Part 2: Four Years of Saturdays
He drove a full mile without a word.
Then he reached over and rested his hand on my knee. He left it there all the way into Kearney.
The Monday after Easter, I called a dentist in Hastings named Dr. Reinke.
A friend had told me his Saturday hygienist was retiring, and that nobody wanted the shift.
“It’s eight to four,” Dr. Reinke said. “Every single Saturday. Most of my farm families can’t get in during the week, so the book’s always full. Are you sure?”
“I’m sure,” I said.
For four years, I left our house on the east side of Kearney at six-thirty every Saturday morning, in the dark for half the year. I drove forty minutes to Hastings, cleaned teeth for eight hours straight, and drove home.
Every Saturday paycheck went into a separate savings account at our bank on Central Avenue.
We never touched it.
Not when the furnace quit. Not when the transmission went on the minivan the second winter.
Luke’s snowplow overtime went into that account too.
When a big storm hit, the county ran the graders and plows around the clock. Luke would get home at four in the morning, eat a bowl of cereal standing at the counter, and sleep three hours. Then he’d head back out.
We took no vacation in four years.
We kept driving that same minivan until it had two hundred and fourteen thousand miles on it.
Hailey’s school clothes came from the church rummage sale, and she never complained once. I still think about that.
The kids knew what we were saving for. We told them that very first summer.
Cody was five. He asked if he could have his old bedroom back, the little room at Grandma and Grandpa’s where he napped on Sundays.
I told him we’d see.
Hailey drew a chart on a piece of poster board and taped it to the inside of the pantry door. It was a big thermometer, like the one at church for the new roof fund.
Each month she colored it in a little higher with a red marker.
That first summer, I found Grant Ostrander’s Denver address in the county tax records and wrote him a letter.
I kept it brief.
I told him my husband grew up on that place, and that his mother had planted the lilacs by the front porch. I asked if I could keep them watered.
He called about a week later, polite and a little puzzled.
“Sure,” he said. “Water whatever you want. I’m only out there in November.”
So once a month, May through September, the four of us drove out on a Sunday afternoon. We brought two five-gallon buckets and a garden hose that we hooked to the hydrant by the barn.
Luke mowed the road ditch along the front of the yard, from the mailbox all the way down to the culvert at the end of the driveway.
The county mowed the rest of the road twice a year. But that stretch by the house had always been June’s, and she’d always kept it nice.
The second winter, a county snowplow clipped the mailbox post and knocked it flat in the snow.
It wasn’t Luke’s truck, but it was Luke’s department.
He went out on his own time with a post-hole digger and a bag of Quikrete and set a brand-new post, plumb and solid.
We never once went inside the house.
We never went in the barn.
We watered the lilacs, mowed the ditch, and picked up the shingles the wind tore off the machine shed roof. Then we went home.
Walt came to every one of Cody’s Little League games in those four years.
He sat in the top row of the bleachers in his seed cap and clapped when Cody got a hit.
He came to Hailey’s band concerts, and to Thanksgiving, Christmas, and every birthday.
He was polite to me, and I was polite to him.
Neither of us said a single word about the farm. Not once, in four years.
It sat between us at every meal like a dish nobody would pass.
In February of the fourth year, the notice ran in the Kearney Hub.
That same week, a sale bill went up on the co-op bulletin board, right beside the seed corn flyers and a poster about a lost dog.
PUBLIC AUCTION. Brandt Homeplace. 80 acres more or less with improvements. Sale to be held on site. Last Saturday in March, 11 a.m. Kruse Auction Service. Denny Kruse, auctioneer.
Grant Ostrander had bought a bigger place up in South Dakota where the pheasants were better. He was finished with Nebraska.
I read the notice standing in my own kitchen with my coat still on.
Then I called Mr. Ostrander before Luke even got home from work. I wanted to be the first call he got.
“Mr. Ostrander, this is Amy Brandt. I watered the lilacs.”
“I remember,” he said. He sounded friendly.
“We’d like to make you an offer before the auction,” I said. “A fair one.”
He was quiet a moment.
“I’m sorry. I’ve already signed the listing with the auction company. And I want a public sale. That way nobody can ever say I played favorites. But you’re welcome to come and bid like everybody else.”
I couldn’t argue with that.
It was fair. Honestly, it was more than fair. He wished me luck before he hung up.
