Fifteen hundred dollars a month, for the two of us.
That was our pay. For running twelve hundred acres of corn and soybeans in Lyon County, Minnesota. For planting and spraying and combining and hauling and fixing every broken thing on the place. For checking bins at two in the morning in a blizzard. For calving the forty head of cows Vern kept because he liked looking at them.
Eighteen thousand dollars a year. Both of us.
No raise. Not once.
I know the number because I keep the farm books.
Have for ten years. I took a bookkeeping course at the community college in Marshall the winter after we got married, because Judy’s eyes were going and she couldn’t see the numbers anymore. I took over the farm accounts in March of that year and I’ve done them every month since.
Every check. Every invoice. Every grain ticket. Every payment to the bank in Marshall and the co-op and the seed dealer. I’ve written them all. I’ve balanced them all.
So I know exactly what twelve hundred acres brings in on a good year. And exactly what goes out.
And exactly what came to Nate and me. Fifteen hundred a month.
There was no contract. Only family pay on a handshake.
Vern and Nate shook on it in the shop, the week before our wedding. Fifteen hundred a month and the trailer and the electric. And someday, Vern said, the land would come to Nate anyway. So it all came out in the wash.
Someday. Nobody ever said when.
And we were never going to sue Nate’s parents. We talked about it once, lying in bed in that cold back bedroom. Nate said no before I even finished the sentence.
“I’m not taking my dad to court, Holly,” he said. “Not ever.”
All we could do was stop working for nothing.
Chapter Two: Five Hundred Dollars
In March, I asked Vern for five hundred dollars more a month.
I didn’t ask Nate to do it. He would have, but I knew how it would go. Nate and his dad don’t talk about money. They talk about weather and seed and the price of diesel and whether the Vikings will ever win a Super Bowl. Money makes them both go quiet.
So I did it. I’m the bookkeeper. Money’s my job.
I picked a Tuesday afternoon. Vern was in the shop, working on the planter. It was twelve degrees outside and the woodstove in the corner of the shop was going.
I brought him a cup of coffee. I stood by the workbench.
“Vern,” I said. “Can I ask you something?”
He looked up from the planter. “Sure.”
“Nate and I need more,” I said. “Five hundred more a month. Two thousand instead of fifteen hundred.”
He set down his wrench.
“The trailer furnace quit twice this winter,” I said. “In January, for three days. We slept in our coats. Then again in February. The repairman says it’s done. It needs to be replaced. That’s thirty-two hundred dollars.”
Vern didn’t say anything.
“And we haven’t had a raise in ten years,” I said. “Not once. Everything costs more than it did ten years ago. Groceries, gas, insurance. We’re paying for our own health insurance on the MNsure exchange. That’s six hundred and forty a month by itself.”
I took a breath.
“Five hundred, Vern. That’s all I’m asking.”
He looked at me for a long time. Then he picked up his wrench again.
“There’s no money this year, Holly,” he said.
He went back to the planter. That was all.
I stood there by the workbench for a minute. The woodstove ticked. The coffee I’d brought him sat on the bench, steaming.
I knew it wasn’t true.
I keep the books. I knew exactly how much money there was. Last fall’s crop had been the best in five years. Two hundred and eight bushels an acre on the corn, fifty-eight on the beans. We’d sold some at harvest and stored the rest. There were fourteen thousand bushels of corn sitting in the big bin, waiting for a better price.
At four-sixty a bushel, that was over sixty thousand dollars.
There was money. There just wasn’t money for us.
I walked back to the trailer in the snow. Nate was inside, sitting at the little kitchen table in his coveralls, eating a sandwich. He looked up when I came in.
“Well?” he said.
“He said there’s no money this year.”
Nate set his sandwich down. He didn’t say anything for a long time.
“There’s fourteen thousand bushels in the big bin,” he said finally.
“I know.”
He looked out the window at the shop. At the smoke coming out of the stovepipe.
“Okay,” he said. That’s all. Okay.
That night the furnace quit again.
At two in the morning. I woke up shivering. Nate was already out of bed, in his long underwear, banging on the furnace closet with a flashlight. I could hear him swearing under his breath.
He got it going around three-thirty. He came back to bed and lay there with his arm over his eyes.
“I’m going to fix this, Holly,” he said in the dark. “I don’t know how yet. But I’m going to.”
Chapter Three: The Corn
In June, fourteen thousand bushels of corn went out of the bin.
I watched the trucks come. Three semis from the elevator in Marshall. They backed up to the big bin, one after another, and the auger ran for two days. I stood at the trailer window with a cup of coffee and watched the corn pour out into the trucks in a long gold stream.
I wrote the grain tickets into the books that night. Fourteen thousand, two hundred bushels. At four-forty-one. Sixty-two thousand, six hundred and twenty-two dollars.
Vern had waited for the June rally. It came. He sold.
It paid for Tiffany’s barn wedding.
Tiffany is Nate’s little sister. She was twenty-eight that summer. She lives in Minneapolis now. She’s a marketing director for a company that makes yoga clothes. She met her fiancé, Brandon, on a dating app. He works in finance. Something with spreadsheets. He wears loafers without socks.
They wanted a barn wedding. On the farm. In Vern’s old red hay barn, the one built in 1912 by Nate’s great-grandfather.
Sixty thousand dollars.
That’s what it cost. I know, because I wrote every one of those checks myself.
The tent. A big white sailcloth tent from a rental company in Sioux Falls, with sides that rolled up, set up on the lawn between the barn and the house. Twelve thousand, four hundred dollars.
The band. A six-piece from Minneapolis that played covers of eighties songs. Eight thousand dollars, plus their hotel rooms at the AmericInn in Marshall.
The lights in the rafters. Strings and strings of them, hundreds of feet, hung by a company from Mankato who came out with a lift and spent two days up in the hayloft. Forty-six hundred dollars.
The caterer. The florist. The photographer. The rented chairs and tables and linens. The portable bathrooms, the nice kind, with sinks and mirrors.
The barn itself needed work before anybody could stand in it. New boards on the floor of the hayloft. A railing on the stairs. The county building inspector came out three times. Nine thousand dollars, all told.
Vern signed them without reading them.
Every single check. I’d bring them into the house in the evening in a manila folder, all filled out, and set them on the kitchen table in front of him. He’d pull out his pen and sign his name on each one. Vernon A. Haugland. Over and over.
He never looked at the amounts. Not once. He never asked what any of it was for.
He trusted me.
That was the part that stung.
I’d sit across the kitchen table from him and watch him sign. Twelve thousand four hundred. Eight thousand. Forty-six hundred. Nine thousand.
And I’d think about the furnace in the trailer. Thirty-two hundred dollars. And five hundred a month.
There’s no money this year, Holly.
He’d hand me the folder back with all the checks signed. And he’d say, “Thanks, Holly. Don’t know what we’d do without you.”
And I’d say, “You’re welcome, Vern.”
And I’d walk back to the trailer in the dark.