The Card My Father Called My Inheritance

What justice looked like

By the end of that summer, the ground was mine on paper and in fact. I drove out the gravel road north of town with the deed and the acceptance in a folder on the seat, turned in at the mailbox that still had REYLAND stenciled on the side in Harlan’s hand, and parked in the yard where he taught me to change a tire.

Wayne was on the porch. He stood up when I got out of the car, and for the first time in my life I watched Wayne Reyland not know what to do with his hands.

“Dana,” he started.

“You have thirty days,” I said. “Carol already sent the letter. You’ll get it certified, so I know you can’t say you never saw it. That’s important to me now, that people can’t say they never saw the letter.”

His mouth worked. Bradley came to the screen door and stopped.

“Your grandpa wanted the family to have this place,” Wayne said.

“He did,” I said. “That’s why he left it to me. In writing. Dated. Witnessed. I’m the family he wanted to have it. You just decided I didn’t count, and then you spent five years making sure the mailman agreed with you.”

I did not yell. I want you to understand that, because for a long time I thought justice would feel like yelling, like finally getting to be as loud as the hurt. It did not feel like that at all. It felt like setting a post deep and level and stepping back to see it stand.

The accounting came due too. Five years of crop income off trust ground was not a small number, and a court does not care whether you spent it or how you feel about giving it back. Wayne and Bradley owed the trust, which is to say they owed me, and they did not have it in cash, because they had lived on it. So it came out of what they did have. Bradley lost the truck he had photographed for me, the one with the caption looks good doesnt it. Wayne signed over a piece of ground of his own in town to make up the shortfall. Carol handled the paperwork, and the county recorded it, and it was done.

And there was one more thing.