“Eighty-five thousand,” my brother Steve said. “Dale will take it as it sits. House, barn, the forty, all of it.”
He wrote the number on the back of an envelope with the stub of pencil he keeps in his shirt pocket, and he drew a line under it.
“Three ways,” Ron said. He had the property tax bill 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,” Steve said.
“And thirty-three cents.”
Mama sat at the head of the table with her fork in her hand.
She was 86 years old. She was wearing her blue housedress and the gray cardigan with the pockets, and her white hair was combed back and pinned the way she has pinned it every Sunday of my life. She had a slice of roast on her plate that she had cut into small squares and not eaten.
Neither of my brothers looked at her. Not when they said the number, and not when they divided it.
It was the second Sunday in October, a little past one in the afternoon. The light came in low through the dining room window and lay across the tablecloth, the white one with the cross-stitched corners. Outside, the maple by the pump house had gone orange. From where I sat you could see three hundred yards down the lane to the county road, and the three white pines my father planted alongside it, one for each of us the year we were born.
This was the home place. A farmhouse and forty acres on a ridge six miles out of Viroqua, Wisconsin. My mother came to it as a bride in 1961. She raised three children in it and buried a husband from it, and my brothers were selling it over a pot roast.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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