Free A Winning Ticket by J. Michael Stewart Page A

line.
    They used to be rambunctious, Benjamin recalled. Harrison especially loved to push parental boundaries. Smiling to himself, Benjamin remembered the time when they were eight years old and Harrison booby-trapped the mailbox with an M-80 firecracker. They had watched, with great anticipation, the result from the living room window. Damn near blew the mailman’s hand off.
    Benjamin had tried harder to gain his mother’s approval—and avoid her switch.
    He continued to gaze out the window.
    The clouds had lowered over the past several hours, and daylight was quickly fading. The wind had also picked up and was now blowing and lifting the snow into swirls and eddies that moved along the landscape like a flowing river. Benjamin saw no sign of his brother yet, and he began to worry. Perhaps he should have gone with him. The two of them could have completed the chores in half the time and both would have been safely inside the house by now. The winter storm was bearing down on the Zimmerman farm, and within the next half-hour, it would be dangerous, even life-threatening, to be outside.
    January snowstorms like this were not uncommon in northern Nebraska—still, they weren’t to be taken lightly. It was not unusual to hear of someone who got stranded outside during a blizzard and died from exposure to the bitter temperatures.
    Just last year, one of the Zimmerman’s neighbors, Mrs. Hannaby, an elderly widow who lived alone, had gone out to check her mail during a winter storm. While returning to the house, she had tripped and fallen on the front steps and broken her hip. Searchers found her five days later, buried under a three-foot snow drift.
    Benjamin turned away from the rapidly frosting window pane and back to the pot on the stove. He removed the lid and stirred the stew with a large wooden spoon. The venison was from a whitetail deer Harrison had shot a few weeks ago.
    He looked down into the pot with distaste. Not that Benjamin didn’t enjoy venison—in fact, he loved it. But it was what it represented—right now, in this moment—that made him want to fling the pot of stew across the kitchen floor. The stew was just the latest in a series of efforts he had undertaken in order to stretch every cent they had. The more food they could grow or kill themselves cut down on the bill at the local supermarket, where food seemed to grow more expensive by the week.
    He tasted the stew, added more salt, and glanced out the window again.
    Over the past several months, he had tried to ignore the reality of their situation. But the truth was, the farm was in serious financial trouble. This was the third year in a row that they were barely squeaking by. For the first two years, crop and beef prices had been at an all-time low, which meant they had just covered their operating expenses. This past summer, a drought had wiped out a good portion of the area crops, which was both good news and bad. The drought had finally driven up corn and beef prices, and the farmers who had sufficient irrigation, or had been fortunate enough to catch a few extra summer thunderstorms, were rewarded with a nice profit.
    But for the unfortunate ones, such as the Zimmerman brothers, the drought had decimated what little hope they had of turning a profit. By August, the fields had turned brown and the cattle were starving. They were forced to sell most of them at a loss, because the drought had driven up feed prices as well, making the option of purchasing food on the open market unacceptable. They had been able to keep only twenty head through the winter. To make matters worse, the crop insurance they carried on the farm had scarcely covered their expenses and left little to live on.
    They were almost two years behind on the property taxes, and the county was threatening to take the only place they had ever lived. The thought of losing the farm almost drove Benjamin to madness daily. It had become all he thought about. Worry and stress had become his