An Acre a Year

An acre a year was all they asked. I agreed. Fifty acres was too much for William to work anyway, even with my help.

The first year, William didn’t notice. I stood on the hill behind the house and surveyed the fields below. Cows, hay, alfalfa, corn, sweet potatoes. It looked the same as the day I married William. Maybe a few corners rounded off in the distance. Or was that my imagination?

What was not my imagination was how the little men delivered on their promises. Travelers willing to work for a meal and a bed for the night. Cows delivering calves effortlessly. Neighbors offering to trade a tractor for a fraction of its worth. Fields of corn yielding twice the expected amount, allowing William to sell the excess and use the money to hire help.

And William, in my bed at night again. The man I married, not the exhausted shell dragging himself in after dark with barely enough energy to eat supper, much less tend to a lonely wife. The fields had been his mistress of necessity. She provided, but not nearly as much as she took. If I had not agreed to the trade, she would have taken him forever.

I discovered them in the loft of the barn, five tiny men ducking behind the hay, never completely leaving the shadows, never letting me fully see them in the dusty beams of light that spilled between the planks. They proposed a deal–our happiness for land. There was no contract, just a prick of my finger on a dry piece of straw and a drip of my blood into a bale of alfalfa in the far corner of the loft. They said the bale would bind the deal, an incorruptible yield from the very acres I had promised.

I worried, but I never regretted the decision. If fifty acres were too much for William at twenty-five, how would he handle the burden at seventy-five? Would we even live that long? The land would break him, and he would die young like his father.

I was pregnant with Billy by year two.

In year seven, I found a troubled William at the hilltop overlooking the farm.

“It used to feel so much bigger,” he said.

By then, we were living a comfortable life, with regular hands working the fields for cash on the barrel. I still went to the fields but for leisure instead of labor. William would sometimes join Billy and me for afternoon picnics.

I asked the tiny men in the hay loft where the land went. They explained that the acreage had not disappeared. It had been moved within the boundaries of a world I couldn’t see. It was in the world of the Fae.

“Do you farm it in Fae?” I asked.

“Others do. Those who understand the land like you and your husband.”

By year fifteen, William began to obsess over the diminishing farm.

“Am I losing my mind?” he asked.

I tried to soothe his worries with affection, kisses, and reminders of how blessed we were.

In year twenty-two, he had the land surveyed. When the report came in the mail, William retrieved his deed to the property from the lockbox under our bed and sat down at the table to compare. The numbers matched: twenty-eight acres, not the fifty he remembered.

I feared he would have a mental breakdown. His land was the one thing in this world he thought he truly knew.

So, I told him everything.

He had never been angrier with me. I took him to meet the tiny men. He asked if the deal could be reversed and if he could buy the land back.

“Money is meaningless,” said one of the men.

“Land is eternal,” said another. “Like us.”

That night, I tried to reason with William. We were getting older. We would have more security and less work in our golden years.

“What about year fifty?” he asked. “They will take it all, and we will have nothing. What then?”

In year twenty-five, Billy married, and with the money he saved over the years, he bought a small farm of his own, a manageable fifteen acres. In year twenty-six, they gave us our first granddaughter.

Only William and I noticed the disappearing land. In year thirty-two, we made the hard decision to sell the cattle. In year forty-one, we stopped growing alfalfa. One lonely bale remained in the loft.

As our hair grayed and our joints ached, we found ourselves down to a few acres that nearly managed itself with the help of a single hired hand.

The tiny men were firm. “The deal is binding,” they said from behind the bale of hay that held my blood.

“What if we refuse to leave?” I asked.

They did not answer.

“We can move in with Billy,” I said as we stood at the hilltop overlooking our last acre. “Build a small house and help him on the farm? I could watch the babies and–”

“No,” William said flatly.

“We have money in the bank to buy an acre. We don’t need more than that.”

“This farm was my life. I won’t leave it.”

When the last day arrived, William got up early, paid the hand, and told him he would no longer be needed. William killed a chicken, and I dressed it and put it in the oven. I picked tomatoes, corn, and zucchini from the backyard garden and onions from behind the barn.

Billy, Sarah, and the kids came for supper. Billy and William talked about tractors, and I gave Sarah my yeast roll recipe.

We watched from the doorway as they drove away.

I took William’s hand and led him to bed early. If we woke in the morning, if we woke in Fae, I wanted us both to be well rested. Fifty acres is a lot of land for one man to work. He would need my help.

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Ⓒ Gregory Marlow