The terms were printed at the bottom of the sale bill.
Ten percent down on sale day. Balance due at closing, on or before April 30. No contingencies. Every bidder had to register on site and show a letter from a bank.
So the next morning I went to our bank and sat across the desk from the ag loan officer, Tom Riley. I’d brought four years of savings statements in a manila folder.
We had seventy-one thousand, four hundred dollars.
Tom went through the statements twice.
He asked about Luke’s county job and my two offices. He pulled our credit. He called a man he knew who had appraised land in that same township the year before.
“Here’s your number,” he finally said.
He wrote it on a yellow sticky note and turned it so I could read it.
Three hundred and five thousand.
“That’s your bid,” Tom said. “Not one dollar over. I mean it, Amy.”
He typed up the bank letter and signed it.
I slipped that sticky note into my coat pocket.
It stayed there until the auction.
The last Saturday in March arrived raw.
The sky hung low and gray. A north wind blew at twenty miles an hour, with sleet spitting sideways now and then. It was the kind of Nebraska March day that makes you forget there’s any such thing as May.
By a quarter to eleven, sixty-some people were standing in that gravel yard.
There were seed caps, insulated coveralls, and Carhartt coats. A few wives held travel mugs. A young couple from Kearney had a baby in a carrier.
Some of them had come to bid. Most were neighbors who came because a homeplace sale is something you attend around here, the way you attend a funeral or a wedding.
Denny Kruse had parked his flatbed hay rack in front of the machine shed, with a folding table on it and a speaker up on a pole.
His wife ran the registration table inside the shed, out of the wind. His nephew, Brad, worked the crowd as ringman.
Denny had gone to school with Walt. They’d shown calves against each other at the Buffalo County fair in 1966.
Everybody knew that too.
I registered at the folding table, showing my driver’s license and Tom Riley’s letter.
Denny’s wife wrote my name in her ledger and handed me a white card with a big black number printed on it.
Luke stood beside me with his hands in his coat pockets.
In the truck on the way out, we’d agreed that Luke would do the bidding. It was his family’s place, so it should be his hand that went up.
Hailey and Cody stood with Karen and Jeff over by the pickups. For some reason, Hailey had her poster-board chart rolled up under her arm. I never asked why she’d brought it.
Then I noticed the man from the land company.
Everybody noticed him.
He wore a quilted vest over a fleece jacket and clean boots. He stood a little apart from the rest, over by the cottonwoods.
Somebody said he was with an outfit in Grand Island that bought farmland for out-of-state investors and rented it back out. They’d picked up three quarter sections in the county that winter alone.
When he stood still, people stood away from him.
At eleven o’clock, Denny climbed onto the hay rack and tapped the microphone.
“Folks, thank you for coming out on a day like this,” he said. “Most of you know this place. Eighty acres. House, barn, machine shed. Well and septic. Possession at closing. Terms are on your sale bill. Let’s sell it.”
He asked for three hundred thousand to start.
Nobody moved.
He asked for two-fifty.
Nobody moved.
He worked all the way down to two hundred thousand. Then the neighbor who’d rented the cropland for years, Dale Wiese, raised his card.
And the whole yard came alive.
Brad hollered “Yep!” and pointed. Denny’s auction chant rolled out over the gravel, fast and smooth, the same way I’d heard it at cattle sales my whole married life.
Two-ten. Two-twenty. Two-thirty.
The young couple with the baby jumped in at two-forty. They were out by two-sixty.
Dale Wiese went to two-seventy. Then he shook his head, pocketed his card, and looked at the ground.
The land company man hadn’t raised a card once.
He simply nodded. Each time Denny glanced his way, he gave one small nod, and Brad hollered and pointed at him.
At two-seventy, it was down to the land company and us.
I looked at Luke.
His hand was still in his coat pocket.
He wasn’t watching Denny. He was looking past him, at the porch, at the spot by the back door where his mother used to stand and ring the dinner bell.
“Luke,” I said quietly.
He didn’t answer.
His jaw was tight and his eyes were wet. And his right hand would not come out of that pocket.
I’ve been married to that man for sixteen years.
I know how he looks when he’s trying with everything he has and his body won’t do what he’s telling it to.
“Two-seventy-five,” Denny was saying. “Who’ll give me two-seventy-five. Two-seventy-five. Folks, I’m about to sell it.”
So I held up 47.
