A Pie for Every Thousand Dollars

A true fifty-fifty crop-share means you share the whole of it. The good crop in a good year and the hailed-out crop in a bad one, both.

That most certainly includes the check that comes when it hails out. All of it, right down the middle, same as everything else. That is the whole meaning of the word share.

But the policy had been written in Donnie’s name alone years back, because he was the operator and that was simply how the agent set the paperwork up at the start.

So the check came addressed to his mailbox with his name on the front. One sheet of paper, one name. And he chose to let that sheet of paper outweigh his own mother.

He had already deposited it. All seventy-six thousand, straight against his note, as if the whole thing had been his and his alone from the very first.

“Why would you do a thing like this to her?” I finally asked him. “She is seventy-one years old, Donnie. She trusted you with Daddy’s ground.”

He went quiet a moment. Then he said the thing I am certain he had been telling himself all summer, the thing that let him sleep.

“I’m the one out here busting myself on that ground every day,” he said. “Not her. She sits in town in an easy chair. I do the work, Peggy.”

“She gave you the ground, Donnie. She handed it to you.”

“The work ought to get paid,” he said, like he had not heard me. “That’s all I’m telling you. A man’s work ought to get paid. There is nothing wrong in that.”

He had talked himself all the way into believing it. That is the only way a basically decent man brings himself to do a plainly indecent thing.

He builds himself a reason one brick at a time, patient as a mason, until the wall is high enough that he can stand behind it and not see his own mother on the other side.

Why Not A Lawyer

Every single person I told that fall said the same three words right back to me. Get a lawyer.

Or they said, call the sheriff out on him. Or, haul him into court and let a judge sort the whole mess out in front of everybody.

I looked into every bit of it. I want you to know that I did, because I understand how this story sounds.

It sounds like a woman got cheated out of thirty-eight thousand dollars and her big answer was to go in the kitchen and bake. I know. Stay with me.

The sheriff was the first dead end. I actually called the county, and a tired-sounding deputy took the time to explain the whole thing to me plain.

What Donnie did was not theft in the eyes of the law, he told me. It was a crop-share lease dispute between two grown members of the same family.

The check had been written legally to Donnie, in Donnie’s own name. Nobody broke into anything. Nobody forged a signature. Nobody signed a name that was not theirs.

“That makes it civil, ma’am, not criminal,” the deputy said, not unkind. “And we just don’t come out for civil. What you’d be wanting is a lawyer.”

So I called the lawyer. That was the second dead end, only slower, and a good deal more expensive going in.