The Farm They Nearly Signed Away
Sharon did not call. Sharon did something better. About a week later she went to Prairie Rose, by herself, no folder, no pen, and she sat with her father for three hours, and near the end of it she cried, and Earl told me afterward that he had let her, and that she had said she was sorry, and that he believed about half of it, which he said was a start. Sharon withdrew from the whole thing. She told Marge in writing that she wanted no part of any action against her father. I have wondered since whether she was sorry or just the first rat off a sinking scheme, and I have decided it does not matter, because the effect was the same: they could not move without her, and she would not move.
Tara, Dale’s wife, I never heard from at all. But the listing agreement was withdrawn eight days after Marge’s letter. The broker, it turned out, had not even known the seller was in a care facility or that the family was split, and he pulled the listing so fast he practically left skid marks. Nobody wants to be the broker who sold a competent old widower’s farm out from under him. That is the kind of story that follows a man around a small county for the rest of his life.
Home
Earl got his spring under the apple trees.
It took most of the winter to arrange, and it did not happen the way a movie would do it, all at once with music. It happened the way real things happen, in phone calls and forms and a wheelchair ramp Doc Pruitt’s nephew built for cost. But by the time the eleven apple trees came into bud, Earl Merrick was home.
Not alone. That was never going to be safe or wise, and Earl was the first to say so. Marge helped him set up a proper arrangement, the honest version of the one they had tried to force: a real power of attorney, springing, the kind that only takes effect if two doctors ever agree it needs to, and Earl chose who would hold it, and he did not choose Dale. He chose Sharon, in the end, which surprised me, and when I asked him why he said, “Because she’s the one who came back and cried. A person who can be ashamed can be trusted a little. A person who can’t, can’t.” He hired a woman from the church, Loretta, a retired nurse, to live in the little bedroom that used to be Dale’s and look after the house and drive him to town. He put the farm into a trust so it could not be sold out from under him or, later, split and paved. There will be a working tenant on that bottom ground long after Earl and I are both gone, which is exactly what he wanted, and exactly what the will he wrote when Nadine was alive had always said.
The farm was never mine and never will be. I want to say that plainly, because I know how these stories can sound, like the woman who swoops in gets the prize at the end. I got no acres. I did not want any. Earl offered, once, awkwardly, to “see me right” in his papers, and I told him the only thing I wanted was already happening. It was Tuesdays.