The Deed I Almost Signed Away

Once the farm was in Kyle and Megan’s names, Carol was going to file for divorce from me. She believed, wrong as it turned out but she believed it, that she could walk with half of what we had built. Then Megan would stay married to Kyle just long enough to be decent about it, a year, maybe less, and then Megan would leave him too, and under the law a wife who is on the deed walks with her share. Two women, two divorces, and at the end of it the Coleman land, my grandfather’s eighty and my father’s section and every quarter I bought with my own corn, would belong to Carol and the daughter she hid from me for three decades. They would sell off Kyle’s half or squeeze him off it, and the two of them would have the thing they came for.

“He’ll sign Thursday,” Megan said on the tape, meaning the real papers at Sam’s office, meaning my Kyle. “He’d sign anything. He’s just like his daddy.”

And Carol said, “His daddy already did sign. He just doesn’t know it’s the last thing he’ll ever give me.”

They laughed again. Then Megan pinned the foam belly back on under her dress, and they fixed their faces in the mirror, and they walked back out to the reception to dance at the wedding they had built out of nothing but my trust.

I sat in that office a long time after the tape ran out.

Gary knocked once, soft, and put his head in, and saw my face, and did not say anything at all. He just came in and sat down across from me and let me be quiet in front of another man, which is a kindness I will not forget as long as I live.

“What are you going to do,” he finally said.

And that is when the farmer in me, the man who has watched hail take a crop and gotten up the next morning to till it under and plant again, that man took the wheel.

“I’m going to go see Sam Ruthven,” I said. “Can you make me a copy of that tape.”

Sam Ruthven’s kitchen table

I did not go home. I could not have kept my face flat across a supper table from Carol that night, not yet. I called Sam at his house and he told me to come on over, and I sat at Sam Ruthven’s kitchen table while his wife poured coffee and pretended she had ironing to do in the other room.

I told him all of it. I set Gary’s copy of the tape on the table between us.

Sam is seventy-eight years old and he has seen every ugly thing one family can do to another over money and land. He listened to the whole thing without moving, and when I was done he took his glasses off and pinched the bridge of his nose, and he said one word.

“Well.”

Then he said the thing that let me breathe for the first time since that phone rang.

“Walt, listen to me now and listen good. You did not sign anything. That framed thing you handed the boy is a picture. It is a nice picture and it means nothing. The real deed is in my drawer downtown and your name is not on it. Nothing has left your hands. That farm is yours this minute exactly the way it was yours a year ago.”

I asked him about the divorce. About Carol taking half.

Sam almost smiled, and it was not a nice smile, it was the smile of an old lawyer who has just watched a trap close on the people who set it.