The Farm My Uncle Almost Stole
Bishop Yoder came out the following Tuesday and sat at our table with my mother and read Ulys’s paper twice through. It gave Ulys full management of the farm, the livestock, and the household accounts for a period of “not less than five years, renewable at the caretaker’s discretion,” with my mother and us children permitted to remain in the house as residents, not owners. Buried in the third paragraph was a line granting Ulys authority to sell any portion of the acreage “as needed to satisfy outstanding obligations.”
The bishop read that line out loud twice.
“Wilamena,” he said, “I would not sign this.”
“I don’t intend to,” my mother said. “But I need to know what happens if I don’t. He holds that note.”
None of us knew, that week, that my father had drawn up a will. We assumed, the way most families around us assumed, that the farm simply passed to the widow, and that the community and the bishop would see to it that things were done fair. My mother believed that too, right up until Ulys came back a second time, ten days later, with a man from the bank in a car, and told her plainly, in front of that man, that the note would be called due in full unless she signed the caretaker agreement or found another way to satisfy it inside thirty days. Full payment. Nine hundred and some dollars, which might as well have been nine hundred thousand to a widow with four children and a corn crop not yet in.
I watched my mother’s face while the bank man talked. I had never seen her look at anything the way she looked at Ulys that day, past him, through him, like she was already three moves ahead and none of them were good.
She didn’t sign. She also didn’t fight, not out loud, not where Ulys could see it and adjust his plan around her resistance. What she did instead was quiet, and it was the thing that saved us, though it took twenty years to prove it.