The Deed I Set Beside His Plate

What I Learned About Ron

I did not go looking for dirt on Ron Dykstra. I want to be honest about that. I went looking for the man.

I asked around the way you ask around in a small town, which is to say I mostly listened. I bought coffee at the cafe on the square three mornings in a row and sat near the round table where the retired men solve the world before eight.

Ron had come to Holton from out by Emporia about two years before. He rented a room over the hardware store. He did odd jobs, fixed small engines, and kept to himself.

His divorce had been a bad one. Married thirty-one years, and his wife’s family owned the land, and when it ended, Ron walked away with his truck, his tools and a check that did not last.

One of the old men at the round table, a retired mail carrier named Walt Henning, told me that part. He told it without any meanness.

“Ron’s scared,” Walt said, stirring his coffee. “Man gets to be our age with nothing in his name, he lays awake. I know a fella went to the county home in Seneca with one suitcase. Ron talks about that more than you’d think.”

“Who told him about the taxes?” I asked.

Walt made a face. “That’d be Duane. Duane tells everybody about taxes. Duane told me to put my truck in my granddaughter’s name once. Duane doesn’t know a tax from a tick.”

I laughed in spite of myself.

“I’ll tell you what, though,” Walt said. “I don’t think Ron set out to rob anybody. I think Duane told him a story, and Ron wanted it to be true so bad he didn’t check it.”

“He told my mother it’s not my house.”

Walt looked at me over his glasses. “Well,” he said. “It’s not. It’s not his either. That’s the trouble.”

I drove back to work that morning thinking about a man who lay awake at sixty-six afraid of a county home, and about my mother, who had lain awake for nine years for an entirely different reason.

I did not want to destroy him. I wanted the house back in my mother’s name. Those were two different jobs, and I was going to have to do the second without doing the first.

The Paper

At the extension office I have a filing cabinet of sample forms. People come in all the time needing to understand how a deed works, and I always send them to an attorney for the real thing, because that is the rule and it is a good rule.

So I followed it. I called a lawyer in Holton named Jim Ruder who had done my father’s will, and I paid him $150 to draw up a quitclaim deed from Ron Dykstra back to Beverly A. Holt, one page, the legal description of the five acres copied word for word off the one Mom had signed.

“He has to sign it,” Jim said. “Voluntarily. In front of a notary, or he signs it and acknowledges it in front of one later. Then you record it at the Register of Deeds. You can’t make him.”

“I know I can’t make him.”

Jim slid it across the desk in a manila folder. “Then what’s the plan?”

Everybody kept asking me that.

“A birthday party,” I said.

He looked at me a long time and then he laughed, not at me. “Your dad would have liked that,” he said.