The Farm They Thought I Rented

Up there is the office. My grandfather’s office, and before him his father kept the farm’s papers in that same room. There is a big oak desk, and a bank of filing cabinets, and a green shaded lamp, and on the wall a framed plat map of Haddon County from 1938 with the Hartwell ground already inked in. Down through the floor, faint, you can hear the Merritt parts counter, the little bell on their door, a salesman’s laugh. They had been standing on my grandfather’s floor for twenty six years and had never once come up the stairs.

I sat down at Walt’s desk and I called Merl Pruitt, the lawyer, who is old now himself but sharp as the day he wrote the estate, and I told him what had happened, and there was a long silence on the line and then Merl said, in a dry voice, “Well, Nora. Their lease is up the first of November.” It was the middle of October. “You want to renew it?”

“I want to think about it,” I said. “For now I just want everything ready. The deed, the lease history, all of it, in a folder, on my grandfather’s desk, so that if I need to lay it in front of somebody it’s there and it’s clean.”

“It’s already clean,” Merl said. “Walt never did a dirty piece of paper in his life. I’ll have the folder to you by Thursday.”

So that is what I spent three days doing, while Diane Merritt, three miles south, was renting a church van.

The van

I found out about the van from my friend Carol, who cleans at the church and hears everything, and who called me Saturday night half laughing and half sick about it.

Diane had told half the family that I had run off in a huff back to “some rental,” and she had turned my leaving into a party. She had booked the fellowship van, the fifteen seater the church uses for youth trips, and she had filled it, Carol said, with better than twenty of them: Roy, and Dale, and Dale’s married sister down from the city, and cousins, and Diane’s own sisters, and a couple of the Rotary wives she wanted as witnesses. They were going to caravan out and “check on Nora,” which everyone understood to mean drive out to whatever sad little place she imagined I lived in and let the whole clan get a good look at where I really belonged. Diane had it in her head, Carol said, that once Dale saw me small, saw me in my true size against the Merritt name, he would come to his senses and the marriage would quietly go away and the family could tell it however they liked.

She had my address. Not the town address she assumed I had. My actual address, the one on my driver’s license, the one on the co-op’s checks, the one Dale had put on the marriage license himself five weeks before and never thought about: 4400 North Ash Creek Road. The Hartwell place. She had it and it never occurred to her to wonder what kind of shoebox has a number like 4400 and a road named after a creek.

They came on Sunday afternoon, after church, still in their church clothes.

Carol texted me when the van pulled out of the lot: They’re coming. God be with you, honey.

I put my phone in my pocket. I told Earl. Then I did the thing my grandfather taught me to do, which is nothing. I did not stage a single thing. I did not change my clothes. I was in jeans and a barn coat with a torn pocket. The farm was doing what it does on a Sunday in October: the cattle were in the near pasture, the wheat was green to the horizon, Earl’s son was greasing the drill in the machine shed, a pot of coffee was on because there is always a pot of coffee on, and the big white house stood at the end of the lane the way it has stood for a hundred years, needing nothing, apologizing to no one.

I went out and I stood on the porch, and I waited for my mother in law to arrive and be right about everything.