“Luis, do not open that gate,” I said into the phone. “Park your truck across the lane. If those men try to drive around it, you tell them Rika Van Wyk said the sale is void, and that the sheriff is on the way.” I could hear the fans roaring behind him, and the long shout of a truck driver, and Luis said, in his careful English, “Mrs. Van Wyk, I will do it right now.” I put the phone in my apron pocket. Marten sat across the table with the old hat of his father in his hand, and he looked at me as if I had grown a second head.
I dialed the Sioux County sheriff from the kitchen wall phone, the number I have known since 1974, and spoke to a deputy named Haan who used to bag groceries for me. I told him where I was and what had been done in my name. By the time I put on my coat, he was already in his cruiser on Highway 75. Marten stood up. “Mom, you are making a mistake,” he said, his voice trembling. “Dad knew about the debt. Dad took out loans against the barns. We are going to lose all of it.” I took the blue notebook from my shelf. “Marten, there is no debt,” I said. “Come and see.”
The two semis sat at the load out with their engines running, and Luis had pulled our flatbed across the lane like a wall. Behind it stood Deputy Haan, hat tipped back, reading a paper by flashlight. The drivers leaned against the cabs with their arms folded. When I stepped out of the pickup of my son in my church coat, a man in a company jacket hurried toward me from the second truck, a young land buyer named Brent Hoekstra, whom I had seen the day before at the office on Highway 75. He had the face of a man who suspects the floor has opened.
Two semis left an empty load out, a forged contract went to the county attorney, and the books of a hog farm were opened to the whole family.
“Mrs. Van Wyk,” he said, “I understood you were unwell.” I opened the blue notebook to a page with a corner folded down, and handed it to Deputy Haan. “Deputy, that is every dollar this farm has owed since 1966,” I said. “At the bottom you will see it is zero. We paid off the last barn loan in 1994. Gerrit and I have never borrowed against a single acre since.” The deputy ran his flashlight down the page, whistling softly. “Mrs. Van Wyk, you keep better books than the county,” he said. Marten stood in the headlights with his mouth open, and I saw him shrink by about a foot.
“Marten,” I said, “tell me what is real.” It took him a long time. He told it to the gravel, in front of the deputy, the buyer, the drivers, and Luis. He had lost three hundred and eighty thousand dollars in hog futures over two years. He had borrowed against the inheritance of Shelly, and then against a credit card, and then from a man in Orange City who did not send letters. Shelly had found the sale offer in his email in June. She had written the power of attorney herself, and her sister Kristen had stamped it. “Mom, I wanted to fix it before you knew,” he said. “I did not want you to see.”
I took off my glove and put my bare hand on his face. He is fifty four, with the same square jaw as his father, and he was crying like a boy of six. “Marten, I have kept every number on this farm for fifty nine years,” I said. “Do you think I did not see a number go missing from my own table?” He covered his eyes. “Gerrit left something for exactly this day,” I went on. “I did not want to open it. But here we are.” Behind me, Deputy Haan quietly asked Hoekstra to put the contract in an evidence bag, and the young man did so without a word.
The next morning I drove to the Sioux County courthouse in Orange City with Gerrit last letter in my purse. Our lawyer, an old Dutchman named Vander Meer, had held it in a safe for six years. It read: “Rika, if Marten ever comes after the farm, do not sell. Put it in the Van Wyk Family Farm Trust. Make Luis a partner. He has worked harder than any of us, and he has never asked for a thing. Let Marten stay on the place and learn from him. Let Hannah have the home farm when she is ready. I love you, my Rika. I am sorry I did not tell you. G.”
The Van Wyk Family Farm Trust was filed the following Friday. Luis Ortega became a one quarter partner, with his name on the deed beside ours. He wept in the lawyer office like a man who had won the lottery, and I held his hand. Marten signed over his own share to the trust, to pay what he owed, and went to work for Luis, at wages, doing chores at four every morning. Kristen De Boer lost her notary commission. Shelly pleaded to a reduced charge and moved to her mother house in Hull. She wrote me a letter that I read once and set aside.
The county attorney let Marten plead to a misdemeanor. He did one hundred and forty hours of community service, mostly at the food pantry in Sioux Center, and he paid the man in Orange City from the sale of his boat. He is not the man he was a year ago. On Sundays he comes to my kitchen for coffee and sits in Gerrit chair, and I show him the notebooks. He turns the pages slowly. Last month, at page 212, he found the line where I had written: “Marten born. Eleven sows. A good year.” He put his hand over it.
Last spring, my granddaughter Hannah graduated from Dordt in agriculture and came home to the farm. She sat with me at the kitchen table on her first night, with the blue notebooks stacked beside her like a pile of old family Bibles. I opened a fresh one. Fifty nine years of hand written numbers. I wrote the date at the top of the first page, and under it, in my small, neat hand, I wrote: “Hannah starts. Four barns. Zero owed. Everyone home.” Then I gave her the pen.
