The Farm They Thought I Rented
I will come back to that building. It matters more than anything else in this story.
My grandfather raised me. My mother, his daughter, died when I was six, and my father was a decent enough man who was never going to be a father, and so I grew up on the Hartwell place with Walt and my grandmother Ruth. I learned to keep books at that kitchen table before I learned to drive. Walt did not trust banks to tell him the truth about his own money, so from the time I was ten he had me keeping the farm’s books in a green ledger, penciling in the seed and the fuel and the cattle and the rent that came in from the building in town, and checking his figures against the bank’s, and finding, more than once, that the bank was wrong.
“A person who keeps the books,” Walt told me one winter night, “is the only person in the whole deal who actually knows what is true. Everybody else is guessing or lying. You keep the books, Nora, and you keep your mouth shut about what they say, and you will never once in your life be surprised.”
He was right. I have been many things. I have not, since I was a girl, been surprised.
Walt passed four years ago, in the spring, in his own bed, eighty nine years old and clear as glass to the end. He left me the farm. He left me the building on Main. He left me the cattle, the equipment, the mineral rights, and a set of instructions in his own hand about how to handle all of it, chief among them this one, underlined twice: Do not tell people what you have. Let them show you who they are first. They always will.
I was the sole heir. There was no drama about it, no cousins circling, because there were no other cousins, and because Walt had done the paperwork right the way he did everything right. When the estate settled I was, on paper, one of the largest landowners in Haddon County and the outright owner of a full quarter of downtown Danby’s main block.
I kept doing the co-op’s books. I liked the co-op’s books. I liked the work and I liked the people and I liked driving my dented truck to a job where nobody knew to treat me like anything other than the woman who caught their math. Walt’s voice was in my ear the whole time. Let them show you who they are first.
Diane Merritt showed me exactly who she was.