The Farm My Uncle Almost Stole

We stayed with my aunt Nora for the better part of three years. My mother worked, took in mending and then a housekeeping position in town, and wrote, when she could afford the postage, to a lawyer in Chillicothe named Everett Boehm, a plain-spoken man who did work for a handful of Old Order families in the area because he did it honest and didn’t charge them for what he couldn’t fix. She had one thing to go on, a thing my father had told her only once, the winter before he died, half joking, the way men say true things they don’t want examined too closely.

He’d told her he’d had a will drawn up the year Ulys co-signed that bank note, “in case my brother ever got any ideas about being generous,” and that he’d put it somewhere Ulys would never think to look, because Ulys, he said, thought my mother too soft to go digging for anything herself.

My mother never found where that was. Not in three years of writing to Mr. Boehm, not in three years of quiet, careful asking that never reached Ulys’s ears, because she was terrified that if he learned a will existed, he would find it and burn it before anyone else could. Mr. Boehm searched the county recorder’s files in Bucklin twice and found nothing filed. A will that was never recorded is nearly as good as no will at all, in the eyes of a courthouse, and my mother knew it. Without the paper itself, there was nothing to bring to a judge. Ulys kept the farm. He farmed our land for the better part of twenty years, took the cattle Garver had been minding, sold off forty acres of timber ground along the creek to a man from Macon, and told anyone who asked that his brother’s widow had simply walked away from her inheritance rather than face the debt, and wasn’t it a shame, and wasn’t he doing his Christian duty by not letting good land go to ruin.