A Two Thousand Dollar Nebraska Land Purchase Leads to a Federal Fraud Case
The fields stretched out before me, two hundred acres of grey, dry prairie grass that should have been turned over three weeks ago. The neighbor’s fields to the north were already showing the first green mist of winter wheat. My soil was silent.
I looked down at my hands. The skin around my knuckles was white and split from the cold, the dirt from the tractor frame ground deep into the lines of my palms. I had spent thirty years under the chassis of semi-trucks, breathing diesel exhaust and lifting iron heads, just to have a piece of earth where nobody could tell me when to work or when to stand.
The driveway was empty. There was no sound but the wind in the dry sunflower stalks along the ditch.
If I could not plant by the fifteenth of April, the moisture in the soil would be gone. The crop would not germinate, and the two thousand dollars I paid at the county steps would be nothing but a tax bill on a piece of weeds.
I reached into my pocket and felt the cold iron of the tractor key.
