The Farm They Nearly Signed Away

The blue folder

I found out how far along it was on my fifth visit, because Earl told me, and Earl told me because we kept an honest ledger and the ledger was the only place left where he was allowed to be a whole man.

“They brought a folder last Sunday,” he said. “Sharon and Dale both, which is how I knew it was serious, because they don’t come together. Blue folder. Papers in it. Dale said it was just to let them help me with the accounts, so I wouldn’t have to worry about the bills in here. Tara had a pen already out of her purse. Had the cap off it. Set it right by my hand.”

My stomach turned over. “Did you sign it, Earl?”

He gave me a look then, and for one second he was not a small man in a vinyl chair. He was the man who taught me to back a trailer.

“Diane,” he said, “I ran that farm through the eighties. I have signed my name to a lot of paper in my life, and I learned one thing about it. When a man wants your signature bad enough to put the pen in your hand himself, that is exactly when you set the pen down and read every word twice.” He smiled, and it was Nadine’s stubbornness looking out of his face. “I told them my eyes were tired and I’d look at it next visit. Sharon left the folder. It’s in my nightstand. I have been reading it every night.”

He had it memorized. He recited it to me. It was a durable power of attorney, general and immediate, not the springing kind that only kicks in when a doctor certifies incompetence, but the immediate kind that would have handed Dale and Sharon full authority over every account and, critically, over the real property, the moment the ink dried. There was a second document behind it. A listing agreement. A real estate listing agreement, already filled in, for two hundred and ten acres and a house and a barn, with a broker’s name Earl did not recognize and a suggested price that made me sick, because it was low, it was a quick-sale price, the price you set when you want the money now and do not care what the ground is worth.

They were not even going to wait for him to die. They were going to sell his wife out from under the maple tree while he watched from a window on Route 9.

“Earl,” I said, and my voice was not steady. “Do you want to sign this?”

“No,” he said.

“Do you want to go home?”

He looked out the window at the parking lot for a while. Then he said, “I want to be buried next to Nadine. And I want, before that, one more spring under the apple trees. That’s the whole of it, Diane. That’s everything on my list.”

I wrote it down in the ledger. One more spring under the apple trees. Then I closed the notebook and I made him a second promise, and this one I understood completely.

“Then that’s what we’re going to get you,” I said.