Not immune.
Stable.
Hay prices rose during the 1983 drought.
Della bought less than neighboring horse farms because her winter feed system included root crops.
Her land payment was zero.
Her machinery payment was zero.
Her shop absorbed repairs that would have required dealership labor elsewhere.
The root washer still ran.
The same welded drum.
The same homemade chute.
Every autumn it processed produce.
Della had upgraded bearings.
Replaced brushes again.
Changed a crank bushing.
But the basic machine remained.
The sixty-dollar auction lot still contributed every winter.
A savings account that held forty-one thousand dollars in 1979 passed seventy-eight thousand by 1984.
Some of that came from horse sales.
Some training.
Some careful land use.
A great deal came from what she did not spend.
That distinction mattered.
People often noticed income.
Della noticed avoided cost.
In April 1985, the Kettner east fields came to auction.
Two hundred acres.
Bank-owned.
The sale was held at the county fairgrounds in Viroqua.
Eleven registered bidders.
Three outside land investment companies.
Two neighboring farmers.
Several individuals.
Della registered as number seven.
She was forty-four.
She wore a dark work coat.
No jewelry beyond her wedding band, which she still wore on a chain beneath her shirt.
The room smelled like coffee and wet coats.
Dale Kettner stood near the back.
He had managed to keep his home place and buildings.
Barely.
The east fields were gone regardless of who bought them.
The auctioneer opened at two hundred eighty dollars per acre.
Someone bid.
Another followed.
The number climbed.
Three hundred.
Three ten.
A neighboring farmer stopped.
Three twenty-five.
Three forty.
The second neighboring farmer lowered his card.
Della remained.
Three fifty-five.
One investment group dropped out.
Three seventy.
Now three bidders.
Della.
A Madison land company representative in a sport coat.
Another investment buyer.
Three eighty.
The second company stopped.
Only two.
The man in the sport coat looked toward Della for the first time.
"Three eighty-five."
Della raised.
"Three ninety."
The man raised almost casually.
The auctioneer looked at Della.
She knew her limit.
She had calculated it before entering the building.
She had acreage yield data.
Drainage.
Tax.
Expected hay production.
Potential horse pasture.
Resale was irrelevant.
She wanted the ground.
She also refused to chase another person's number.
Four hundred dollars per acre was her ceiling.
Exactly eighty thousand dollars.
The auctioneer called:
"Three hundred ninety. Do I have four hundred?"
Della raised her card.