And this room, though it was not a courtroom, would be closer to one than to any other room she had entered that year. She parked at the far end of the lot next to a chainlink fence that separated the fairgrounds from a field of last year's cornstalks. She walked to the registration table set up outside the hall's east entrance. She gave her name to the woman with the clipboard.
She received a bidder's card with the number seven printed in black marker on a rectangle of white card stock the size of a paperback book. She walked into the hall. 11 other bidders had registered. Mari counted them as she took her seat three rows from the front on the aisle.
Two were neighboring farmers she recognized from co-op mornings and church suppers. Both men in their 50s, both wearing the specific tight expression of men who had survived the previous four years by not overextending and who were now cautiously considering whether the bottom had arrived. Three others were unfamiliar and dressed in a way that told her they were from Madison or Milwaukee. Sport coats, leather portfolios.
One had a fountain pen visible in his breast pocket, which was in Vernon County in April of 1985, the equivalent of arriving in a top hat. The remaining six were a mix of local men and one woman who ran a nursery operation outside Ontario. All of them looking at the East Fields. The way a person looks at a piece of ground they have been driving past for years without ever expecting the chance to own it.
Dale Kentner was in the room. He was standing at the back wall behind the last row of chairs with his hat in his hands. He was not there to bid. He was there because it was his ground and there were things a man attended in a small county whether he wished to or not.
Mari did not turn around to look at Dale. She had seen him when she came in. He had seen her. They had exchanged the small nod that acknowledged the presence of another person without demanding anything further of the encounter.
That was enough. That had been enough between them in various small ways since the March afternoon in 1983 when he had left her kitchen with a folded projection sheet in his shirt pocket.
The auctioneer took the platform at exactly 1:00. His name was Otis Rasmussen from a firm out of Sparta that handled bank sales across four counties. He was not Wendell Krauss. Wendell handled farm dispersals and personal property.
Otis handled sales in which no one in the room was smiling. He read the terms of sale from a printed sheet. He read the legal description of the parcel. He confirmed that the bank had clear title, that all liens had been discharged, and that the successful bidder would be required to tender a certified check or cash for the full amount within 24 hours of the drop of the gavel.
He asked whether there were any questions. There were none. He opened the bidding at $250 per acre. The first bid came from one of the neighboring farmers, a man named Alvin Peterson, at $260.
The second came immediately from one of the sport coats at $270. The third came from the other neighboring farmer at $280. The fourth from a different sport coat at $290. Mari kept her card in her lap.
She was aware without needing the look of the man behind her whose card had not yet come up. She had noted him during registration. He was 52 years old, tall, wearing a charcoal sport coat with a slight sheen to it that suggested it had been chosen for the occasion. His hair was steel gray cut recently.
He wore a wristwatch on a leather band that showed evidence of professional maintenance. His name on the registration sheet was Preston Halverson representing Midwest Land Holdings out of Madison. He had a leather portfolio open on his lap in a small notebook in which he had already made three entries. Preston Halverson had glanced at Mari once when he came into the row.
He had noted the canvas coat, the work boots, the hands that had been reddened by early spring cold on the walk-in from the parking lot. He had classified her the way men in his profession classified people, which was quickly and with a small internal category. His category for Mari was local widow present out of interest or sentiment, not a serious bidder. He had turned his attention to the sport coats in the front rows whom he understood to be his real competition.
He was wrong about this and he did not know that he was wrong and he was not going to know it until $350 per acre. The bidding climbed steadily through the 290s and into the low $300s. At $310, Alvin Peterson dropped out. His card went down and did not come back up.
At $340, the second neighboring farmer, whose name was Ruben Anderdall, made a bid he had not planned to make and immediately regretted. At $350, when the bid was raised, he set his card on the seat beside him and stared at the floor. The woman from Ontario had never lifted her card. Two of the six local men had lifted theirs once and let them fall.
That left three bidders active. Mari, who had not yet bid, and the two sport coats whose bids were coming in matter-of-factly, one after the other, in the manner of men executing a strategy rather than making a decision. At $355, Mari lifted her card for the first time. The auctioneer took the bid and moved on.
Otis was too experienced to react to a new bidder appearing at that level. He simply added her number to the pattern. $355 from card 7, $360 from card 3, $365 from card 7, $370 from card 9, $375 from card 7. Preston Halverson turned his head slightly, not to look at her precisely.
He turned it just enough to place her in his peripheral vision. He revised his internal category. She was evidently a serious bidder after all. He made a small adjustment in his notebook.
He raised his card. $380. The other sport coat, the one with the fountain pen, held for a beat and then raised $385. Mari raised $390.
Fountain pen looked at his portfolio for a long moment. He wrote something in the margin of a document he had brought. He closed the portfolio. He set his card face down on his lap.
He was out.
That left Mari and Preston Halverson. Preston looked at her fully for the first time. He turned in his chair and studied her across the two row gap that separated them. What he saw was a woman in her mid-40s in a canvas coat and a wool skirt with unfashioned hair pulled back at the nape and a bidder's card held steady in her right hand.