I left the last page face down and said nothing, because Tomás had already said it for me. “Gus did it before he passed, Mrs. Halvorsen,” he repeated, and he came forward from the doorway and laid his hat on the table beside the pie. “He came out to the shop one night in December. He said, Tomás, Joyce and the boy are going to try to take the farm from Margie. He said when it happens, you hand her this.” He turned the page over for me with a callused finger. It was a letter in the blocky hand of my husband, and under it, a trust document with the stamp of a lawyer in Des Moines. “He knew, Margie,” Tomás said gently. “He knew all of it.”
I read the letter aloud, because I wanted the voice of Gus in that room one more time. “Margie, if you are reading this, I am gone, and Joyce has come with her boy,” it began. “I have put the farm and the elevator into a trust that only you can open. I have told my lawyer to watch every account. If anyone says you are lost, show them this. You are the sharpest woman in Clay County, and I mean to see that nobody forgets it.” My voice cracked on the last line.
The phone of Derek buzzed again on the tablecloth. This time his mother snatched it and held it close to her face. I watched her lips move. “Your account is closed,” she read. “All funds frozen pending an investigation by the Clay County Attorney.” She looked at me with her mouth open. “Margie, the lawyer of Gus sent a letter to the betting company in February, with copies of the grain tickets. They closed everything.” She set the phone down very slowly, as if it might burn her. “Derek, they know about the Nebraska corn,” she whispered. “They know about all of it.” Derek put his head on the table and laughed, once, a terrible little sound.
A rhubarb pie set beside a folded letter gave one widow the weekend to bring her sister back to the farmhouse in Spencer.
I gave my terms standing at the head of that table in my church dress, with the apron of Gus still tied around my waist. Joyce and Derek would leave my house the following morning and would not return. Derek would repay the ninety three thousand dollars for the corn, and every dollar he had moved to the betting app, in monthly payments, under the supervision of the county. The false doctor letter would be handed to the county attorney, and so would the loan document signed by Joyce as my guardian. Derek would enter a treatment program in Sioux Falls, if he wished to avoid charges, and I would pay for it as long as he stayed.
Joyce did not argue. She sat with her hands in her lap, and I saw her shoulders sag, a woman of seventy who had been given a golden boy and had spent thirty nine years ruining him with love. “Margie, I never meant to hurt you,” she said. “I only wanted to keep Derek out of trouble. Every time he got in a little deeper, I thought, one more time. One more time.” I sat down beside her. “Joyce, I know,” I said. “That is the way it goes. Gus did it for years. I did it too.” She leaned her head against my shoulder, and I felt her trembling like a bird.
Derek raised his gray face from the table and looked at me across the rhubarb pie. “Aunt Margie, I took the tractor money of Uncle Gus,” he said. “The first time. In 2021. And I told myself he would never miss it.” He rubbed his face. “I think about it every night. I think about him standing in that field, buying me one more chance.” I did not look away. “Derek, he bought you more than one,” I said. “He bought you eleven years. He was waiting to see what you would do with them. I am sorry to say he never got to see.” Derek nodded, and tears ran down his stubble.
The next morning, I stood on the porch while Joyce and Derek loaded the old Buick. The sun was just coming up over the corn, and the dew was on the grass. Tomás stood at the foot of the steps with his arms folded, making sure nothing went into the car that did not belong. Joyce came up the steps one last time, took my hand and held it. “Margie, I will call you,” she said. “If you let me.” I looked at her gray, tired face. “Joyce, I will answer,” I said. “That is all I can promise.” She kissed my cheek and walked down to the car, and she did not look back.
The money consequences were enforced by the county. The county attorney in Spencer charged Derek with theft by deception and forgery, and in exchange for a guilty plea and a restitution order he was given probation and a court mandated treatment program. The elevator accounts were returned, the betting company repaid forty thousand dollars of the losses, and the sale of the farm to the agriculture company closed without trouble. Tomás received a quarter section of ground and the old tenant house, in a deed that Gus had drawn up himself, and which I signed with great joy.
In the name of Gus, who passed in January and who left his seed cap hanging on the hook by the back door as if he might come in for supper, I started the Gus Seed Cap Fund. It pays for legal help, trustees and treatment for older farmers and widows in Clay and Dickinson counties who are being pressed by relatives to sign away their land. In the first year, we helped nineteen families keep their farms. A widow of seventy nine, with soil still under her fingernails, came out of the office of the lawyer with her papers clutched to her chest and said, “They told me I was too old to understand. They were wrong.”
In August, at the Clay County Fair, I carried my rhubarb pie into the exhibit hall under a clean dish towel. The judges came down the long table with their clipboards and their little forks. At the end of the day, a blue ribbon was pinned to my entry for the twelfth year in a row. As I stood admiring it, I saw Joyce at the far end of the hall in a plain blue dress, holding a cup of lemonade. She raised it to me, shyly. I raised the ribbon to her. Then I cut her a slice from the corner, and we ate it together, standing up.
