The thing that slid into the palm of Dylan was a small brass tag, round and thick, with a hole near the top and the words stamped across the face, RASMUSSEN FARM, 1911. The brass was worn smooth where a thumb had rubbed it for a century. Jim studied it and cleared his throat. “That hung on the front gate,” he said. “the grandfather of Uncle Henrik hung it the day he bought the first forty acres, and it hung there until the day Henrik took it down, the winter after his wife died. I thought it had been lost. I looked everywhere. And all the time he had it inside your hat.”
“I should tell you the rest of what happened Monday,” Jim said, “because I would rather you hear it from me than from the gossip at the Hy Vee.” He turned his cap in his hands. “The lawyer read the will. The first name on it was yours, Dylan. The home place. Eighty acres, the farmhouse, the barn, the machine shed, and the mower in it. My brother Lars stood up right away. He said it was a scandal. He said an eighteen year old boy with no farming experience had taken advantage of a lonely old man.”
“I stood up, too,” he said quietly. “I did not say anything, because I did not know what to say. I had been angry since the funeral. I thought, That should be mine. I worked that land with him every summer as a kid. And then the lawyer read the letter that went with the will. He asked if anyone would like to hear it. Nobody did. Lars sat down and crossed his arms. So he read it anyway.” Jim took a worn envelope from his shirt pocket. “I made him give me a copy. I would like to read it to you, Dylan, if you will let me. I think you should know exactly what he said.”
A brass farm gate tag hidden in a hatband turned a bitter will reading into the start of a new harvest.
Dylan nodded, wordless, and Jim began. “To my nephews. You are my blood, and I love you, and I should have said so years ago. The land is not a prize. It is a responsibility. I left the north four hundred acres to the two of you, because you know how to farm it. I left the home place to the boy who mowed my lawn, because he understands what it is to take care of something that cannot say thank you. If you want to be angry at an old man, be angry. But if you want to be farmers, be better than I was. Be kind to your neighbors. Look out the window, and wave. Henrik Rasmussen.”
The only sound on the porch was the wind rattling the maple leaves. I looked at Jim, a big, weathered man in his fifties, with soil under his fingernails, and saw that he was crying without making any noise at all. “I read it three times,” he said. “That night in the truck. And I realized he was not talking about the land. He was talking about me. I live four miles from his front door, and I did not visit him once last winter. Not once. I could have driven over with a thermos of coffee. I could have waved. The boy across the road did it, with a lawn mower, every week, for ten years.”
Dylan finally spoke. He had pulled the straw hat from his knee and was holding it by the brim. “Jim, I do not want to take your family land. I only mowed the grass.” “Son,” said Jim, “you did a great deal more than mow the grass. And I want to make you an offer.” He leaned forward. “Lars will cool down. He always does. But I want you to know that I am not contesting. I am going to help you. I would like to teach you everything my uncle taught me, if you will let me. How to read soil. How to rotate a field. How to fix a combine in the dark. Come out to my place this Saturday. Bring the hat.”
Dylan went that Saturday, and the Saturday after, and every Saturday that fall. Jim taught him to drive a tractor, to test the moisture of a bean, to read the sky for hail. In October they harvested corn together on the north four hundred acres, with Lars driving the combine, grumbling under his breath. By the end of the month, the grumbling had stopped. On the last evening of harvest, the three men sat on the tailgate of the pickup in the gold light, passing a thermos back and forth, and Lars said, gruffly, to the boy, “You are not bad with a mower.” Which, I am told, was a speech.
Dylan enrolled at Iowa State in the fall, in agricultural science, only twenty minutes up the road from the house. He lives in the farmhouse of Mr. Rasmussen during the week and works the eighty acres with the equipment that Jim lent him, and I drive out every Sunday with a pan of casserole and a book. The kitchen has a sunny window over the sink. I stand there while the dishes soak and look out across the fields, and I cannot help thinking that a man who spent his life staring at his land has left it to someone who sees it the same way.
Last spring, Dylan hung the brass tag on the front gate. He stood back and looked at it, hands on his hips, in the same straw hat he had worn to every Saturday of his boyhood. It swayed in the breeze and caught the light. Across the road, in the yard where he had mowed his first crooked rows, a young family had moved into the house, with two little boys and a golden retriever. The older boy stood by the fence watching. Dylan waved. The boy waved back, shyly, and then ran inside to tell his mother that the farmer across the road had a funny hat.
In July, on the Saturday before the Fourth, I found a paper bag on our porch with a dozen ears of sweet corn in it, picked that morning. There was no note. Dylan, beside me, held one up to the light, the husk still cool and damp with dew. He looked across the road at the empty porch of the old farmhouse where the rocker sat, and then at the sky, and smiled. “Uncle Henrik,” he said, as though he had been calling him that all his life, “I think you got a good deal.” Then he went inside and put the water on to boil.
