The Dispatch Log My Mother Forgot

What was waiting at the courthouse

To understand why I was on that road, you have to understand my grandfather, and the farm, and what my parents had turned into over the eighteen months since he first got sick.

My grandfather’s name was Walter Kessler. Everybody in Ash Grove called him Walt. He farmed four hundred and twenty acres of corn and soybeans north of town, land his own father had broken with a team of horses, and he worked it himself until he was seventy-nine years old and the doctor in Fremont finally told him his heart would not let him climb up into the combine anymore.

I was the one who moved home.

I was not the golden child. I was the divorced daughter who taught fourth grade two counties over and drove a paid-off car and never had much money to show at Christmas. My brother, Wade, was the one my parents bragged about, the one with the boat and the sales job in the city. When Grandpa Walt got sick, Wade sent flowers. I sent myself.

I moved into the little back bedroom of the farmhouse, the one with the slanted ceiling, and I got up at five to help him with the chores his heart would still allow, and I drove him to Fremont for his appointments, and I sat with him in the evenings while he told me the same three stories about the flood of 1962. I learned to run the grain cart. I learned which fields drained bad and which fence lines the neighbors argued over. I would not trade that year and a half for anything on this earth.

My parents visited twice.

Both times they came with a folder.

The first folder had papers that would have signed the farm over to a trust my father controlled, “for tax reasons,” he said, “to protect it.” My grandfather was on oxygen that afternoon and my mother kept pushing the pen into his hand, and I said, quietly, “Grandpa, you don’t have to sign anything today.” He did not. My mother looked at me across that kitchen like I had stolen from her.

The second folder came after he was gone.

Because my grandfather did not sign their papers. What he did, three months before he died, was have old Mr. Prewitt, the lawyer in Ash Grove who had done his father’s will before him, come out to the farmhouse on a Tuesday afternoon. He had two of the neighbors witness it, Harold Vandenberg and Dot Reinhold, people who had known him sixty years. And he left the farm, all four hundred and twenty acres, the house, the machinery, the grain in the bins, to me.

To me. Because I stayed.

He left my parents the cash accounts, which were not nothing, and he left Wade his truck and his tools and a note that I never got to read. It was, by any measure a decent person would use, a fair and loving will. He took care of everybody. He just gave the land to the person who had actually worked it beside him at the end.

My parents lost their minds.