Margaret said:
"I know."
"It's not normal."
"I know that too."
Della graduated from Viroqua High School in 1958.
She had a scholarship offer from the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
Teaching program.
She had a suitcase.
A bus ticket.
A roommate assignment.
A letter from the housing office listing the things she should bring.
Sheets.
Towels.
Desk lamp.
Winter coat.
She did not go.
Years later, people tried to make that decision more dramatic than Della ever did.
Some said she sacrificed college for family.
Others said she was afraid to leave.
Della never encouraged either version.
When asked, she said:
"The farm needed me."
Then changed the subject.
What the family ledger showed was that Raymond's health began declining in 1957.
Shortness of breath.
Fatigue.
Long rests after moderate work.
By 1959, he could not reliably work a full day.
Della stayed.
She took over more cattle work.
More hay.
More machinery maintenance.
More accounts.
By the early 1960s, father and daughter operated almost as partners.
By the middle of the decade, Della ran most of the farm.
Raymond still made decisions.
But his body increasingly refused to participate in them.
Della married Carl Vickers in 1964.
Carl's family farmed two miles north.
He was steady.
Quiet.
A better crop man than cattleman.
He was not particularly interested in horses, but he respected Della's judgment with them.
They combined their work gradually rather than formally.
Carl planted on Mayes ground.
Della helped with Vickers hay.
They talked about someday consolidating both farms into one operation.
Then Raymond died in January 1967.
He was sixty-two.
He left Della the farm.
The equipment.
The horses.
The ledgers.
And fourteen thousand two hundred dollars in savings.
The farm carried no mortgage.
Raymond had made the final payment in 1954.
A year before he died, he sat with Della at the kitchen table and pointed toward the deed.
"A paid-for farm is the only thing a bank can't take away from you."
Della wrote the sentence in the margin of the ledger.
Raymond continued:
"Everything else in agriculture is borrowing time."
She wrote that too.
Two years later, Carl died.
Heart attack.
He was thirty-three.
He collapsed in the field beside a planter.
By the time Gene found him, there was nothing anyone could do.
Della was twenty-nine.
Within two years, she had lost the two men around whom most of her adult working life had been organized.
People expected her to sell.
Or lease the ground.
Or remarry quickly.
Or let one of Carl's brothers manage the operation.
She did none of those things.
She combined the Mayes and Vickers ground.
Four hundred ten acres total.
Sixty cattle.
Two horses.
One part-time hand during planting and harvest.
No debt.
And Raymond's ledgers.
Della did not pretend grief made her stronger.
She hated that idea.