The Farm They Nearly Signed Away
Dale and Tara and Sharon
Let me tell you what was under it.
The Merrick farm was two hundred and ten acres of good bottom ground on the county road, plus the house, plus the barn Earl’s own father raised in 1951, plus a row of eleven apple trees that Earl and Nadine planted the spring their first child was born. Earl owned all of it free and clear. No mortgage. He had paid the last note off the year Reagan left office and he mentioned it, not to brag, but the way you mention a mountain you climbed once, with a little wonder that you did it.
Two hundred and ten acres of clear bottom ground, at what farmland was going for that year, was worth more money than anyone in that family had ever seen in one place.
Dale’s marina, the one he opened after we divorced, had gone under. I knew that much from the diner grapevine. Dale had remarried, a woman named Tara who I had met exactly once and who had looked at my thrift-store coat like it might leave a mark. Sharon’s husband had his own troubles, a business thing, I never learned the details and did not need to.
Three grown children with money problems, and a father sitting on two hundred and ten acres he refused to sell because his wife was buried under the maple in the side yard and he was not going to plow her up for anybody.
You do not need me to draw you the rest of the picture. But I will draw it anyway, because the ledger deserves it.
If Earl was competent, the farm was Earl’s, and Earl would die on it and leave it however his will said, and the will (I would learn) split it three ways but with a clause that it could not be sold as long as either Earl or the land could support a working tenant, because Earl did not want it turned into a subdivision.
But if Earl was not competent, then someone would need to manage his affairs. Someone would need power of attorney. Someone would need, for his own good, to liquidate that burdensome asset and put the poor confused old man somewhere safe. Somewhere like Prairie Rose. And two hundred and ten acres would become cash, and cash could be divided three ways today instead of someday, and the clause in the will about not selling would simply never come up, because a competent man’s wishes do not bind an incompetent man’s guardians.
The whole scheme, all six months of small manufactured forgetting, existed to move Earl from the first picture to the second one. To make him not competent. On paper. Whether or not it was true.