I held the strip of paper to the window of the scale house and read it standing at the counter, with my daughter beside me and the red cap of Wendell crushed in her fist. It was torn from the edge of a feed receipt, and the pencil was his. Gaynell, if they come with paper, it is not mine. The real one is at the lawyer on Broadway, signed in front of Carl and Bea Tucker on the sixth of February, and it is recorded. I did not write Ray. I never will. Love you, old girl. W.
I read it twice. The wind rattled the door. I thought of the winter before he died, when he wore that cap to every appointment, the bank and the doctor and the barber, and kept touching the sweatband like a man checking for his wallet. I had thought it was grief. It was a trust. Tonya stood there shaking her head. “Mama, I did not know,” she said. “Kyle told me Daddy signed it over in the hospital. He made me bring the paper to the co op. He said if I did not, we would lose the house in Tulsa.”
She sank onto the bench by the weigh window and told it all. Kyle owed money, a great deal of it, to a man who did not send letters. The farm was the way out. His sister, who had a notary stamp and a gift for looking the other way, had agreed to witness. Tonya had watched him practice the signature at their kitchen table on a legal pad, again and again, until the Ray looked natural. “I told myself it was what Daddy wanted,” she said, and her voice broke. “I knew it was not. I am so ashamed.”
We drove to the lawyer on Broadway that very afternoon, in my old truck, with the cap on the seat between us. Mr. Teague, who is eighty and wears bow ties, went to the vault without a word and brought out a long envelope with a ribbon around it. The deed was dated the sixth of February. Wendell Cobb and Gaynell Cobb, husband and wife, as joint tenants with right of survivorship. It had been recorded at the county seat the next morning. I had owned the whole farm, free and clear, for the last eight months of his life.
A man who knows he cannot hold a pen at the end will sign his name correctly while he still can.
Carl Tucker still lives two doors down from the courthouse, and he came over in his bedroom slippers when Mr. Teague telephoned. He remembered the day exactly. Wendell had driven into town in the red cap and signed with a steady hand, and afterwards he treated them all to pie at the diner. “He said it was the last thing on his list,” Carl said. Mr. Teague pulled out a second folder. The notary journal of the sister of Kyle, subpoenaed in a different matter, showed a stamp in Tulsa at 11:40 p.m. on a night when Wendell lay in a bed in Okmulgee, eighty miles away.
Mr. Teague called the county attorney, and the county attorney called the sheriff. A deputy named Pruitt arrived at the elevator within the hour, a polite young man with a clipboard. Kyle drove in at half past five, in a hurry and a temper, expecting to find me standing by the scale with my head bowed. What he found was the whole room waiting, the manager of the co op, the lawyer, the deputy, and his wife, who stood by the window with her arms folded and her jaw set like her father.
He tried to talk his way through it, as men like Kyle do. He said it was a family matter. He said an old woman was confused. Then the deputy read from the journal, and Tonya said in a clear voice, “I watched you practice the signature, Kyle. On a legal pad. At the kitchen table.” Kyle looked at his wife as if he had never seen her before. He sat down on a sack of seed. He did not say another word until his lawyer came, and by that time it did not matter.
They charged him in July with forgery and conspiracy. His sister lost her commission and paid a fine, and cooperated, and cried in the courtroom. Kyle took a plea that sent him away for a time I do not care to count. I did not go to the sentencing. I stayed home with a pot of beans on the stove and my daughter and the grandbabies on my porch, and I let the wind do what it does in Oklahoma, which is carry things off. By evening the sky had gone the color of a peach, and I felt lighter than I had since March.
Tonya moved back to the farm that August with the children and four boxes of clothes. She took the room that had been hers as a girl, with the faded wallpaper and the window that sticks. She cried a good deal in the first month, mostly in the kitchen, mostly while peeling potatoes, and I let her. I did not say a word of blame. I only put a cup of coffee at her elbow and sat down across from her. After a while she looked up and said, “Mama, how did you stand it?” I said, “I did not. I leased it.”
The wheat came in fine in June. Lonnie Birdwell cut it with a borrowed combine, and Tonya rode with him on the first round with a little boy on each knee. The co op cut my check on the last day of the month, three thousand six hundred dollars for the storage, and the manager shook my hand and said he was sorry for all the trouble. I told him there was no trouble that a good sit and a cup of coffee could not mend. He laughed. He did not believe me.
I put the red cap back on its nail inside the door of the grain bin, with the strip of paper folded into the band, where it belongs. Evenings, I still sit in the pickup beside it with the radio low and the wind blowing forty miles an hour, the way it always does. Tonya comes out sometimes and sits beside me, and we do not speak. The cap hangs there, faded and greasy, and I hear it quite plainly. Love you, old girl. I say it back every night to the dark.
