The Feed Truck I Drove Home

“To my son Wade,” the lawyer read, “the 1994 International feed truck, with the mixer box, and its title.”

He stopped there, because that was where the sentence stopped.

I waited for the next one. There was not a next one.

It was a Tuesday, the last week of February, in an office over the hardware store in St. Paul, Nebraska. The radiator ticked. Somebody downstairs was cutting a key. My brother Phil sat across the table from me in a sport coat, with his reading glasses folded in his hand, and he did not look up.

The sentence before mine had been his.

“To my son Phil, the home place, being the home quarter, the east eighty, and the creek pasture, with the buildings, the irrigation equipment, and the machinery.”

Four hundred acres. The pivot. The house we were both raised in. The shop where I had spent twenty-two winters with my hands inside one piece of iron or another.

Phil is fifty-six and sells insurance in Omaha. He had not driven a tractor in thirty years. I am fifty-one, and I had not gone more than nine days in a row without driving one since I was a boy.

The lawyer was a decent man named Don Jensen who had known my father since they were both in 4-H. He set the paper down and squared it with two fingers.

“Wade,” he said, “he came in here in November and he was in his right mind. I want you to hear that from me. He knew what he was signing.”

“I don’t doubt it,” I said.

“He didn’t say why. I asked him.”

“What did he say?”

Don rubbed his jaw. “He said, ‘Write it the way I told you, Don.'”

That was my father, word for word. I could hear him say it.

My wife Theresa was sitting beside me. She had her hand on my knee under the table, and she had been pressing down the whole time, the way you hold a gate shut in the wind.

I stood up and shook Don’s hand. I thanked him, because my mother raised us to thank people. Then I went down the stairs.

That is the only time a lawyer comes into this story.

Outside it was twenty degrees with a north wind, and the sky was the color of a galvanized tank. Theresa caught up with me at the pickup. She keeps the books for the vet clinic in town and she does not say a thing until she has it added up.

“Call a lawyer of your own, Wade,” she said. “Not Don. Somebody from Grand Island.”

“No.”

“Twenty-two years. You have twenty-two years in that ground.”

“I know how many years.”

“Then why not?”

I had to think about how to say it, because I had not said it to myself yet.

“Because that’s his signature,” I said. “He’s three weeks in the ground and he can’t tell me what he meant. I’m not going to stand in a courtroom and argue with a man who can’t answer back. Not him.”

She looked at me a long time. Then she pulled my collar up against the wind, which is what she does when she has lost an argument and loves me anyway.

Phil came out the street door behind us. He stood on the sidewalk with his glasses still in his hand.

“Wade.”

I waited.

“I never asked him for this. I want you to know that. I didn’t know a thing about it till Don called me.”