The Waltz I Could Only Feel

Two Pens on One Desk

On Monday, the second of November, at nine in the morning, we sat in two leather chairs in front of Mr. Zabel’s desk. Gerda wore her good gray coat. I wore my church jacket, which I had not worn since Dolores’s funeral, because it seemed like the kind of morning that wanted a jacket.

I could not hear Mr. Zabel. I want to say that plainly. He is a soft-spoken man, and he sits across a wide desk, and the first time he spoke I caught only the shape of his lips and the word “deeds.”

He saw me struggling. He did not say a thing about it. He stood up, walked around the desk, turned the chair beside mine to face me and sat down about two feet away, and began again, slower, into my left ear. I realized that this man had been doing that for years. Whenever I had come into the bank, he had come around and leaned toward me, and I had never noticed it once.

Mr. Zabel explained the deeds. A transfer-on-death deed says who gets the land when you are gone. Until then it is yours, you farm it or rent it, you can sell it or borrow against it, and nobody can touch it. When you die, it goes to the person named, without probate. He said he was a banker and a notary, not a lawyer, and that the county had the forms, and that these were ordinary papers that ordinary people signed every week.

Then he turned to Gerda and asked what she wanted to put on hers. She said “Sheryl,” and she said it the way you say the name of someone you would cross a flood for.

He turned to me. I said “Wesley.”

“And the other?” he said. “Does either of you want to name the other?”

“No,” Gerda said, and I said “No” at the same time. It was the one word we said at the same moment, and both of us flinched a little, and both of us laughed.

“That is the point,” I said. “Neither of us wants the other’s land. We want that written down where her girl can read it.”

He filled in the descriptions from the tax statements while we signed. Hers was 160 acres, which at three thousand an acre was a $480,000 quarter. Mine was two quarters, 320 acres, $960,000. Together it came to $1,440,000, and I watched the number go onto the paper in his small handwriting and thought that it looked like a great deal of money to be nobody’s business.

Then Mr. Zabel typed a single page saying that each of us leaves what is ours to our own children and neither of us claims anything of the other’s. He read it to us, and I heard maybe half. We signed that too.

I will say something here that I did not say to Gerda. When I signed that deed, I felt lighter. I had expected to feel as if I were losing something, because it is a hard thing to put your land in writing under a boy’s name while you are still alive and farming it. It was the opposite. I felt the whisper from the elevator lift off me, as if somebody had taken a sack of feed off my shoulders that I had been carrying so long I had forgotten it was there.

Gerda reached over and touched my wrist for just a second.

“Thank you for not arguing,” she said.

“You did the same,” I said.