“She can’t do the stairs anymore,” Ron said to Steve.
“She doesn’t use the upstairs,” Steve said. “She’s heating four rooms nobody walks into.”
“She doesn’t need forty acres.”
“She sure doesn’t need a barn.”
She. She. She.
I looked at Mama. She was looking down the length of the table, to the far end, where Daddy’s chair sat empty.
I should tell you right here that my brothers were not bad men, because by now you are thinking it.
Ron was 64 that fall. He put thirty-eight years in at the Trane plant in La Crosse and came out of it with a bad shoulder and a pontoon boat. Steve was 62 and kept the books for the implement dealer in Viroqua. They were big men, both of them, built like our father, and they wore plaid shirts to Sunday dinner because Mama had ironed plaid shirts for each of them for eighteen years and they never got out of the habit.
They loved her. I never doubted that for one minute, and I don’t now.
What happened to them was March.
On the eleventh of March, Mama went out the back door a little after seven in the morning with a pie tin of scraps for the barn cats. There had been a thaw and then a hard freeze. The second step had a skin of ice on it you couldn’t have found with a flashlight.
She went down on her left side. She broke her wrist, and she bruised her hip so deep it was black for a month. And she lay there on the frozen ground beside the steps, in her housecoat and Daddy’s old chore jacket, for forty minutes.
Dale Sorenson found her. Dale farms the eighty acres that wrap around ours, ground my folks sold to his father the year they sold the cows. He was coming across the pasture on his four-wheeler to look at a fence and he saw the blue of her housecoat against the snow.
Dale called the ambulance. Then he called Ron, because Ron’s number was the first one on the card Mama keeps taped inside the cupboard door.
Ron drove the thirty-five miles from La Crosse faster than a man should. He got to the hospital in Viroqua before I did, and I only had to come from Westby. When I walked in he was standing beside her bed with his cap in both hands and his face the color of dishwater.
She spent three weeks in the rehab wing. While she was there my brothers started “getting things settled,” which was Ron’s phrase for it. Ron took over her checkbook. Steve started pricing things. They talked on the phone most nights, and it always went the same way. What if it happens again. What if it’s January next time. What if Dale doesn’t come across the pasture.
Those were fair questions. I had no good answers for them. So mostly I listened and said “I know” and “we’ll see.”
That’s my part in this, and I’m not going to skip past it.
My father died two years before that dinner, in October, in his sleep, at 88. Lowell. He and Mama were married sixty-three years. And somewhere in the months after the funeral, without anybody deciding to, the three of us started doing Mama’s talking for her.
It began small. Ron filled out the forms at the funeral home because her hands were shaking. Steve called the insurance. I drove her to the clinic, and when the doctor asked how she was sleeping I said, “Not very well, she’s up by four,” and Mama sat there on the paper sheet with her purse in her lap and let me.
I answered for her at the pharmacy. I answered for her in the church basement, when people asked how she was getting along. I ordered her the fish at the supper club without asking whether she wanted it.
I thought I was helping. I thought being a good daughter meant taking things off her.
I work in the kitchen at the elementary school in Viroqua, and I have told a thousand little children to use their words. I never once noticed I had taken my own mother’s.
Paul noticed. My husband fixes school buses for the district, has for twenty-six years, and he is a man who will listen to an engine a long while before he says what’s wrong with it.
That morning, driving out the ridge road with the roast in the roaster pan on my lap, I told him Ron had called to say he and Steve had “a number to go over” at dinner.
Paul drove a while.
“They ask Hazel?” he said.
“I don’t think so.”
“You going to?”
I looked out at the contour strips going by, corn and hay and corn, bending around the hills the way they do in our country.
“They’re scared, Cher,” he said. “Scared men get loud about numbers. A number’s the one thing that’ll hold still for them.” He slowed for the lane. “But it’s her table.”
“I’m not going to start a fight at Sunday dinner.”
“Didn’t say fight.”
He parked by the pump house and came around and took the roaster from me so I could get the door, and he said nothing more about it. That’s Paul. He hands you the wrench and lets you decide.
At the table, Steve had moved on to the furniture.
“Dale doesn’t want the contents,” he said. “So we’d have a sale. Or split up what we want first and sale the rest.”
