To understand why I paid three hundred dollars for a pink boat anchor, you need to know about my grandfather.
Arvid Lindeman is eighty-eight years old. He farmed a hundred and sixty acres south of Marysville for sixty-one years: wheat, milo, a few cows, and hay. He’s a tall, stooped, quiet Swedish Lutheran with enormous hands and a soft voice. He didn’t say much, but when he did, people leaned in to hear it.
He had two children. My mother, Karin, and her younger brother, Lars, who was Brock’s father.
Uncle Lars died in 1988, when Brock was five and I was eight. A tractor rolled on him on a creek bank in October. I don’t remember much about the funeral except my grandfather sitting in the front pew, not moving, with his big hands flat on his knees.
After that, Grandpa farmed with Brock. Brock grew up in Grandpa’s shadow, riding in the tractor cab, learning everything from him. When Brock was old enough, he took over the land, then rented more, then bought more. Now he farms two thousand acres and has three hired men.
My mother married a schoolteacher and moved to Topeka. I married Curt, a truck driver for the farmers’ co-op, and stayed in Marysville. We have two boys, Tucker, sixteen, and Reed, thirteen.
When my boys were little, I worked summers, and Grandpa watched them. He took them out to the hayfield. They rode the hay wagon behind that New Holland baler while Grandpa drove the tractor, and the bales came up the chute one after another, thump, thump, thump. Grandpa hummed “Bringing in the Sheaves” the whole time, off-key, the same three lines over and over.
Tucker was seven the first summer. Reed was four and had to wear a little life jacket on the wagon so Grandpa could grab him by the straps if he wobbled.
They were the happiest summers of their lives. Mine too.
Grandpa quit baling small squares when he was eighty-one. His shoulders gave out. He sold his cows and leased the hayground to Brock, who baled it in rounds. The New Holland went into the machine shed under a tarp.
Last fall, Grandpa fell in his kitchen and broke his hip. After surgery at the hospital in Manhattan, the doctor said he couldn’t live alone anymore. In January, he moved into Prairie View, the assisted living home in Marysville, in a small room with a window that looks out on the parking lot.
It costs $5,900 a month. Grandpa’s Social Security and his small pension from the grain elevator where he worked winters cover about $2,300. His savings cover the rest, for now.
Before he moved, he sat at his kitchen table with his attorney, Mr. Haugen, and signed a few papers.
He leased his hundred and sixty acres to Brock for five years at $95 an acre in cash rent. That’s $15,200 a year, paid in two installments, and it goes straight to Prairie View.
And he signed all his farm machinery over to Brock by bill of sale. Two old tractors, a disc, a grain drill, a hay rake, a hay wagon, and the baler.
“Brock’s the farmer,” Grandpa told me. “It ought to go to the farmer.”
So it was legally Brock’s to sell. I wasn’t going to fight family over it.
I just bought it.
Nobody had told Grandpa that Brock was scrapping it. I knew why. Brock didn’t want to explain, and I didn’t want to be the one to break Grandpa’s heart.
That night at supper I told the boys.
Tucker set down his fork. “You bought Grandpa’s baler?”
“For three hundred dollars.”
“Does it work?”
“Not even a little.”
Reed was quiet for a moment. Then he asked, “Can we fix it?”
Curt looked at me across the table. He’s a big, quiet man who doesn’t waste words.
“You’ve got a plan,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“I’ve got a plan,” I said.
Ethan Blake is a skilled Creative Content Specialist with a talent for crafting engaging and thought-provoking narratives. With a strong background in storytelling and digital content creation, Ethan brings a unique perspective to his role at TheArchivists, where he curates and produces captivating content for a global audience.
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