The Farm My Uncle Almost Stole

My father had hidden his own will from his own brother, in the one place on the property Ulys would never crawl into on his hands and knees, because he knew, even eight years before his death, exactly what kind of man his brother was capable of becoming if the chance ever came.

I sat on the spring house floor for a long time with that tin box in my lap.

I drove straight to Mr. Boehm’s old office in Chillicothe, retired now but still keeping half his files, and then to a younger lawyer he pointed me to who knew probate law better than either of us. It took the better part of a year, because these things do, but a will found decades late, properly executed and witnessed, still carries weight in Missouri, especially set against a caretaker agreement that had never been signed and a note that court records showed Ulys had, in fact, quietly written off his own taxes as a bad debt eleven years after we left, meaning he had already treated the “debt” my mother supposedly owed him as settled, while continuing to farm and profit from land he had no clear legal claim to at all.

Denton, to his credit, did not fight us. When I showed him the will, sitting at his own kitchen table with his father napping in the next room, he went quiet a long moment and then said, “Dad always changed the subject when I asked why Aunt Wilamena never came around anymore.” He helped us the rest of the way, and I have come to think he was glad of the excuse to set something right that had sat crooked in his own house his whole life.