Chapter 1 – The Hired Hand

Daniel Kane had worked Arthur Hale’s Iowa farm for thirty-one years, starting as a nineteen-year-old drifter Arthur hired on a trial basis and never quite let go, eventually becoming less an employee than the son Arthur’s own children had never quite managed to be.

Arthur’s biological children, Claire and Grant, had left for the city decades earlier, building careers and lives that rarely brought them back to the six hundred acres their father had spent his life working, visiting mostly at holidays and, in recent years, mostly to discuss what the land might be worth if it were ever sold.

“You know that land’s worth a fortune to developers,” Grant said at Thanksgiving one year, not quite quietly enough for Daniel, setting the table in the next room, to avoid overhearing. “Dad’s not going to farm it forever. We should be thinking about the exit plan.”

Arthur, in his early eighties by then, said little in response, though Daniel noticed, in the years that followed, a growing quietness in the old man whenever his children visited, a contrast to the easy warmth he showed on ordinary days working alongside Daniel in the fields.

“They don’t understand what this place is,” Arthur told Daniel once, during a long evening of fence repair neither of them particularly needed to rush. “To them it’s just an asset. Numbers on a spreadsheet.”

“It’s not that to me,” Daniel said simply, and Arthur nodded, the two of them understanding each other in the particular way of men who’d spent three decades working the same land side by side.