“Eighty-five thousand,” my brother Kevin said. “Dale will take it as it sits. House, barn, the forty, all of it.”
He jotted the number on the back of an envelope with the stub of pencil he keeps in his front pocket, and he drew a sharp line under it.
“Three ways,” Ron said. He had the property tax assessment flattened out beside his plate, with the gravy boat holding down one corner. “That’s twenty-eight thousand, three hundred thirty-three apiece. And change.”
“Thirty-three cents,” Kevin said.
“And thirty-three cents.”
Mama sat at the head of the table with her fork held in her hand.
She was 86 years old. She wore her faded blue housedress and the grey cardigan with the deep pockets, and her silver hair was combed back and pinned the way she has pinned it every single Sunday of my life. She had a slice of pot roast on her plate that she had cut into neat little squares and left untouched.
Neither of my brothers looked at her. Not when they spoke the number, and not when they divided it up.
It was the second Sunday in October, just past one in the afternoon. Golden autumn light slanted low through the dining room window and stretched across the tablecloth, the clean white linen with the cross-stitched corners. Outside, the sugar maple beside the pump house had turned brilliant orange. From where I sat you could look three hundred yards straight down the gravel lane to the county road, and the three tall white pines my father planted along the fence line, one for each of us the year we were born.
This was the home place. A sturdy farmhouse and forty rolling acres on a ridge outside Viroqua. My mother came here as a bride back in 1961. She raised three kids under this roof and buried a husband from it, and my brothers were selling it off over Sunday dinner.
“She can’t manage the stairs anymore,” Ron said across the table to Kevin.
“She doesn’t even set foot upstairs,” Kevin answered. “She’s burning fuel oil heating four empty bedrooms nobody walks into.”
“She doesn’t need forty acres to look after.”
“She sure doesn’t need an old timber barn.”
She. She. She.
I looked over at Mama. She was staring straight down the length of the table, toward the far end where Daddy’s empty chair sat.
Now, my brothers weren’t wicked men, in case that’s what you’re thinking.
Ron was 64 that autumn. He had given thirty-eight hard years to the Trane manufacturing plant up in La Crosse and came away with a worn-out shoulder and an aluminum pontoon boat. Kevin was 62, keeping the ledger books for the farm implement dealership in town. Big men, both of them, broad-shouldered like our father, wearing crisp plaid shirts to Sunday dinner because Mama had starched and pressed plaid shirts for them for decades and the habit stuck.
They loved her dearly. I never questioned that for a second, and I don’t today.
What changed everything was that icy morning in March.
On the eleventh of March, Mama stepped out the back door just past seven with an old pie tin of kitchen scraps for the barn cats. A quick afternoon thaw had been followed by a bitter overnight freeze. The top wooden step carried a thin glaze of black ice you couldn’t have spotted with a lantern.
She slipped and went down hard on her left side. Her wrist fractured instantly, and her hip took a bruise so deep it stayed purple-black for over a month. She lay there on the frozen dirt right beside the porch steps, shivering in her housecoat and Harold’s old canvas chore jacket, for forty endless minutes.
Dale Sorenson finally spotted her. Dale farms the eighty acres wrapping around our ridge, ground Daddy sold to his folks back when we auctioned off the milk cows. He was cutting across the back pasture on his four-wheeler to check a downed wire when he caught the bright blue of her housecoat against the crusty snow.
Dale dialed the rescue squad right then. Then he called Ron, whose number was scribbled first on the index card Mama kept taped inside the spice cabinet.
Ron flew down the highway from La Crosse faster than any patrol car would allow. He arrived at the county hospital before I did, and I was only driving over from Westby. When I stepped into the room, he was standing beside her railing, clutching his work cap in both fists, his face pale as chalk.
She spent nearly three weeks in the rehab wing. While she was tucked away in that bed, my brothers started “sorting out affairs,” as Ron called it. Ron grabbed hold of her checkbook. Kevin started gathering estimates. They talked late on the phone almost every night, chewing on the same dark thoughts. What if she takes another fall? What if it happens in the dead of January? What if Dale isn’t riding his four-wheeler through the pasture next time?