The Farm My Daughter Called Worthless

Elvira grew up watching both of us and chose neither. She left Clarksburg for the city at eighteen and never really came back, not all the way. She sells real estate now, big houses with columns out front, and she married a man named after his own father who talks about margins and leverage the way Dorris used to talk about torque. I am not going to pretend I always understood my daughter. I loved her the whole of her life without one single day of understanding her, and there’s a particular grief in that I never had words for until this year.

Dorris got sick two winters ago. Slow at first, then not slow at all. In his last months he started taking quiet drives to see his lawyer that he didn’t explain, and requesting old paperwork I didn’t ask about, because by then I had learned that asking Dorris a direct question when he’d already made up his mind was like asking a closed door to open itself. What he did tell me, over and over, in that steady voice he used when he wanted something to stick, was this.

“Trust the farm, Doretha. Whatever happens, trust the farm.”

I thought he meant memory. I thought he meant the place where he’d go to be young again, and that he wanted me to keep driving out there after he was gone so some piece of him would still have somewhere to be quiet. I did not understand, not even a little, that he meant something closer to a life raft.

At the will reading, the lawyer got two sentences into the house on Maple before Elvira’s whole posture changed. She sat up straighter. Her husband put a hand on her knee and gave her that small satisfied look people give each other when a number has just landed the way they hoped it would. Then the lawyer turned the page and said my name.

“To Doretha Cottrell, the property known as the Cottrell farm, forty acres and all structures, outside Clarksburg.”

Elvira blinked like she’d misheard.

“That’s it? The farm?”

“There is also a sealed letter,” the lawyer said, “to be opened on the property, and not before.”