The Paper Vernon Forgot He Signed

Six weeks later

I will not stretch this out, because the ending is cleaner than the beginning.

Section Seven held. Of course it held. Harlan had written it airtight in 2013 and had a notarized copy in his own file, and Dale Kessler, down in Texas, when he got his copy of my letter and understood what his brother had done, called Vernon and told him to pay me every dollar the agreement said and count himself lucky I was not asking for the one-third partnership option instead. The store cut me a check for my deferred compensation and my restored capital with interest inside of a month. I was released, in full and in writing, from the non-compete and the non-solicitation. In writing. The very chain Vernon thought held me, cut clean by the paper Vernon himself had signed.

By then I had already leased the old Fuchs welding shop on the county road east of town, a cinder-block building with two big overhead doors and a yard, and hung out a plain sign that said Mercer Farm Service. I did not sell new tractors. I did not need to. I did parts and I did service and I did the thing I had always done, which was answer the phone at five in the morning during planting and harvest and get a farmer’s machine running before he lost the daylight. I hired one of the techs who had watched me walk out, and by spring I hired the other, because Trent had let them both go looking for that fresh energy.

The Vogel brothers moved all nine thousand acres of their service work to me the first week. Marvin Kubik brought me the 1994 combine and, that fall, finally bought a newer used one that I found for him two counties over. Reinhardt came, and Dell Prochaska came, and Emmett Ford came with a story about hydraulic hoses that we both laughed about. I was not stealing them. That is the part Vernon never understood. You cannot steal what was never held by the building. Those men had been mine to begin with. Vernon had just had his name on the roof.

Kessler Implement did not fold. I want to be fair about that too. A sixty-year name does not die in a season. But it got small and it got quiet. The factory, Phil Ostergaard’s people, put the dealership on a watch list after service complaints piled up under Trent, and I heard they nearly pulled the franchise before Vernon brought in an outside manager, a serious man from another state who did not know a soul in Pell County and had to learn every farm from scratch. Trent lasted about a year in the chair. Last I heard he had gone off to the city again to try something with energy in it.

Vernon came to see me one afternoon in the second spring, in the yard behind the welding shop. He stood there a while with his hands in his pockets, looking older than I remembered, and finally he said, “You know, Wade, I always meant for you to have a piece of that place.”

“I know you meant it,” I said. “Once. In 2013. With the bank breathing on you.”

He looked at his shoes. “I forgot about that paper,” he said.

“I didn’t,” I said.

We were quiet a bit. He was not a bad man, Vernon. He was a weak one, which in the end costs the people around you about the same. He put his hand out and I shook it, because my father raised me to shake a man’s hand, and because I could afford to now. Then he got in his truck and drove back to a store with his name on it and a stranger in the manager’s chair, and I went back into my shop where the phone was ringing.