Three Old Farmers and a Locked Door
The lane to Dad’s place is a quarter mile of gravel, with a mailbox shaped like a barn that my husband Elton made the first year we were married. I stopped at it, sat there with the engine running, and made a list. Forty-four years of keeping the books for Lindgren Feed and Seed taught me that most disasters get smaller when you put them in a column.
Here was the column.
One. I was sixty-one years old and my name was not on the deed. Dad had always said he would “get to it,” the way he said about the roof. Elton had been gone six years, and I had sold our little place in town to move in with Dad when his heart got bad. I had no other house.
Two. Dad’s will had named me executor for years, and last spring Roger had himself named in my place. He drove down on a Sunday while I was at church, with a paper from a lawyer in Grand Island, and Dad signed it at the kitchen table with a shaky hand. I found out that Tuesday, when the paper turned up in the filing cabinet. I had never said a word to Dad about it, because he had looked so pleased that Roger came.
Three. Roger had gone to the county courthouse on Wednesday, the day before the funeral, and gotten the papers that make an executor an executor. The woman at the counter told me later he had asked how fast it could be done.
I had already called the lawyer. The Tuesday before the funeral, sitting in the dark hall with my coffee, I had phoned Mr. Engel in McCook, because a small voice in me had noticed Roger going through the filing cabinet. He called back that afternoon and was kind about it. A retainer would be $4,000 to start, and a hearing might be set in four to six weeks, maybe eight if the judge was on the road. He said, “In the meantime, an executor can generally secure the property of the estate, Judy. That includes changing locks.”
Four to six weeks. Roger had given me until the thirty-first. A sale company could have Dad’s tractors, his grain truck, his 1978 swather, and sixty years of tools on a trailer in less than that, and once a man’s hand-forged anvil is on a stranger’s trailer, no judge brings it back.
I want to be fair to the lawyer. He was decent. But there was something else, and it was the main reason, if I am honest. My father never sued anybody in his life. When his cousin cheated him out of a pasture in 1991, Dad walked up the courthouse steps once, looked at the door, and walked back down. He said a farm gets worked out between people at a kitchen table or it does not get worked out.
I could hear him say it, sitting there at the mailbox.
Four. I called the sheriff’s office anyway, because Vicki at the desk went to church with me and I thought, well, you ask. Deputy Clint Hargrove came on the line. I had known Clint since he was in diapers. He listened to the whole thing and was quiet a long while, and then he said, “Judy, I’m sorry. Your brother called me yesterday evening to ask about the locks, and I told him what I’d tell anybody. He had the papers from the clerk. As the executor he’s within what he’s allowed to do. It’s what we call a civil matter. If I came out there, I’d be arresting nobody and fixing nothing.”