The Farm They Nearly Signed Away

Building the case

Here is what I did, and I am setting it down plainly, because if you are reading this and there is an Earl in your own family, I want you to know it can be done and roughly how.

First, I did nothing that was not true. I want that on the record above everything. I did not lie about Earl to help Earl. That was their method, and I was not going to win his dignity back by borrowing their tools. Everything I did was aimed at one thing: getting the truth checked by someone with the authority to make it stick.

I asked the front desk who Earl’s physician of record was, and it turned out to be a rotating clinic doctor who had never spent twenty minutes with him. So I called Earl’s real doctor, old Doc Pruitt in town who had treated the Merricks for thirty years, and I told him what I was seeing, and Doc Pruitt got very quiet and then very angry, in the slow way of country doctors, and he said, “Nobody ever asked me. They put that man in Prairie Rose and nobody ever once asked the doctor who’s known him since Carter.” He agreed to do a full cognitive evaluation himself, on the record, and to write down exactly what he found.

Second, I went to see a lawyer. Not a fancy one. Marge Kettleman keeps an office above the old hardware store on the square, does wills and land and the occasional divorce, and she had done Nadine’s estate work years back so she knew the family and the farm. I laid the whole ledger in front of her, my actual notebook, seven weeks of dated entries. Marge read it front to back without saying a word. Then she took off her glasses.

“Diane,” she said, “you have been keeping evidence for two months and you didn’t even know it. This isn’t a diary. This is a timeline.” She tapped the page where I had written down, dated, what the medication chart showed. “They are going to argue he’s incompetent. You just handed me two months of him being the most competent man in the county. And you’ve got the physician who’s known him longest willing to say so under his own signature. Honey, they don’t have a case. They have a wish.”

Third, and this is the part I am least proud of and most glad I did, I made a copy of everything and I mailed one copy to myself and left it sealed, and I gave one copy to Marge, and I told exactly two people in town what was happening: the pastor at the Merrick family church, who had married Dale and me and buried Nadine, and the young woman at the Prairie Rose front desk, whose name was Kayla, and who had loved Earl before I ever showed up. I did not do this to gossip. I did it because a scheme like theirs only works in the dark, in the quiet, one small story at a time, told to a man with no one to check himself against. The cure for it is witnesses. The cure for it is light.

Doc Pruitt did the evaluation on a Tuesday. Earl scored, in Doc Pruitt’s own words on the form, “within normal limits for his age, oriented to person, place, time, and situation, with intact memory and sound judgment; I find no basis whatsoever for a determination of incapacity.” He underlined “whatsoever.” I have the form. I framed a copy of it, later, though I am getting ahead of myself.