“The auction fellow from Westby does a good job,” Ron said. “He did the Olson place.”
“We could list the good pieces separate. The oak sideboard. This table. Dad’s chair might bring something, it’s a real captain’s chair.”
Mama’s fork came down on the edge of her plate. Not hard. It made one small sound against the china.
Daddy’s chair stood at the foot of the table, opposite her, where it had always stood. A captain’s chair with curved arms, oak, older than I am. The varnish was worn off the arms in two pale places, right where his hands used to rest while he waited for the blessing. For two years Mama had set a place in front of it every Sunday, a plate and a fork and a water glass, and for two years not one of us had asked her why. We passed the dishes around it and kept eating.
Paul’s knee came up against mine under the table. He had put his knife down. It wasn’t his land and she wasn’t his mother, and he had more sense than to speak ahead of her own children. But he was there, and he wanted me to know it.
I had about four things I wanted to say to my brothers, and every one of them would have been one more person talking about Mama in front of her.
So I said the only other thing I could think of.
“Mama, would you pass the potatoes?”
They were sitting at her left elbow in the yellow crock bowl. It’s a heavy old thing, stoneware, with a brown stripe around the middle and a chip in the rim that I put there in 1977 with the potato masher and got sent to my room for. She would not hand that dish over to anyone. The potatoes were hers, with a stick of butter and the top of the milk and more pepper than anybody ever asked for.
Ron’s hand started across the table for the bowl.
“She’s got it,” I said.
He stopped. He looked at me.
Mama set down her fork. She put both hands around that bowl, the wrist that broke in March and the good one, and she lifted it. It took her a second. The bowl shook a little and the serving spoon ticked against the side of it, tick, tick, and the steam went up past her glasses. I could smell butter and pepper clear across the table.
She held it out to me. I took the weight of it. I didn’t take my eyes off hers.
“Mama,” I said. “What do you want to do?”
Steve’s pencil stopped moving.
“Cheryl,” Ron said, quiet, in the voice he uses on dogs and grandchildren. “Don’t put her on the spot.”
“It’s her spot, Ron.”
“We’re trying to get this figured out so she doesn’t have to.”
“I know you are. I’m asking her anyway.” I set the bowl down in front of me. I didn’t take any. “Mama. The house and the land. What do you want?”
Nobody chewed. Nobody reached for anything. The rooster clock over the stove was ticking out in the kitchen, and I don’t believe I had ever heard it from the dining room before.
And then I did the hard part, which was to stop talking.
You wouldn’t think that’s hard. It is. Ten seconds went by and I wanted to fill every one of them. I wanted to say “You don’t have to answer,” or “I only meant,” or anything at all to smooth it over. Twenty seconds. Steve shifted and his chair creaked. Ron opened his mouth, and Paul, of all people, lifted two fingers off the tablecloth about an inch and Ron shut it again.
Mama looked at me a good long while. Then she looked at Ron. Then at Steve. Then at the tax bill beside Ron’s plate, which had her own name printed on it.
She took off her glasses. She wiped them on the hem of her cardigan, both sides, slowly, and held them up to the window to check, and put them back on. She folded her hands on the tablecloth.
“Well,” she said. “Since somebody finally asked.”
Paul told me afterward that she talked for four minutes by the rooster clock. I would have guessed longer. I’ll set it down as near as I can, because I have gone over it enough times since.
“First, the price,” Mama said. “Steven, where did you get eighty-five thousand?”
Steve cleared his throat. “It’s what the county has it at. The assessed value. Eighty-four thousand six hundred. I rounded up.”
“You rounded up four hundred dollars.”
“To be fair to you.”
“Mm.” She nodded toward the tax bill. “The county has it at that because farm ground in this state is taxed on what it will grow, not on what it will sell for. Your father sat in that chair and explained it to me the year they changed the law, and I have read every tax bill that came to this house since. Until this year.” She let that sit a second. “That number is what my hay ground is worth to the tax man. It is not what it’s worth to Dale Sorenson, and Dale knows it.”
“Mama, it’s an old house,” Ron said.
“I’m not done, Ronald.”
He sat back.
“The Halverson forty, across the ridge road. Bare land. No house, no well, no barn, and half of it side hill. It went at auction two springs ago for forty-eight hundred dollars an acre. I know because I sat in the third row with Dale’s mother and we both wrote it on our sale bills.” She looked at Steve. “You’re the bookkeeper. What is forty times forty-eight hundred?”
