The Nine Names on the Hay Wagon

Why I didn’t fight it

I looked it up the next Monday, on my lunch break, at the counter. Illinois lets an executor take reasonable compensation from the estate. The court can review it if one of the heirs objects.

So I could have objected. I could have hired my own lawyer and filed a paper and stood up in the courthouse in Eureka with my brother across the aisle, and a judge could have decided whether our mother’s dish towels were worth twenty-three thousand dollars of Ardell’s time.

I thought about it for a whole day. Then I thought about Mom, and what she would have said about her two children in a courtroom over her estate.

She would not have said anything. She would have just looked at me, the way she did when I was twelve and had done something small and mean. That look was worse than any sentence.

I was not going to sue my brother. I was not going to stop speaking to him either. He is the only family I have left from that house, except Megan, and Megan loves her uncle.

But I was not going to let those nine people disappear, either. That was the part I could not swallow. Not the money. The disappearing.

Because Ardell’s accounting would go into a file at the courthouse. And in that file, forever, it would say that the estate of Edith Wendt was cleaned out by her executor, for a fee. And not one of those nine names would be anywhere in it.

The index card

I wrote the names on an index card out on my back steps on a Thursday evening, with the porch light on. Nine names. Next to each one, a few words about what they had carried.

I did not write a speech. I am not a speech person. I just wanted to say each name out loud, once, in front of everybody, so that nobody in that township could ever say it was not them.

Megan came out and saw me writing. “What’s that for?”

“The auction,” I said. “I want to thank everybody who helped.”

She read the card over my shoulder. She was quiet a long time. Then she said, “Uncle Ardell isn’t on there.”

“No,” I said. “He isn’t.”

“Is that mean?”

I thought about it, because she deserved a real answer. “It would be mean,” I said, “if I said his name and said something bad about it. I’m not going to say anything about him at all. I’m just going to say who carried the boxes.”

She nodded. Then she took my pen and, at the bottom of the card, in her loopy handwriting, she wrote: “And Megan ran the lot sheet.”

“You’re not going on the card,” I told her. “You’re family. Family doesn’t get thanked.”

“Then neither does Uncle Ardell,” she said, and gave me the pen back.