The Honey Farm They Signed Away

What I Do for a Living

I am a records clerk. For nineteen years I have worked in the office of the Register of Deeds for our county, three doors down the courthouse hall from where my mother works in the county clerk’s office. I record deeds and mortgages and liens and plats. I index them. I file them. I know, better than almost anyone alive, that a piece of paper is only worth what the record behind it can prove, and I know that the difference between owning a thing and losing it is very often nothing more than who kept better track.

And I am, the way my grandfather made me, a person who does not throw things away.

That night I went home to the duplex on Sumner Street and I pulled three cardboard file boxes out of the back of my bedroom closet, each one labeled by year in my own printing. I had been keeping them since I was a girl. Inside were more than ten years of my grandfather’s letters.

Grandpa Walt did not use a telephone if he could help it and he never in his life touched a computer, but he wrote letters, real letters, in that careful back-slant, two and three a month, all the years I lived away for a while over in Kearney. He wrote about the weather and the hives and the price of corn, and he wrote, more times than I could count, about the farm and about me.

I sat on my kitchen floor until two in the morning and I read all of them.

He had written it down. Over and over, for years, he had written down exactly what he wanted and exactly why. “The farm goes to you, Ruthie, and I’ve told the lawyer so, because you’re the only one who ever loved it for what it is instead of what it’s worth.” That was from a letter dated four years before he died. “Your mother has her eye on this ground and I know it, and I want it in writing so there’s no argument. You keep these letters. You’re my bookkeeper.” That was from three years before he died.

He knew. He had known for years. He had been building the record for me the whole time, one letter at a time, and I had been filing it away in boxes in my closet without understanding that he was handing me the evidence.

There was more. There were the honey ledgers, dozens of them, going back to the 1970s, every one in his hand, every jar and every dollar accounted for. There was a letter from his doctor in Broken Bow, dated the same month as the will, that he had mailed to me “for the file,” in which the doctor stated plainly that Walter Dyer was of sound mind and clear memory. He had gone and gotten that letter himself. He had gotten a competency letter and mailed it to his granddaughter three years before anybody accused him of being incompetent, because he understood exactly how my mother’s mind worked.

I called a lawyer of my own the next morning. Her name was Grace Ohlmann, a straight-talking woman about my age with an office over the pharmacy in Broken Bow, and I brought her the three boxes and set them on her conference table and told her the whole thing, start to finish. She read for about twenty minutes without saying a word. Then she took off her glasses and looked at me.

“Ms. Dyer,” she said, “in eighteen years I have never had a client walk in with a record like this. Your grandfather did your whole case for you.”

“He was a bookkeeper,” I said. “So am I.”