She Paid $55 for a Sealed Farm Barrel — 24 Days Later, Everything Changed
Chapter 4
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"Mr. Lindquist," Junie said, "do you know where it came from?"He sat down on the canister beside her. "My great-grandfather grew wheat here. In 1951, the Department of Agriculture went looking for a few trustworthy farms to store a batch of precious seed. He accepted, put the canister up in the barn loft, and told the family nobody was ever to open it. Then he died, and the program got forgotten. It sat there seventy-five years.""Did he ever open it?""Never," he said. "Whoever broke those seals had better know what he was doing." Neil looked at the little lead tag with the wheat stalk. "I always figured he was just being stubborn."Junie wrote it all down in the small notebook she kept in her jacket.That night, she went out to the old shed behind the house where her grandfather Tobias had sorted seed every season: the wooden table, the tin boxes of seed, every box labeled in his square hand. As a little girl, she had spent hours out here on an apple crate, learning the names of things: winter wheat, spring wheat, plump kernel, shriveled kernel.Once, he had taken a lead tag stamped with a wheat stalk from a cigar box. "This came off a National Seed Bank canister," he'd told her. "Seed put away carefully, never opened. That seal is a story, Junie, and the story is worth something. But only if it's still whole. Break it in a barn with nobody watching, and all you've got is an old can of seed and your own word."She found the cigar box; the tag was still in it. She held it up beside the photo she had taken on her mother's phone, and the wheat stalks matched.At 7:00 the next morning, Wendell showed up with his red wrecker and a lowboy trailer. It took most of the day: setting ramps, running the winch, easing it up inch by inch. The cable sang, and the iron groaned, and Junie stood well back beside her mother, exactly where Wendell had told her to stand.Word got around; a dozen cars stopped along the road to watch. Somebody brought lawn chairs, somebody brought a thermos. About 2:00 in the afternoon, the truck from Rudd Feed and Grain rolled by slow, and Cal leaned out the window in his red jacket."Careful, Wendell! Don't bust your back over $55 of moldy straw!"The people along the road laughed. Wendell didn't even look up.