Steve’s lips moved. “Hundred ninety-two thousand.”
“One hundred and ninety-two thousand dollars, for dirt. Mine has a house on it with a roof we put on in 2019, and a good well, and a barn that still stands plumb. So eighty-five thousand is not a price. It’s a number off a piece of paper. You were about to hand a neighbor better than a hundred thousand dollars of your own inheritance, because neither one of you thought to ask the old woman who goes to the land auctions.”
Steve looked at his envelope. He turned it over, face down.
“Second, the buyer.” Her face eased some. “I had Dale Sorenson in Sunday school for three years, down in the church basement. He could not sit still through the Beatitudes to save his life. But he never once took a second cookie without asking, and he is the same man now. Dale came to my back door Thursday afternoon with his cap in his hand. He said, ‘Hazel, your boys have offered me the place at a number. I told Ron it was light, and I told him I’d want to hear it from you.’”
Ron’s neck went red above his collar.
“He did say that,” Ron said. “I figured he was being polite.”
“He was being honest. From a distance they can look the same.” Mama smoothed the tablecloth with the flat of her hand. “Dale would have taken it at that price if you had pushed it on him. He has two boys who want to farm and not enough ground for one. And he’d have felt like a thief every time he drove past the cemetery. I won’t do that to him. He picked me up off the ice. I am not going to pay him back by letting my sons make him ashamed of himself.”
So she had known since Thursday. Three days. She had mashed those potatoes that morning knowing what was coming to her table, and she had sat through the better part of an hour of it with her fork in her hand, waiting to see whether any one of her children would turn and ask her.
And I almost hadn’t.
“Third,” Mama said. “Where I intend to die.”
“Mama,” Steve said.
“You brought it up, Steven. The two of you have been bringing it up since March without ever saying the word. I’ll say it. I am 86. I am going to die, and before so very long, and I have given it more thought than the pair of you put together.” She pointed past us, through the doorway, toward the downstairs bedroom. “I intend to do it in there. In the bed your father and I bought at the furniture store in Viroqua the week we were married, with the shade up so I can see his pines. On a weekday, if I can arrange it, so nobody has to miss church or a Packer game.”
Paul made a sound into his napkin. He tried to turn it into a cough and didn’t get the whole way there.
Mama’s eyes slid over to him. “Thank you, Paul. I’ve been saving that one.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Paul said.
“I am not going to do it in a room with a television going and somebody else’s teeth in a cup,” she said, more quietly. “I have visited those rooms. I have carried the altar flowers to those rooms for forty years. The people who work in them are kind, and I would go if I had to. I don’t have to yet.”
“Fourth.” She turned her head and looked straight at my oldest brother. “One of my children has been getting my mail.”
Ron went still.
“You had me sign a card in the rehab wing, Ronald. I had a pill in me the size of a lima bean, and you said it was only until I got on my feet. I have been on my feet since June. It is October. Every two weeks you bring me a grocery sack of what you’ve decided I ought to see. I have not had the county paper since April. I have not had a church newsletter. Marion’s girl got married in August, and I found out about it in the cemetery on Decoration Sunday, because the invitation is someplace in La Crosse.” Her voice wobbled for the first time, and she steadied it. “And I don’t know who has written to me and thinks I didn’t care to answer.”
“Mama, it’s three hundred yards down that lane,” Ron said. “And the milk trucks come over that hill on the county road like nobody lives here.”
“I know how far it is. I have walked it since before you were born. That walk to the mailbox is the one trip I have left where I pick the time. I go when I’m ready. I stop at the pines. I see who wrote.” She shook her head. “You took it so I wouldn’t fall. I understand that. But you took it without asking me, and then you sat down at my table with my own tax bill under my own gravy boat.”
Ron looked at the gravy boat as if he had never seen one in his life.
“And the last thing.” She looked from one of them to the other. “I was Mama in this house for sixty-four years. Sometime this spring I turned into She. ‘She can’t do the stairs.’ ‘She doesn’t need a barn.’ I counted today. I quit at nineteen.” She touched her own chest with two fingers, on the gray cardigan. “I’m right here, boys. I have been right here the whole time. I fell down. I didn’t go anyplace.”
