第19章 The Sale That Was Not a Sale

The fourth of October was the date in the letter of the ninth of April, which had been drawn by an attorney in a suburb office and had been signed by Boone Ambrose on the fourteenth of March in a kitchen in Fetterling at a table where his mother had been sitting when he did it, silently, with her cup in her hand, not saying one word. She had read the letter before he signed it. She had read it twice and put it down and picked up her coffee and drank it, and Boone had watched her do that and had known exactly what it cost and had signed it anyway, and neither of them had ever once referred to it since. The sale was scheduled for ten in the morning at the courthouse annex, room two, which was the room where land gets sold, and the room had a different smell from the hearing room and a different kind of light. There were nine bidders registered by nine forty. Six of them were farmers. Two were a father and son from the next county who had been to a farm sale together in 2011 and were "just looking," which in that room means the opposite. One was a retirement fund with a letterhead, and the man holding it was young and had read the addendum and had a copy of page eleven of the 2019 report and a copy of page eleven of the addendum and had put them side by side on his table with his thumb holding both, and Corrine saw him do it and understood that everything she had written had been read by somebody who was paid to read it. The sale did not happen for ninety-one minutes. Corby Ambrose had bought the position with his customary lack of subtlety: a certified check, a written reason, and a farm credit letter issued in the last ten days, which is the single hardest document in that county for a man to obtain and the one thing that separates a person with money from a person with a speech. He bought the quarter at one hundred and ninety-four thousand, which was over the reserve, which was over the tax value, and which was about seventy percent of what the field alone was worth if it drained properly, and which nobody in that room thought was going to happen until it happened. The soil scientist sat in the fourth row with her hands on her knees and watched a man she had met nine days ago pay a number for her family's ground, and felt absolutely nothing at all, and was not proud of it. Afterward everybody came out into the lot. Phelan found her by the annex steps and took out a card and did not give it to her. "Five-oh-eight on the north field," he said. "I got my permit and my eleven conditions and your Condition Twelve, and I can live with Condition Twelve, and I want you to know that I can live with it because it costs me about ninety thousand to prove out that run every three years and I would have spent ninety thousand on it eventually anyway when a lawyer made me." He put the card back in his shirt. "You cost me this sale and I'll take it. What I don't take is being a man who got a piece of ground out of a family that'd been on it since before there was a tile in it, on a Tuesday, with a letter from April." "It was a Monday." "That's the part that sticks in me," said Darryl Phelan, and got in his truck. Boone came out last. He had signed as the record owner of a fifty-six percent interest with a signature that people who knew him would recognize as the signature of a man who had been told no about this four times and had done it anyway, and he stood in the lot in his good coat with his hands in his pockets and watched his cousin's truck come up the lane toward the turn. "There is going to be a fence," he said, to nobody in particular, and to Corrine. "There's going to be a fence at the top of the creek bank in October and I'm going to have to drive past it for the rest of my life." "He's not taking it out," Corrine said. "He said that on the first day. He said it four ways." "People say things." "He wrote it in the reason. He filed a copy of the reason with the sale." She turned to look at her brother. "It's in the record, Boone. That's what a written reason is. It's there because he wanted it to be there, because his whole business is being the kind of man whose reasons are on file. You read that document. You did the reading and you did the arithmetic and you chose not to believe a piece of paper, because you needed it to be false." He turned and looked at her, and his eyes were wet, and he did not wipe them, which was somehow the most like him thing he had done in eleven years. "I know," he said. "You do?" "I read it in the truck in the parking lot at the fairgrounds in February." His voice was entirely level. "I've known since February. I signed the letter in March because I had four months of not sleeping to get through and I could not make myself say no to the only door in the room, and I have known every single day since that it was not going to be the door." He pulled his collar up against a cold that was not really there. "You want me to say I'm sorry. I'm not, because I asked you for a number that was true and you gave me a number that was true and I'd do it again tomorrow. But I'd like to be able to tell you something and not have it come out sideways through a lawyer for the rest of my life." "Say it." "I drove past that field this morning at six in the morning because I couldn't sleep, and the water was off it. All of it. You could see the corn rows from the levee." Boone Ambrose put both hands flat on the hood of his truck. "I stood up there for maybe ten minutes looking at ground that has been under water since before I was born, and it wasn't. And I thought, all the way down the lane, I'm going to lose that field and it was never going to be mine to keep." Then he got in the truck and drove home, and he was back at the bench at seven the next morning with the compressor running, and he did not say anything about any of it to anybody, and Corrine did not bring it up. Her mother was on the porch in the kitchen chair when Corrine came up the lane that evening, and had been since two, and had a dish towel folded in her lap, and did not ask how it had gone, because there was nothing to be asked that she had not already accounted for. "Loretta," Corrine said. "You signed something." "I wrote nineteen pages that end other people's careers and I watched a man with a hundred and ninety-four thousand dollars buy my family's field in a room that smelled of radiator heat, and I'd like to go and sit on the levee for an hour and not talk about any of it." "Sit on the levee," Loretta said. "But sit where you can see the tile." ---