Part 3 — The Dry Well
The zoning administrator held the yellowed county paper up so everybody under the white tent could read the signature line. It said Lyle Reinholt. My brother. In his own square farmer handwriting, dated five days after the sheriff wrote his name down as missing.
My knees had already gone once that morning, and they nearly went again. For fifteen years I believed Lyle was gone. I had walked the ditches with search volunteers, and I had lain awake more nights than I can count picturing that dry well behind the windbreak. All the while my brother had walked into the county office on his own two feet and signed his own name.
“I called the number on the application before I drove out,” the administrator said. “It was disconnected years ago. But the paper lists a forwarding address in Billings, Montana, and a deputy there knocked on a door at six this morning.” She turned her phone around. A white-haired man with the jaw of our father sat at a kitchen table in a flannel shirt, holding a coffee mug in both hands. “Mr. Reinholt, your brother is alive, and he is waiting to hear from you.”
It came out in pieces, standing there on the grass. In August of 2011 Lyle and I had a bitter quarrel over the will of our father. Lyle, too proud and too ashamed to stay, caught a bus to a cattle ranch in Montana. Before he left, he went to the county office and applied to fill the old well, because a calf from the next farm had nearly gone down it and he did not want anyone hurt.
A few days later he telephoned the sheriff from Montana to say he was safe and was not ready to come home. The deputy wrote it down as “located, safe.” But somebody filed that paper under the name Reinhold instead of Reinholt, and in all those years no one ever came to my door. Fifteen years of grief had been sitting in the wrong drawer because of one wrong letter.
Inga was crying openly now, her hand over her mouth. “Amos, I would have told you if I had known,” she said. I believed her, and I took her hand. She had only wanted peace in the family, and she had been fooled by a boy in a pressed flannel shirt, the same as me.
That boy had stopped smiling. The administrator laid it out in plain words. The deed to both parcels had never left my name. The quitclaim Kurt filed in April carried a signature that an examiner at the state office had already marked as not mine. Kurt had taken $37,000 from the co-op account, and the county attorney had a banker waiting in the parking area with the withdrawal slips.
Kurt did not run. I will give him that much. He set the gold shovel down on the grass, very carefully, as if it might break, and said, “Amos, I am sorry.” I told him that sorry was a fine place to start and a poor place to stop. The next spring he pleaded guilty to forgery and theft, took five years of probation, and began paying the co-op back out of his own wages, starting with the pickup I once bought him.
Pastor Grimm stood in front of the congregation and asked forgiveness for the church as well. He said no one should ever be asked to give away what is not theirs to give. The tent was quiet. Then I asked him for the microphone, which I had not done in fifty years.
I told them the east parcel was mine to give, and that I would give it, but by my own hand and on a day of my choosing. In June I signed the deed in front of the pastor, a notary, and two hundred witnesses with pancake syrup on their chins. My condition was a small one. The new fellowship hall would carry the name of my wife, Margit, over the door.
Lyle came on a Thursday, on a bus, with one duffel bag and a hat he held against his chest. We stood in the yard and neither of us knew what to do with our hands. Then he said, “That calf made it, you know,” and we laughed until we had to sit down on the tailgate.
The county crew capped the old well properly in September, with a concrete lid and a brass plate. Lyle asked to sign the work order himself. We eat supper together every night now, two old milkmen at one kitchen table, and when the sun goes down behind the windbreak we do not say much. We do not need to.
