The Farm My Uncle Almost Stole

The morning after we buried my father, my uncle Ulys walked into our kitchen without knocking and set a folded paper on the table next to a cup of coffee my mother hadn’t touched.

“Wilamena,” he said, “you’ll want to sign this before the bank in Bucklin opens Monday.”

I was eleven, sitting on the bench by the stove with my little brother’s sock feet propped against my leg, and I remember how the steam still curled off that coffee like nothing in the world had changed, when everything had. My father had been dead four days. He’d gone out at first light to bring the team down off the ridge road above our place, and the mules had spooked at something, a dog, a shadow, we never did know what, and the wagon had gone over on him before he could get clear. He was thirty-nine. My mother had four children under twelve and a hundred and forty acres that had been Lattimore land since before the county had a courthouse to record it in.

Ulys was my father’s older brother by six years, and he had never once, in my whole life, come to our house to ask how we were doing. He came that morning to ask my mother to sign.

She didn’t touch the paper. She picked up my baby sister instead, propped her on her hip, and said, “What is it, Ulys.”

“A caretaker agreement,” he said, easy as anything, like he was talking about borrowing a plow. “Temporary. Until you’re back on your feet. I hold the note on this place anyway, Wilamena, you know that. Daddy’s debt, then your husband’s debt, it’s been mine to carry for years. I’m only asking to manage what I already own a piece of.”