The Farm My Uncle Almost Stole

That was true, in the narrow way that the worst lies are true. Ulys had co-signed a loan for my father eight years before, back when a hailstorm took the whole corn crop two summers running and the bank wanted collateral beyond what we had. It was family helping family, the way it’s supposed to work in a place like Bucklin, where nobody had much and everybody had somebody. But holding a note is not the same as holding a farm, and every soul in our fellowship knew it, including Ulys.

My mother set my sister back down in the cradle and looked at that paper a long moment. Then she folded her hands the way she did before she prayed, though she wasn’t praying, she was buying herself time to think, and she said, “I’ll want to read it proper before I sign anything, and I’ll want Bishop Yoder to read it with me.”

Ulys’s face did something small and quick that I understood only years later. It was the look of a man whose plan had just met its first obstacle.

He left the paper on the table anyway.

I need to tell you what our farm looked like, because it matters to what came after. We were plain folks, Old Order, horse and buggy, no wire running to the house, no engine in the barn. My father grew corn and hogs and kept eleven Jersey cows, and my mother’s garden fed half the lane in a good year. We went to town on market days in a spring wagon and we were known there, the Lattimores, honest people, quiet people. My father had a reputation for paying what he owed before it came due. He was not a rich man. But he was not a careless one either, and that turned out to matter more than anyone guessed.