Adah looked at the tag again.
Eleven dollars and forty cents.
She had seventeen dollars in cash inside her wallet.
Farm operating account: almost empty.
Property tax due in six weeks.
Diesel bill unpaid.
Feed bill partially paid.
She had no reason to buy four hundred pounds of useless iron.
“Load it.”
Vernon blinked.
“What?”
“I said load it.”
The workers laughed louder than before.
Vernon stared at her.
“You serious?”
“Yes.”
“That thing is frozen solid.”
“I noticed.”
“You planning to use it as a mailbox?”
“No.”
“What then?”
Adah pulled eleven dollars from her wallet.
Then four dimes.
She placed the money in his hand.
“That part’s my business.”
Vernon looked down at the bills.
One worker called, “Better throw in the electric one too, Vern. She’ll need it to move the old one.”
The men laughed.
Adah did not.
She had learned something after Harold died.
People could survive being underestimated much more easily than they could survive wasting energy correcting every person who underestimated them.
She walked toward her truck.
“Chain it down tight.”
Vernon shook his head.
“You’re buying four hundred pounds of rust.”
Adah opened the driver’s door.
“Then I’m getting a good price by the pound.”
That quieted him for half a second.
Then even Vernon laughed.
The loader placed the winch onto her flatbed.
The rear springs dropped noticeably.
Adah secured it with chain.
As she climbed into the cab, Vernon shouted through the open window.
“When you get tired of staring at it, bring it back.”
Adah started the engine.
“You buying it?”
“For scrap.”
“How much?”
“Same eleven-forty.”
Adah put the truck in gear.
“Then I’d better make it worth twelve.”
She drove away.
Her farm sat twelve miles north of town.
A quarter section, one hundred sixty acres if a person counted the drainage ditch and windbreak.
Harold’s father had farmed it.
Then Harold.
Now Adah.
That last part still sounded strange.
Before Harold’s death, people called it the Ferris place.
Afterward, people called it Adah’s farm when they were being kind.
When they were not, they called it the widow farm.
Adah hated that.
She had been a farmer before Harold died.
Marriage had not created her hands.
Widowhood had not created the land.
She had worked cattle, changed bearings, driven grain trucks, cleaned irrigation screens, repaired fence, and run the combine beside Harold for seven years.
But death rearranged how other people saw her.
Suddenly every decision required supervision.
Every machinery purchase produced advice.
Every mistake became evidence.
Every success became luck.
Adah had stopped arguing with people about it.
She preferred work.
The farmstead appeared beyond a row of cottonwoods.
White farmhouse.
Red barn.
Machine shed.
Two corrals.
Windmill.
Three grain bins.
Harold’s old International tractor sat near the shed.
Adah parked the flatbed beside it.
For several minutes, she remained in the cab looking at the winch through the rear window.
Eleven dollars and forty cents.
She had bought stranger things.
Not many.
But some.
Getting it off the truck took more than an hour.
She used the tractor loader, two chains, and a rolling steel pipe.
By sunset the winch sat inside the machine shed beneath a hanging yellow bulb.
Adah ate dinner standing at the kitchen counter.
Eggs.
Toast.
Black coffee.