Then she picked up her fork and ate one square of roast, and the four minutes were over.
I don’t know how long we sat. The gravy had grown a skin.
Steve spoke first.
“I sounded like that,” he said. He was looking at the back of his envelope. “Did I sound like that?”
“You did,” Mama said. “You both did. You sounded like two men pricing a used baler.”
“Lord.” He rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hand. He has Daddy’s forehead. “Mama, when Kathy’s mother went downhill, they sold her house out of a hospital hallway. Eleven days, start to finish. Kathy and her brothers still aren’t right with each other. I have been so set on us not doing it in a hallway that I went and did it at your dinner table instead.”
“I know why you did it.”
“That doesn’t make it right.”
“No,” she said. “It makes it forgivable. That’s a different thing, and it’s the better one.”
Ron hadn’t moved. He is the big one, with hands like Daddy’s. He had hold of the edge of the table with both of them.
“Forty minutes,” he said.
Nobody answered.
“You laid out there forty minutes, Mama. In your housecoat.” His voice had gone thick and strange. “Dale called, and I couldn’t make sense of what he was telling me. I don’t remember the drive. I kept thinking, she was calling for somebody and nobody came. She was on the ground calling for one of us, and I was thirty-five miles off, drinking coffee and reading the sports page.” He stopped and breathed. “I can’t get it out of my head. I wake up with it. I thought if we got you someplace with people in the hall all night, I could quit seeing it.”
I had never heard my brother put that many words together about anything that mattered. My eyes filled, and I let them.
Mama put her hand out across the corner of the table, the left one, the mended one, palm up. It took Ron a moment to understand what she wanted. Then he let go of the table and laid his big hand in it.
“I wasn’t calling,” she said.
He looked up.
“I called twice. Then I knew nobody was near enough to hear, so I quit and saved my wind. Ronald, look at me. I wasn’t scared the way you have it pictured. I was cold, and my wrist hurt like fury, and I was put out with myself about those steps. But I was lying where I could see the barn roof and the tops of the pines. I talked to your father some. I said the Twenty-third Psalm, and as much as I could remember of the hundred and twenty-first. I thought, well, Hazel, if this is it, it’s home, and there are worse places.” She squeezed his hand. “And then here came Dale on that noisy machine, and I thought, well, it isn’t it, and now I have to go to the hospital in this housecoat.”
Ron laughed. It came out wet and broke in the middle. Then his shoulders were shaking, and that great big retired man put his forehead down on his mother’s hand on the tablecloth and cried the way he hadn’t since he was small.
She laid her other hand on the back of his head.
“There,” she said. “There now. You’ve been carrying that seven months.”
Paul looked at the ceiling. Steve got out his handkerchief and blew his nose like a truck horn. I sat with the potatoes going cold in front of me and let it be.
After a while Mama patted Ron twice, the way you tell a child that’s enough now, and he sat up and wiped his face with his napkin.
“Now,” she said. “I’m old. I’m not a fool. I fell, and I could fall again. You are right about those steps, and you are right that I can’t go on carrying wash up from the cellar. So here is what I want. I want you to tell me what scares you, one thing at a time, and we will fix that. Instead of fixing me.”
She looked down the table at me.
“And you took your time, Cheryl Ann.”
“I know, Mama.”
“Two years.”
“I know it.” My throat hurt. “I’m sorry. I’ve been answering for you since the funeral home.”
“You have. And I let you. It was easier than arguing, and I was tired, and then it got to be a habit for the both of us.” Her face softened. “Well. You got there. Now eat some of those potatoes before I’m insulted.”
I ate the potatoes. They were lukewarm and they had too much pepper in them, and I would put them up against anything I have eaten in my life.
Steve turned the tax bill over. I want that understood. He slid it out from under the gravy boat, and wiped a spot of gravy off the corner with his thumb, and laid it face down. On the clean back of it he wrote a numeral one.
“Steps,” he said. “That’s mine. That’s the first thing that scares me.”
“Paul?” Mama said.
It was the first time anybody had asked Paul anything all day. He sat forward.
“Railing on both sides, lagged to the house, not just nailed to the stringer,” he said. “Grit strips on the treads. I’d put a grab bar in the tub while I’m at it. I can do it Saturday. Lumber and hardware, call it a hundred and forty dollars.”
