That winter, Brock and I sat down at Mrs. Ochsner’s office in Marysville and signed a hay partnership agreement.
It was simple, two pages. Brock would set aside forty acres of his best brome and alfalfa ground for small square bales. I’d do the baling with the 268, with the boys. Brock would provide the tractor, fuel, and twine. I’d handle sales and deliveries. We’d split the gross proceeds sixty-forty, sixty to me, forty to him. Each of us would carry our own liability insurance.
“Sixty-forty?” Brock said, reading it. “You’re taking the bigger share?”
“I’m doing the work,” I said. “You’re providing the ground and the iron. That’s how it goes with shares.”
“Grandpa would say you’re right,” he grumbled. But he signed.
Mrs. Ochsner charged us $225 to draw it up, and we split it.
Brock also did something I didn’t expect. In December, he called me.
“I want to give you something,” he said. “Come out to Grandpa’s machine shed.”
When I got there, he’d rolled open both big doors. In the middle of the shed sat Grandpa’s old hay wagon, the one my boys had ridden on when they were little, and Grandpa’s old side-delivery rake.
“I’m signing these over to you,” Brock said. “The wagon and the rake. They go with the baler. They always did.”
He’d written out a bill of sale on the back of a feed store receipt: One hay wagon and one New Holland side-delivery rake, given to Jana Lindeman, for one dollar and love.
“One dollar and love?” I said.
“Mrs. Ochsner said you have to put something for it to be legal,” Brock said, red in the face. “So I put a dollar. And the other part was just true.”
I gave him a dollar bill from my purse. He folded it and put it in his shirt pocket, the same pocket where he’d put my three hundred dollars in June.
Then he reached into his pocket again and pulled out a folded check. It was for $300, made out to me.
“What’s this?”
“The money you paid me for the baler,” he said. “I can’t keep it. It was never mine to sell. Not really.”
I looked at the check for a long time. Then I folded it back up and handed it to him.
“Put it toward Grandpa’s Prairie View bill,” I said. “That’s where his money ought to go.”
Brock looked at me. Then he nodded slowly.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”
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