The For Sale Sign In My Yard

A lawyer meant a process. A process meant months, maybe a year or more, meant mediation or worse, meant a judge somewhere in Rush County eventually deciding what our parents’ farm was going to become, with Pam and me sitting at opposite ends of a table being represented instead of being sisters. I had already watched that happen to the Fentons two farms over, when their brothers fought over a grain bin for three years and did not speak a civil word to each other at either of their own mother’s funeral or father’s funeral, two separate funerals, two separate rows of family not looking at each other. I was not willing to pay that price to win a piece of ground, even ground I loved as much as I loved that farm. I had already lost a husband and both parents in four years. I was not going to lose my only sister on top of it, not over a signature, not even over a signature I was legally entitled to withhold.

Withholding my signature, anyway, would not have stopped anything that mattered. Pam was right about that part. She could keep showing the property to buyers all she wanted, because a showing is not a sale, it is just an invitation, and nothing about my refusing to sign a closing document someday was going to put that sign back out of my yard today. The sign was not really about the deed. The sign was about which one of us got to decide, out loud, in front of strangers, what our parents’ sixty eight years of work was worth and who it belonged to now. That decision was the thing being taken from me, not the ground itself, not yet.

So instead of a lawyer, I called Dale Oster.

Dale and Ruthie have farmed the place next to ours since before I was born, and Dale is sixty six now, retired from the co-op but still running his own eighty acres and still the man everybody on our road calls first when a truck won’t start or a calf won’t nurse. He answered on the first ring, the way he always does, like the phone is just another tool within arm’s reach.

“Dale,” I said. “Pam’s got the home place listed. There’s a showing coming, I don’t know when yet, but I need you to know, and I need you to tell Ruthie.”

“She sold it out from under you?” Dale said, and his voice went flat the way it does when a piece of machinery has failed him in a way he considers personal.

“She listed it. She can’t sell it without my signature too, eventually. But she can show it, and she’s going to.”

“What do you need.”