The Guardianship Papers on My Table

The Courtroom

Judge Ramona Sedillo is a short woman with reading glasses on a chain and a voice that does not need a microphone. There were fifty-two seats in that courtroom and I believe two hundred people tried to use them. The rest stood along the walls and out into the hall, and Rey propped the doors wide.

“Mrs. Hargis,” the judge said, looking at me over her glasses. “Do you understand why we are here this morning?”

“Yes, ma’am. My nephew is worried about me.”

“That is what the petition says.”

“It is true, too, Your Honor. He has been worried since August.”

Kurt flinched. His lawyer put a hand on his sleeve.

The Albuquerque lawyer went first, and he was good. He walked through the fever, the propane notice, the road before sunrise, the telephone call in April. He called it a pattern. He said his client, who loved his aunt, had been left no responsible alternative.

When he sat down, the judge turned to Anita. “Ms. Archuleta. Does the respondent have witnesses?”

Anita stood and buttoned her jacket. “Your Honor, I have a hallway.”

Somebody in the back laughed. The judge did not smile, but her eyes did.

“Then bring me the hallway, Deputy.”

Rey carried the green guest book up the aisle and set it before her. She opened the cover, read down the first page, and looked at Kurt over her glasses. Then she said, “We will begin with the visitor’s report.”

Mr. Salas gave his report in four minutes, from a single page. Thirty-one interviews. Records he called better kept than the court’s. Then he said, “In nineteen years, Your Honor, I have never had three witnesses ask me to apologize to the respondent for the inconvenience of being investigated.”

Dr. Linebarger stood in the second row. “She scored twenty-nine out of thirty, Judge. The word she missed was velvet.” There was a low murmur. He read his letter and sat.

Gwen Medlin stood and said only what her note said, in her bank voice, and sat. Eloy stood with his green ledger and said, “I have farmed her ground eleven years and never been short a penny of her share or one day on her word.” That was all.

Judge Sedillo took off her glasses and turned to the room. “I am going to ask something unusual. Anyone here who has come to speak to Mrs. Hargis’s ability to manage her own affairs, would you please stand.”

I heard the chairs.

I did not turn around. I could not have. I heard a sound I can only compare to a field of beans going over in a wind, a long soft rushing, fifty-two seats and the walls and the hall beyond. I looked at the seal on the wall and kept my chin level.

Then I looked at Kurt, because someone ought to.

He had turned all the way around. I watched his eyes go from face to face, and he knew every one.

The rancher in the feed cap who had bought the gooseneck. Pastor Gil from the Willard church. The fire chief whose work trailers he sold. Lonnie Peck, who carries his hitch parts. The woman who runs the county fair livestock sale, where Kurt had bought the grand champion lamb ten years running and stood for the photograph. Ruben Trujillo against the back wall, hat in his hand.

And in the second row, sitting very straight with her hands in her lap, Dena.