The Card My Father Called My Inheritance

What a good man leaves behind

To understand why one word from a small town bank teller stopped me cold, you have to understand what my grandfather was to me, and what my father made himself into after Grandpa died.

I was adopted into the Reyland family when I was seven. I remember the paperwork more than the people, because the people did not feel like mine yet and the paperwork felt enormous, thick folders and rubber stamps and a woman in a county office who kept calling me “the child.” Wayne Reyland and his first wife took me in, and his wife left within two years, and after that it was Wayne, his own son Bradley from that first marriage, and me, in a rented house at the edge of Cloverdale with a chain link fence and a dog that was never really allowed inside.

Wayne was not cruel in ways that leave marks. He was cruel in the way of a man keeping a ledger. Everything I was given, I was reminded of. Every shirt, every school trip, every plate of food had a number attached in his mind, and he made sure I heard the number. Bradley was his blood. I was his charity. A child learns to read the space around words long before she can read the words.

Grandpa Harlan was different, and Grandpa Harlan was mine.

He was Wayne’s father, no relation to me at all by blood, and he never once treated it that way. Harlan Reyland farmed a quarter section of wheat and milo eight miles north of town, out where the gravel roads run straight to the horizon and the grain elevator stands up against the sky like a white church. He had a farmhouse with a wraparound porch, a barn that leaned a little more every year, and a workshop that smelled of motor oil and cut cedar. When the house in town got loud, somebody would drive me out to Harlan’s, and out there I was not the child or the charity. I was just Dana. His girl.

He taught me to change a tire in the driveway with my knuckles going white on the iron. He taught me to shake a hand and mean it, to look a person in the eye when they wanted me to look down at my shoes. He taught me that a fence is only as good as the corner post and that you set the corner post first and deep, and everything else hangs off that. I did not know then that he was telling me how to build a life. I thought he was just telling me about fences.

On my eighteenth birthday he took me out to the workshop, away from the cake and the thin singing, and he pressed his old railroad pocket watch into my hand. It was heavy and warm from his pocket, the case worn smooth, the second hand sweeping steady and sure.

“When I’m gone,” he said, “this is yours. Not because it’s worth anything to a dealer. Because I want you to remember who kept time for you when nobody else would.”

I did not have the words then. I put my arms around him and he patted my back twice, and that was the whole conversation. But I kept those words. I keep them still.

I joined the Army at nineteen, because I wanted a life that ran on rules I could see instead of a ledger I could never balance. Harlan drove me to the recruiter’s office in Salina himself, in his old truck with the heater that only worked on the passenger side, and he waited outside the whole time with his hands in his pockets. When I came out enlisted, he did not say he was proud, because that was not his way. He just nodded once, slow, and said, “You set the corner post. Good.”

He died while I was stationed at Fort Riley, close enough that I made it home for the last two days. He knew me at the end. He held my hand and told me the watch was mine and the farm would look after itself if people were honest, and I did not understand that second part until it was almost too late.