The Deed I Almost Signed Away
The wedding
Megan came into Kyle’s life about two years back. He met her at a farm-and-home show over in the fairgrounds at Delphi, the way he told it. She was working a booth for some seed company, or so she said, and Kyle came home lit up like Christmas.
She was pretty. I will give her that. Pretty in a careful way, the way a woman is pretty when she has thought hard about it. She said the right things about the land, about wanting a slower life, about being tired of the city. She called me Mr. Coleman for a year before I told her to knock it off and call me Walt.
Carol took to her fast. Faster than I would have expected, because Carol was never quick to warm to Kyle’s girls. But with Megan it was different from the first Sunday dinner. They would end up in the kitchen together, heads bent, talking low, and go quiet when I came in for more iced tea. I thought it was sweet. A mother getting the daughter she never got to keep. I thought it was one of the good things.
When they announced the engagement, Carol cried. When they announced, three months later, that Megan was expecting, Carol cried harder. And it was Carol, sitting right here at this table, who first said the thing about the farm.
“Walt,” she said, “wouldn’t it mean everything to that boy to know the land is his before the baby comes. To know his child is coming home to something that’s already his.”
I had planned to leave Kyle the farm anyway. Everybody knew that. But putting it in his name now, while I was alive to see him standing on it, that was Carol’s idea, and she pushed it gentle and steady for weeks, the way water pushes a fence post. By the time of the wedding it felt like my own idea, like something I had wanted all along.
That should have told me something. When a thing you never quite decided starts to feel like a decision you made, somebody else is holding the pen.
Here is the part I keep coming back to. Two weeks before the wedding I drove into Harlow and sat down with Sam Ruthven, who has done my legal work since Carter was president. I told Sam I wanted to sign the home place over to Kyle at the reception.
Sam took his glasses off and looked at me a long time.