Longer than it needs to be, and longer than it will be the next time around… Won’t say any more for now.
+ + +
Will rolled his eyes and said, “Inspiring. What’s that got to do with my present situation? Does this give him the right to plow under and plant any bare space in the neighborhood?”
“I’m getting there, Will.” Blom took his glasses off, wiped them and placed them on his forehead. “You’ve been to the house, right?”
“In a sense.”
“Your grandparents used to own it. Not the house, of course, but the property it’s on. It was the last piece of property the Rijsbergen’s sold. It sent your grand-uncle west with his new bride. From that point, your grandparents were finally the only residents of the house you’ve got now. It was the way they did things since your great-grandparents moved here.”
Will was aware of this. The room that became “his” had always been “Jupp’s”, his grandfather’s brother, Josef. Josef—“Jupp– lost a finger in the late thirties, and his grandfather went to Normandy because of it. Two year after the war, Jupp, his nine fingers and a grandaunt headed off to Oregon. He’d never met either of them. A couple of years later, his mother was born.
“The Mikkelson’s were immigrants, too. New ones. They left Norway about five minutes after the Germans invaded, came here from Sweden when the war was over, They got here a year after your grandad was discharged. Jupp was in his twenties, about to get married and was eager to sell and get out on his own. Could well have been your grandad wanted to change his scenery, but that’s not how it worked out. Anyway.
“Matts, Arn’s father, was living in Venlo with his wife and two kids, had been working as a farmhand. He bought the property from your grandfather, which gave Jupp enough to skedaddle.”
Will hadn’t heard any of this before, but it held no interest for him. “Fascinating, Bertie. Again, what’s that got to do with my having a shitbird for a neighbor?”
Blom made his little gesture again and went on. “Moving way ahead, the Mikkelson’s made it through that farm crisis in the eighties by the skin of their teeth, just as your grandparents and every other family farm that survived. In all honesty, most people ended up better off a few years by going under. Arn had two older brothers and a sister, and they left Limburg County the minute they could. Arn was all that was left, and he was barely out of grammar school. He was also the only kid in the family that was in love with the farming life. I don’t think the man is capable of doing anything else. About the time he turned eighteen, Matts was moving into his seventies and was all done with it. He retired and the only thing he left for Arn was the house and the grass around it.”
Will waited for more, and didn’t get it. “And . . . ?”
“If you think Arn’s an asshole, you should have met the old man.”
Blom and Will turned to look at Ouillette. “Matts retired and moved to Texas. The only way he could get to Texas was to sell off everything but the lot the house stood on, and I’m pretty sure Arn had to beg just to get that out of him. And he didn’t just sell the land, but all the machinery too. Arn didn’t have anything but the roof over his head.”
“Who bought the property around it,” Will asked.
“Same folks who bought up everything ten years before. Imperial Agriculture,” Ouillette answered. “And Arn ends up surrounded by dirt and crops he thought were going to be his, and he can’t farm it.”
Having an asshole for a father struck home with Will. He fought down a mild stirring of empathy and asked, “So he steals from the neighbor with a sob story for an excuse.”
Ouillette smiled. “Not that simple,” he said through his teeth. “And, no. He tried to buy the west lot from your grandmother.”
“Why didn’t he?”
“He didn’t have the money, for one thing. He was nineteen years old, never had a job, and all the old man left him was the house. The minute they were gone, Arn was on his own. I don’t think he even had a savings account.” Ouillette fixed Will with a hard look. “The bank wouldn’t give him a loan, not even when he offered to put the house up for collateral, because he had no demonstrable means of paying it off. After all the previous foreclosures, they weren’t about to stir that pot again.”
Ouillette’s open antagonism was unsettling, but Will had pried out this much information and wasn’t about to leave until he had his answers. “So this pissed him off. Nan dies, and he decides he’s got every right to take the property out of some goofy notion it would have been his if his dad wasn’t a dick and fate weren’t so cruel.”
Ouillette answered with a smirk. “She wasn’t all that keen to sell it to him, either.”
“There we go,” Will said to the smirk.
“She didn’t want to sell because of you,” Ouillette said.
Will didn’t have a retort for that.
The smile was back, no less edgier than the smirk. “She did, however, let him ‘borrow’ it for a year. He put a crop in, using Imperial Ag’s equipment.” Ouillette shook his head. “You impress me as a fellow that appreciates irony. Tell me if this suits you. Arn’s first and only outside employment was working for the company his old man sold to. Better yet, some of the property he farmed for a paycheck used to be his family’s. He even made a little extra by storing some of their machinery in his outbuildings. Sort of funny, isn’t it?” Will didn’t laugh, though Ouillette paused long enough to give him the opportunity. With no chuckles forthcoming, Ouillette went on, “One season and an eighty-acre corn crop in, Arn gives your grandmother twenty per cent of his profit. She tried to refuse it, but he insisted. He made an offer to buy it again, too, saying he’d be happy with a contract for deed. He said they could keep it at twenty per cent a year or even go as far as to give her every penny he made off that eighty acres until it met her price.”
Will felt remaining silent would be taken as a tacit admission of some sort of guilt. He wasn’t sure of what guilt he bore, or whether there was any actual cause for it, but it was obvious Ouillette believed there was. If Ouillette believed it, he was certain the rest of the locals probably believed it as well—including Blom. “Sounds like a fair deal,” he said. That answer was as much honest belief as it was empathy quashing and guilt denial.
“As fair as fair could be, especially under the circumstances. More than fair, when you think about it. Imagine, losing all you thought you’d have someday, then working in for some faceless corporation. But, right next door you get a piece of it back. It yours, small as it is. Not enough to raise a family on, and it still meant you’d be sweating for a ‘letterhead’, but it’s yours, and it’s right outside your kitchen window.” Ouillette’s smile had softened, but his eyes had not.
Will didn’t want to satisfy the sense he was getting that Ouillette was waiting for something from him, so he gave him something right away. “Why didn’t she do it?”
“Mind if I answer with a quote?”
Will answered with a shrug.
Ouillette said, “Your grandmother’s answer was this, ‘I think that would work just fine, but I don’t want to do anything without asking Willem first.’”
Will just stood there, locked into place. It the resultant pause was an orchestration of Ouillette’s, it was inconsequential. He was truly rendered speechless. He could think of nothing to say. He turned to Blom, who was looking at him, on elbow on the counter, resting his cheek in a palm, expressionless. He turned back to Ouillette. “How . . . ?”
“I was having coffee with her in her kitchen when he made this proposal.”
Speechless again.
Ouillette’s smile had gone away. So had the hardness in his eyes, but the expression he wore was no less accusatory. “I don’t know if they ever talked about it again. She never said anything to me about it, anyway. There’s no way of knowing how far it might have gone anyhow. The end of the next February she was dead.”
Will swallowed, then said, “I never heard anything like that from her.”
“I guess she never brought it up. She always had a funny way of talking about you without ever really saying anything about you.” Ouillette gave a shrug of his own. “I sure as hell never heard anything more about it from Arn. I’ve known him most of my life and don’t think we’ve ever shared more than ten words between us.” He shrugged again. “Those would have been at her funeral.” He gave another shrug, turned, and disappeared down an aisle.
Will stared at the spot Ouillette had vacated until he thawed out enough to turn to Blom. The shopkeeper raised his eyebrows and said, “Complicated.”
All Will could do was nod. Mexico. Blasted on mescal and mota. “Yeah,” Will finally managed to say. “Yeah.” He couldn’t conjure anything else to say, so he tacked on a “thanks” and walked out of the store.