The Trucker I Fed at Denny’s in 1998 Just Bought Back My Family’s Farm
The auction sign went up in our front yard on a Tuesday, and by Wednesday morning I had already stopped crying about it.
You only have so many tears for a place, and I’d used mine up over eighteen months of trying.
My name is Ruth Ellery, I’m sixty-four years old, and the farm on Miller’s Bend Road outside Sedalia, Missouri, has been in my family since 1889.
My great-grandfather cleared the north pasture with a mule named Henry.
My father died in the kitchen making coffee.
My mother died upstairs three winters later, holding my hand.
And now the bank was going to sell all of it — the house, the barn, the 142 acres — on the first Saturday in November to cover a loan I had signed to keep my late husband’s medical bills from swallowing us whole.
Cal fought the cancer for four years.
The cancer won, and then the debt kept fighting long after he was gone.
I had thirteen days.
My daughter Megan drove up from Springfield on the Wednesday.
She stood on the porch with her arms crossed and her jaw doing that thing it does when she’s trying not to say what she came to say.
“Mom. It’s just a house.”
“It’s not.”
“It’s just wood and a roof and a lot of grass, and you are going to break yourself trying to save it.”
I looked at her — my only child, thirty-eight years old, wearing a blazer at ten in the morning on a farm — and I understood, maybe for the first time, that she had never once felt about this place the way I did.
To her it had always been the place we drove to.
Not the place we were from.
“I have thirteen days,” I said.
“Let me have thirteen days.”
She left before lunch.
I spent Thursday and Friday on the phone with everyone I could think of.
The bank in Sedalia.
A lawyer in Kansas City who charged me $200 for a half-hour of telling me what I already knew.
My cousin Denny in Tulsa, who cried but didn’t have it.
The Farm Bureau.
A nonprofit in Columbia that helps aging farmers.
By Saturday night I was sitting at the kitchen table with a cold cup of Folgers and a stack of paperwork, and I understood I was going to lose it.
Then on Monday, the letter came.
It was a thick cream envelope, the good kind, with a Kansas City law firm’s name embossed in the corner.
Peterson, Vance & Ahn.
My name typed on the front.
Certified.
I signed for it on the porch and stood there in the November wind reading it three times before any of the words meant anything.
Dear Mrs. Ellery,
Our client wishes to acquire the property at 4418 Miller’s Bend Road, Sedalia, MO, currently scheduled for foreclosure auction on November 4.
Our client authorizes us to satisfy the outstanding lien of $284,600 in full, and to transfer the deed, without lien or encumbrance, to you.
Our client asks nothing in return.
Our client asks only that you meet with him, at your convenience, at the Denny’s on East 50 in Sedalia, and that you come alone.
He asks that you bring a photograph — any photograph — of you and your late husband from before 1999.
I read that last line four times.
I sat down on the porch step and I read it a fifth time.
Two hundred and eighty-four thousand, six hundred dollars.
From a man who signed his letter through a law firm I had never heard of, who wanted to meet me at the Denny’s I hadn’t set foot in since 2011, who wanted to see a picture of me and Cal from before we were forty.
I called the number at the bottom of the page.
A woman answered on the second ring, professional as a bank clerk.
“Peterson, Vance and Ahn.”
“This is Ruth Ellery. I just received a letter.”
“Yes, Mrs. Ellery. Our client is expecting your call. He would like to know if Thursday at 2 p.m. works for you.”
“Who is he?”
There was a small pause on the line.
Not confusion.
The kind of pause a person takes when they’ve been told exactly what to say and what not to say.
“He said you’d remember him,” she said, “the moment you walked in.”
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