That had been December. That had been, Arne thought later, the last time anybody in Mullen said anything to him that they did not have to say. Because after December there was January, and in January there was the meadow.
He stood in the barn alley with the hay fork in his hand and Notch looking at him and he made himself think about it, all the way through, the way you make yourself look at a wound when you are cleaning it.
The Kasper place had been mortgaged to Farmers Home, like his own, and like half the places on the Mullen road. When Albin went under, Farmers Home took it, and the county sheriff, Ed Vlasak, who had gone to school with both of them, read the notice of sale on the courthouse steps at ten in the morning on the twenty-second of January in a wind that took every third word away. The place was offered in three parcels. The home place with the house and the buildings and two sections of hill pasture. The north pasture. And the creek meadow: three hundred and twenty acres of subirrigated hay ground along the bottoms of the creek, the best hay ground on that stretch of the river, the ground that shared a fence line with Arne's own meadow on the west, and that had on it, eleven feet over the line, the windmill.
Everybody had known what was going to happen. Nobody bid. That had been agreed, not in any meeting, but the way things were agreed in the Sandhills, at the feed store and on the church steps, a word here and a nod there. You did not bid on a neighbor's ground at a forced sale. If nobody bid, Farmers Home would have to take it into inventory, and then there was a chance, people said, that they might lease it back to Albin. It was not much of a chance. But forty people had come to stand on the courthouse steps in the wind, ranchers and their wives and the Methodist minister and the priest from Thedford and two men from a farm group in Lincoln with a hand-lettered sign, to watch the government read a notice to nobody.
And Arne had bid on the meadow.
He had gone to see Ardell Fenske the week before, about himself. Ardell was a decent, tired man with a crewcut and a Rotary pin who had been given charge of more foreclosures in two years than in the twenty before, and he had sat across the desk in the Farmers Home office over the bank in Thedford and taken off his glasses and said, Arne, I'll be straight with you. Your numbers are thin. The district office is reviewing every borrower in this county, and they look at cash flow and hay base, and on hay base you're short. You've been buying hay two winters out of three. And Arne had said, What would make it not short, and Ardell had looked at him a long time and said, very quietly, I can't advise you. But you know what's coming up on the twenty-second. If you came in here in February with that meadow under you, paid for, I'd have a much easier time carrying you another year.
Paid for. Arne had thirty-one thousand dollars in a passbook account at the bank in Mullen that he had not touched in two years, because it was Ilse's: the money from a Woodmen of the World policy she had bought in 1958 with egg money and paid on every quarter for twenty-five years without once mentioning it, which he had not known about until the agent came out a week after the funeral with his hat in his hands. He had thought, in a vague way, that it would be Kirsten's. That he would not touch it unless the roof fell in.
He had stood on the courthouse steps on the twenty-second of January with Ilse's passbook in the inside pocket of his sheepskin coat, and when Ed Vlasak read the description of the creek meadow and asked, without looking up, in the voice of a man who did not expect an answer, whether there were any bids, Arne Tolstad had said, "Ninety-five an acre."
He would remember the silence for the rest of his life. Forty people in a wind, and not one sound. Ed Vlasak had looked up from the paper. The two men from Lincoln had looked at each other. Dorit Kasper, who was standing at the foot of the steps with her arm through her husband's, had closed her eyes. And Albin had not moved at all. He had stood there with his hat pulled down and his collar up and he had looked at Arne across the courthouse steps without any expression whatsoever, the way you look at weather.