The Honey Farm They Signed Away

Just a Bunch of Bees

The Custer County deputy who came out that afternoon was a young man named Ortega who had gone to school with Kayla. He was polite and uncomfortable and he stood in the yard with his hat in his hand and told my mother and my sister that this was a civil matter, that he could not arrest anybody over a locked door, but that until the ownership was sorted out in front of a judge, everybody needed to leave the property, including me.

My mother did not argue with him. That was the thing about my mother. She never argued with a man in a uniform and she never argued with anybody who could not do anything for her. She just gathered up her purse and her keys and she looked at me across the yard, over the roof of her Buick, with an expression I had seen my whole life and never once been able to read, and she said:

“You’re going to regret making this ugly, Ruth Ann. Family doesn’t drag family into court.”

Then she and Kayla drove off in their two cars, and Deputy Ortega tipped his hat to me and drove off too, and I stood alone in my grandfather’s yard in the long April light and listened to the field.

It was quiet. It should not have been quiet. In another eight weeks the clover would be up and it should have been a wall of sound. But three of the hives were tipped over and the rest had that still, waiting quality, and I understood, standing there, that nobody had opened them since February. Nobody had checked the stores or looked for the queen. My mother and my sister had taken the farm to have the look of the farm, the porch and the flannel and the little videos, and they had let the actual living heart of the place, the forty colonies my grandfather kept alive for fifty years, sit there and starve and freeze.

That is when I stopped being sad and got organized.

A week later my mother’s lawyer called me. His name was Prewitt, a distant relation of the Prewitts down the road, a probate man from Broken Bow with a soft voice. He said my mother wanted to make me a fair offer to “avoid the expense and heartache of litigation.” He said my mother was prepared to pay me eight thousand dollars to sign a quitclaim releasing any interest I might have in the property, so that the family could “move forward.”

And then, in that same soft voice, almost as an aside, he said something that turned out to be the biggest mistake anybody made in the whole affair.

He said, “Of course, Ms. Dyer, we’d also want to explore the question of whether your grandfather was fully himself when that will was drawn. He was quite elderly. There’s some concern in the family about undue influence.”

Undue influence. They were going to say Grandpa Walt was not in his right mind. They were going to say that I, the granddaughter who bottled honey with him and labeled the jars, had somehow talked a confused old man into leaving me a farm he had been telling me was mine since I was sixteen.

They should not have said that to me.

Because of what I do for a living.