The Farm My Uncle Almost Stole

Ulys had grown old and poorly by then, and his only son, my cousin Denton, called me out of the blue to ask if I would come help clear the home place. Ulys was moving into town with Denton’s family, into a small house near the clinic, and the old farmhouse, our farmhouse, was going up for sale to a young couple wanting to start a dairy operation. Denton had no love for the place and less patience for sorting through eighty years of accumulated Lattimore belongings, and he knew I was handy and, he said, “owed the courtesy of first pick of what was Grandpa’s.”

I nearly said no. I had not set foot inside that house since the morning we drove away from it in the dark. But something in me wanted to see it one more time before it passed to strangers, and so I went.

The house had shrunk the way childhood places do, low ceilings, narrow stairs, my father’s peg still by the door though the hat was long gone. I worked through the attic first, mostly dust and mouse nests and a trunk of my grandmother’s quilting scraps. It was in the spring house, down the little path behind the kitchen garden, that I found it.

The spring house had a loose board along its north wall, low near the floor, that I remembered from boyhood because I used to hide penny candy behind it where my brothers couldn’t find it. I was on my knees checking the foundation for rot when my hand found that same loose board, still loose after thirty years, and behind it, wrapped in oilcloth gone stiff and yellow, a tin box no bigger than a Bible.

Inside was a Bible, actually, my father’s own, and folded inside its cover, in an envelope addressed in a hand I recognized after a moment as Everett Boehm’s, was a will. Properly drawn, properly witnessed by two names I didn’t know, dated the winter Ulys co-signed that loan, exactly as my father had told my mother. It left the farm, the equipment, and all accounts, outright, no trust, no caretaker, no conditions of any kind, to “my beloved wife, Wilamena Lattimore, to hold and dispose of as she alone sees fit.”