The Card My Father Called My Inheritance

The watch

I did not care about the truck or the acres in town. I let the lawyers sort those. There was only one item I wanted back with my own hands, and I put it in writing, and Carol made it a line in the settlement so there could be no confusion, no “there’s nothing on paper” the way there had been five years before.

Harlan’s railroad pocket watch.

Wayne had kept it, in a drawer in the farmhouse the whole time, the way my creased card had sat in a drawer in Junction City. When I came for the ground, I came for the watch, and this time there was a line on a page with a case number over it, and Wayne could not say the watch “stays in the family,” because a judge had already decided who the family was.

He handed it to me on the porch, in a plain envelope, without meeting my eyes. I did not open it in front of him. I drove down the gravel to the section corner, where the road runs straight to the horizon and the grain elevator stands up white against the sky, and I opened the envelope there.

The watch was heavier than I remembered. The case was worn smooth, the second hand sweeping steady and sure, still keeping time after everything. Someone, Harlan probably, years ago, had wound it and set it and it had stopped somewhere in a dark drawer, and I sat at the corner of my own ground and wound it back to running and set it to the right hour by the clock on the borrowed dash.

Who kept time for you when nobody else would.

I said it out loud, alone in the car, and that was when I finally cried, five years late, at a section corner in the wind, holding the one thing that was always mine.

Home

I live on the farm now. I did not fix it up like something out of a magazine, and that would not be Harlan’s way. The barn still leans a little more every year. I reset the corner post on the east line myself the first spring, deep and level, and hung the fence off it, and it holds.

I did not do it alone. When word got around what Wayne had done, doors opened. Somebody loaned me a disk. Somebody else showed me where Harlan kept the good wrenches. The old man in the feed store cap from the bank that morning, it turns out, had farmed alongside Harlan for thirty years, and he checks on me every few weeks whether I need it or not.

Wayne and I do not speak. I am at peace with that. I do not need him to admit what he did, because a county courthouse already has it on record, dated and witnessed, and that is more admission than Wayne Reyland was ever going to give with his own mouth. Bradley moved to Wichita. I hear he is doing fine, which is honestly the truth of it, and I find I do not have a knife to send him back.

I keep the watch in my grandfather’s workshop, on a nail by the window where the light comes in over the fields. When I go out there in the morning with my coffee, the second hand is always moving, because I wind it, because that is the job now, keeping time for whoever comes after me the way he kept it for me.

Sometimes I think about that morning at Farmers and Merchants Bank, the wind with teeth, the creased card on the counter, the teller’s voice going low, please stay right here. I came into that building to cancel the last thing my father ever handed me, and I almost ran. For one ugly second I almost grabbed the card and let the wind take the whole thing.

I am glad I set my feet. A quiet thief bets his whole life on you never opening the door he handed you and called a broom closet. Harlan bet the other way. He bet that his girl would knock, and stay, and take her time, and come home.

He kept better time than Wayne ever did. He always had.