“I’ll pay it,” Ron said.
“I’ll pay it,” Mama said, “out of my own checkbook. Which brings me to number two.”
Steve wrote a two.
It went like that for most of an hour. I cleared the plates and brought in the coffee and the apple pie, and they worked down the back of that tax bill one fear at a time.
The checkbook was number two. Ron didn’t want to give it up, and when she pressed him it came out that she had paid the fuel oil bill twice last winter and missed the house insurance once. She admitted it. So they met in the middle. The bills would come to her own mailbox in her own name, and every Tuesday Ron would drive out, and the two of them would sit at this table and go through them together, her pen and his reading glasses.
“You may check my arithmetic,” she told him. “You may not do it for me.”
The washer was number three. Paul and Steve would bring it up out of the cellar to the closed-in back porch, where there was already a drain.
Number four was the forty minutes, though nobody called it that.
“There’s a button you can wear,” Steve said carefully. “Around your neck. Thirty dollars a month. You push it and it calls for help.”
“I know what it is. Marion has one. She set it off in the choir loft during the offertory.” Mama sighed. “I’ll wear the necklace.”
“And when you won’t push it,” Ron said. “Because you won’t, Mama. You’ll lay there figuring you don’t want to bother anybody.”
She opened her mouth and closed it. He had her there, and she knew it.
“The shade,” I said.
They all looked at me.
“The kitchen shade. Mama puts it up when she starts the coffee. Dale’s in that pasture by seven every morning with his heifers. If the shade isn’t up by half past seven, he knocks. If nobody comes to the door, he calls me.”
“That is how my mother and Lena Sorenson did it for thirty years,” she said slowly. “A dish towel on the clothesline meant come when you can. No towel by noon meant come quick.” She nodded. “I would do that. I’d do that gladly.”
Which brought us around to Dale, and the land.
“I don’t want it sold,” Mama said. “I’m not saying never. I am saying not this year, and not by a pencil. But it’s foolishness to have twenty-two acres of good hay ground and pasture going to burdock because I’m too stubborn to let anybody on it. Dale needs ground. He can rent it.”
“What does rent run?” Ron asked.
“Seventy-five an acre would be fair for that piece, with the side hill,” Steve said. He was writing. “Twenty-two acres. That’s sixteen hundred fifty a year.”
“And the button is three hundred sixty a year,” Mama said. She had done it in her head before he could. “That leaves twelve hundred ninety. The taxes were seventeen hundred forty last December. So the land pays for the button and near three quarters of its own taxes, and I get a man in my pasture every morning for nothing.” She looked around at us, pleased. “I would call that better than twenty-eight thousand dollars and thirty-three cents.”
“Twenty-eight thousand three hundred thirty-three,” Steve said. “And thirty-three cents.”
“You keep your thirty-three cents, Steven.”
“Yes, Mama.”
“Now call Dale. He is sitting by his telephone. I told him Thursday he might hear from somebody after dinner.”
Ron made the call himself, on the wall phone in the kitchen. I heard him say, “Dale, it’s Ron. I owe you an apology, and my mother wants to talk to you. No. No, the other way around. You were right.”
Dale was in the yard inside of ten minutes. He came to the back door, not the front, in his chore coat, and stood on the mat with his cap off until Mama told him to quit letting the heat out.
“Hazel,” he said. “I told Ron it was light.”
“I know you did. Sit down and have pie.”
He sat. Paul slid over to make room. Mama gave him the terms herself: twenty-two acres, seventy-five dollars an acre, one year at a time, and the shade.
“Seventy-five is fair,” Dale said. He was grinning down at his pie. “And I plow your lane. That isn’t generous, I have to get my tractor in there anyhow. And I’ll carry your mail up to the porch when it’s icy. Only when it’s icy.”
Mama considered that.
“Only when it’s icy,” she said.
“And Hazel.” He put his fork down. “If there comes a day you do want to sell.”
“You will hear it from me, at this table, before anybody else does. At a price that lets the both of us sleep.”
He put his hand out across the pie plates, and she shook it. That is how land has been dealt with on that ridge for a hundred years, and I didn’t know until I saw it how much I had missed the sight.
