“Marilyn, my darling,” I read, and the words trembled in the evening air over two hundred people and a whole hog on a spit, “if you are reading this at a gathering of any kind, then Derek has made his move, and I am sorry I could not spare you the embarrassment. Please stay on your feet. You have done harder things than this.” Derek stood on the hay bale with the microphone hanging at his side. The band in the machine shed had stopped. Even the smoke from the pit seemed to hang in place. Pam, beside the potato salad, put her hand over her mouth and did not take it away.
“In 2019,” I read, “I recorded a family covenant against the title of this farm with the Story County Recorder. The farm may be conveyed only to a person of the blood of Lyle Hansen, and only by the written, notarized consent of Marilyn, signed in front of two witnesses who are not related to the buyer. Any deed that does not meet these terms is void on its face.” I lowered the paper. Mr. Lindquist stepped forward on his cane, a stooped, white haired man of eighty five in a brown suit, and in his dry courtroom voice said, “That covenant is recorded, folks. Book 412, page 77. Anyone may look it up on Monday morning.”
Derek laughed. It was a thin, scraping laugh. “Marilyn signed the deed herself,” he said, to the crowd. “She just does not remember. That is the whole point, is it not? That is why she needs help.” “I signed three crop insurance forms at your kitchen table in June,” I said. “The deed was folded in between them. I never read the third page because you told me it was a duplicate.” I turned to Gladys, who stood at the front with her arms crossed. “Gladys, did you ever see me sell this farm?” “I did not,” said Gladys, loudly. “And I told that boy so on the phone.”
A black family Bible on a hay bale and a sealed envelope from a late husband stopped a pig roast that was meant to celebrate a stolen farm.
“There is one more paragraph,” I said, and I turned the page. “Derek, I am going to say this once, and kindly. I knew from the day you married our daughter that you were a man who wanted what was not his. I did not stop it because I loved Pam, and because I hoped you would change. If you are standing on a hay bale right now, you have not.” A murmur ran through the crowd. A man near the keg said, quite audibly, “Well, I will be.” Derek stepped down off the bale. His boots hit the grass hard, and his face had gone the color of the dust on the lane.
He tried once more. He said that the farm was practically his already, that he had paid the property taxes for two years, that he had a contract with a buyer in Des Moines. Mr. Lindquist merely nodded. “Mr. Olson,” he said, “the Story County attorney has had a copy of the filed deed since Thursday, along with a sworn statement from the clerk, Sarah Meyer, about how it came to be recorded for one dollar. Obtaining a signature by deception is a felony in this state. I would stop talking now.” For a moment Derek looked as though he might run. Instead he turned toward his wife, as a drowning man looks toward a shore.
Pam did not move toward him. She stood by the buffet in her sundress with her fists clenched, and I saw her struggle, and I saw the moment she chose. “Derek,” she said, in a voice so quiet that the whole yard leaned toward it, “you used my mother. You used the farm of my father. You stood up here and called it ours.” She took off her wedding ring and, very deliberately, set it on the table among the paper plates. “I am going to stay with Mom tonight. We will talk when I can stand the sight of you.” She came across the grass to me. I held out my arms.
The sheriff deputy who had been parked at the end of the lane since four o clock walked up the drive at last, with his hat in his hand, and asked Derek if he would mind stepping aside for a conversation. He was very polite about it. Derek went without a fight. The crowd, which had stood paralyzed for twenty minutes, began to move again, in small murmuring knots, and a hundred people came up to shake my hand or squeeze my shoulder. A boy of twelve told me that he thought I was the bravest lady in Iowa. I told him I was only the oldest.
We did not waste the pig. At nine o clock, with the sun gone down and the fireflies out over the beans, Mr. Lindquist raised a paper cup of lemonade and proposed a toast to Lyle Hansen. Two hundred people raised their cups and said his name. The band struck up a waltz, slow and a little off key, and I danced the first dance with Mr. Lindquist, who is eighty five and who stepped on my foot twice and apologized both times. Gladys carved the pork. The whole county ate until midnight, and for the first time since August I was truly not afraid.
Derek pleaded to felony fraud in November and was ordered to pay back every dollar he had taken from the farm accounts, over ten years, with five years of probation. He lost his job at the seed company. He writes to Pam every month, and she answers some of the letters. She has not decided what comes next, and I have not pushed her. She and my granddaughter moved into the farmhouse with me in October, and we sit up late at the kitchen table, talking about their father and Lyle, about trust, about how long a good thing takes to grow.
In the spring, I bought six Berkshire piglets from a farmer near Boone, for the old hog barn that Lyle built, and my granddaughter and I got up at dawn every day to feed them. They squealed and rooted in the straw and followed us around the yard like puppies. On the first warm morning of May, I opened the Bible to the book of Ruth, as I do now every Sunday, and read the verse that Lyle had underlined in pencil. Where you go, I will go. I closed the book, and went out to see the pigs, and the sun was coming up gold over our corn.
