Ma hadn’t been in the ground more than an hour when my brother Cheet sold the farm. It wasn’t his to sell. I told him that. “Cheet,” I said, “the farm isn’t yours to sell.”

“If it’s not mine, I don’t know whose it is. It surely ain’t yurn,” he told me back.

“It’s Pa’s.”

“Pa’s dead, and ain’t nobody going to raise him up like Lazarus.”

“You don’t know he’s dead.”

“He left in 1859 and it’s now 1863, and he ain’t writ more than three letters that whole time. The last was near two years ago. That means he’s dead, and Ma wasted away from knowing it, and that’s a fact. Her dying words were, ‘Hello, Manley.’”

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“That doesn’t mean she saw him in heaven.”

“You think she’s in hell then?”

Cheet always twisted my words.

“I’m saying we don’t know Pa’s dead.”

I can be stubborn when I want to, even if I don’t do any more than repeat myself. I could have argued Pa’s leaving didn’t kill off Ma. She’d been poorly since long before Pa left, and to tell you the truth, I think that might have been one reason he took out.

“You already said you don’t know Pa’s dead. I say he is, and even if he ain’t, who’s going to run the farm until he decides to come home?” Cheet asked. “You think I’m going to slop the pigs and spread manure until Pa shows up with his tail between his legs and with nary a word of thanks? You know how he is.”

“He’ll come home proud and rich,” I insisted.

I believed in Pa, although nobody else in the family did. Ma nagged him all the time, and Cheet laughed at him, so maybe that was why Pa had taken me up. He taught me to fish and to plow the field and ride astride like a boy. He said I was the best son he had, although he had Cheet and Boots. My older brother said I was too young to have known Pa for a failure. Maybe so, but somebody had to believe in him. And Pa believed in me. Before he’d gone off, he’d made me give him my solemn promise that if something happened to him, I would be responsible for the care of Boots. It was my sworn duty, and he’d repeated that in his letters.

There’d been only three of them, as Cheet said, and they were short because Pa couldn’t write very well. I’d read them so often, I had them memorized.

Dear wif and fambly, he’d written in the first one. I have got to Colorado and gold mines are scarce to find. Im lonesome as a skunk too. Cheet give up cards and do your part on the farm and Haidie you don’t forget your promise about Boots. Afectionate your Pa Manley P. Richards.

“Tough Luck”

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He didn’t say anything to Ma.

Cheet and I were sitting in the kitchen now, him next to the cookstove, which was the only warm place in the house. He spent a good deal of time in that chair, even before Ma died—there or in the barn studying on cards and ways to cheat, him thinking he was going to be a riverboat gambler with a silk vest and a string tie. He made me play against him of an evening—Grandpap had taught us both—and the truth was, I was a better player than Cheet, and better at cheating, too, but I usually let him win, because he’d get mad enough to chew splinters when he lost.

After it got too cold in the barn, Cheet said he had to be near Ma in case she needed somebody to lift her up, and he was the only one strong enough. That meant me and Boots had to do the farm work.

Boots was out milking now, and I’d join him just as soon as I finished washing up the dishes folks had left. The women had brought us raisin pie—funeral pie, we called it, because that’s what they always took to a laying out—and cake and baked beans and bottles of bread-and-butter pickles they’d put up, although I didn’t know why anybody’d want to eat pickles after a funeral. Cheet had just cut himself a big piece of butterscotch cake, spilling crumbs across the table, which I’d have to clean up, too. I wanted to tell him that he could help with the milking now that Ma was dead and buried and didn’t need lifting up anymore. But I knew better than to aggravate him when he was doing some deep thinking.

“I’ll bet you a dollar Pa never comes back.”

I snorted at that. “If I won, you’d pay that bet out of the money we got for the farm.”

Cheet shrugged. “Well, it’s done with and nothing you can do about it now,” he said. “The farm’s sold. I signed the papers even before Ma was in the ground.”

“How much you get?” I asked. “Nine hundred and fifty dollars.”

“It’s worth fifteen hundred. You were snookered.” Truer words were never spoke. Like Cheet said, this was 1863, and it looked like the war was going to go on a long time, North versus South. Our good Illinois cropland was worth even more than fifteen hundred.

“Bird in the hand.”

“What are we going to do with that money?”

“We?” he snickered. “You mean what am I going to do with it? The money’s been give to me. I didn’t see no name of Mary Haidie Richards on it. I am nineteen, and I can dispose of it any way I want to. You are fourteen and a girl and have no rights. Tough luck.”

His words took me back. I hadn’t thought things through until now, not that anybody could blame me. I hadn’t expected Pa to be away so long and I hadn’t studied on what to do if Ma died. And I hadn’t expected Cheet to sell the farm either, and now that he’d gone and done it, I had no idea what the three of us would do. I did not care to live on a riverboat while Cheet gambled away the money, but where else could me and Boots go? Besides, if I didn’t keep an eye on Cheet, he’d use up the money faster than wheat grows in a good rain. “Best give me the money to keep?”

“Best give me the money to keep,” Cheet repeated, teasing me. Cheet was mean to do that. “It’s my money. Why’d I give it to a child like you?”

Sandra Dallas is a New York Times bestselling author of nearly 20 adult novels, several children’s novels, and numerous works of nonfiction about Western subjects. Her work has won numerous awards and prizes including the Colorado Book Award and, in 2021, she was inducted into the Colorado Authors’ Hall of Fame. A former bureau chief for Business Week magazine, Sandra lives in Denver and Georgetown, Colorado, with her husband.