Steve wrote it all down. He put himself down for Thursdays on his way home from work, since he passes within two miles. Paul and I would keep Sundays, and I would come Wednesdays, when the school kitchen lets out at two.
He got to the bottom of the page, and Mama said, “One more.”
“Number nine,” Steve said, pencil ready.
“Ask me.”
He looked up.
“Write it down. ‘Ask Mama.’ Whatever comes next, and something will, you ask me first. And in April we sit down at this table and go through that whole list again. If I have fallen twice more by then and can’t recall my own name, you’ll ask me anyhow, and then you’ll do what you have to. But you will ask.”
Steve wrote it. He printed it in big square letters, and he underlined it the same way he had underlined eighty-five thousand. Then he slid the paper up the table to her. She read every line with her finger. She held out her hand for the pencil and signed her whole name at the bottom, the way she signs a check, and passed it to Ron.
“That goes on my icebox,” she said. “Not in La Crosse.”
“Yes, Mama,” Ron said.
Dale went home to his chores. Paul got the tape measure from his truck, and through the window I could see him crouched at the back steps with Ron holding the dumb end of the tape and doing as he was told.
I washed and Mama dried, sitting on the kitchen stool. She dried the yellow crock bowl last, and ran her thumb over the chip in the rim.
“Nineteen seventy-seven,” she said.
“I got sent to my room.”
“You did. And your father went up twenty minutes later with a dish of ice cream and thought I didn’t know.”
I laughed. Then I was crying, standing there with my hands in the dishwater, and I couldn’t have told you which thing it was for.
She let me. She didn’t tell me what I was feeling. She handed me the dish towel when I was through.
When the kitchen was done she got down off the stool and took her cane and went into the dining room, and I followed to see whether she wanted the tablecloth shaken out. She was standing at the foot of the table with her hand on the back of Daddy’s chair. The plate was still set in front of it. Clean.
“Steven wanted to know what it would bring,” she said.
“He didn’t mean anything by it, Mama.”
“I know he didn’t.” She moved her hand along the arm to the pale place where the varnish was gone. “You children never asked why I set his place.”
“No. We didn’t.” I swallowed. “Why do you?”
It was the second question I had asked her that day, and I think it was the better one.
“Because he asked me,” she said. “Sixty-three years, Cheryl. That man never bought a cow or sold a calf or signed a note at the bank but he came in first and sat down in this chair and said, ‘Hazel, what do you think?’ Half the time I told him and he went and did the other thing. But he asked. Every time. I was somebody whose say-so was wanted.” She patted the arm of the chair. “I set the plate so I’d remember what that felt like. And I put my hand right here every night on my way to bed, and I tell him goodnight, and I tell him what I think about things. Nobody else was inquiring.”
I put my arm around her. She is so small now. She comes to my shoulder.
“You asked me the way he would have,” she said. “With everybody listening. And then you hushed and waited. He always waited.” She leaned her head against me for a moment, only a moment, because she is not a leaning woman. “I had about given up on it.”
“I’m sorry it took me so long.”
“Oh, hush. You’re 57. You have time to get good at it.”
Ron came in from the back porch then, in his stocking feet, and he stopped when he saw us. He looked at the chair, and the plate, and his mother’s hand on the worn place. I watched him understand a good deal of it without being told.
“Mama,” he said. “Next Sunday. Would it be all right if I sat there?”
She studied him a while.
“No,” she said, kindly. “Not yet. Pull a chair up next to mine instead.” And then she smiled at him, the first real smile I had seen on her since March. “But I’m glad you asked. That makes two of you in one day.”
Ron went to the post office that Monday morning. Nine days later Mama walked down the lane with her cane, on a dry bright afternoon, and opened her own mailbox. The county paper was in it, and the light bill, and a fat envelope from Ron with everything he had found at the bottom of his grocery sacks, the wedding invitation on top.
In January the seed catalog came. She walked down for it herself, in the track Dale had plowed, and she told me she stood a good while at the pines with it under her arm.
She called me that evening.
“Cheryl, I’m thinking of putting in more beans this year than I have any business planting. Two rows, maybe three. What do you think?”
I had my mouth open to tell her. I shut it.
“What do you want to do, Mama?”
I could hear her smiling down the line.
“Three rows,” my mother said.
