The Farm They Nearly Signed Away

The peppermints

We talked for two hours that first visit. I want to be careful here, because the whole scheme rested on one lie, and I need you to see how clean and simple the lie was.

The lie was that Earl was gone in the head.

He was not. I sat with that man for two hours and he was as sharp as the day he taught me to reverse a trailer. He knew the date. He knew the price of corn was down and told me why. He remembered that my mother had passed in March of the prior year and asked, gently, how I was holding up, which is more than my ex-husband ever managed. He told me a story about Nadine getting the church van stuck in the creek in 1988 and he told it with every name and every date in its right place and a punch line that made the aide by the door laugh out loud.

The only thing wrong with Earl Merrick’s mind was that everyone he loved had agreed to pretend it was broken.

“They keep saying I forget,” he told me. “Patrick, I mean Dale, and Sharon. Every visit, and they don’t come but the once a month, it’s the same. ‘Dad, you forgot to take your pill. Dad, you left the water running. Dad, you don’t remember, do you.’ And after a while, Diane, you start to wonder. You sit in here with nothing to check yourself against and you start to wonder if maybe they’re right and you’re the one who’s slipping.”

I reached over and, without quite planning to, I checked his shirt pocket.

There were three peppermints in it. Even here. Even now. Some part of Earl Merrick was still keeping candy in his pocket for grandchildren who did not come.

I made him a promise that afternoon that I did not fully understand yet. I said, “Earl, from now on you have something to check yourself against. I’m going to come every week, and every week I’m going to tell you what’s true. And you’re going to tell me what they’ve been telling you. And between the two of us, we are going to keep an honest ledger.”

He squeezed my hand. “Nadine would have liked you doing that,” he said. “She never trusted a thing she couldn’t write down either.”

What they called forgetting

Here is what an honest ledger turned up over the next few weeks.

Earl had not been forgetting his medication. The facility administered it. There was a chart, initialed by a nurse three times a day, and when I asked to see it (I signed in every visit as his daughter-in-law and no one ever stopped me), the chart showed a perfect record. Earl had not missed a dose in six months because Earl was not the one in charge of the doses.

Earl had not left the stove on, because there had been an incident report from the prior winter, back when he was still home, and I got Sharon talking about it long enough on the phone to learn the truth. The “stove Dad left on” had been a burner that clicked on when Dale’s own boy, visiting, bumped the knob reaching for a cookie. Earl had smelled the gas and turned it off himself within the minute. In the retelling, over months, it had become “the day Dad almost burned the house down.”

Earl had not been missing his doctor appointments. Sharon had been driving him, and Sharon had rescheduled two of them herself, and then those became “appointments Dad forgot.”

I want to tell you I was shocked. I was not shocked. I have watched a lot of families up close, my own included, and I have learned that people do not usually decide to be cruel all at once. They decide it one small convenient story at a time. A misplaced bill here. A “he seemed confused” there. Each one is nothing. You could not hang a man on any single one of them. But you stack six months of nothings on top of an old widower who has no one to check himself against, and you have built a case. Not a true case. A usable one.

And a usable case was all they needed, because of what was sitting under all of it.