I held the deed up to the fluorescent light at the counter of the county recorder and tilted it until the gold stamp flashed, and I looked at that name again. Etta Halvorsen, in round friendly letters with a little curl on the E, like a girl practicing in a school notebook. I have signed my name for sixty years with a sharp point on every letter and a hard slash for the t. “Clerk,” I said, “may I see the book for April?” She brought it out without a word. I put my finger on the line and followed it across to the right.
The notary was a woman named Dolly Brandt of Burley, with her commission number printed under the seal. The buyer was Bannock Ridge Land Company, a name I had never heard. The price for the whole north eighty was seven thousand four hundred and fifty dollars, which would not buy a used combine. Lane stood beside me in the glass doorway of the courthouse, unshaven, in yesterday shirt, still holding the brass probe of his father. “Mom,” he said, “I did not know. I swear it on the grave of Dad. I found this in the file cabinet in the office of Jolene.”
He told it badly and then well. Jolene had said that I had agreed, that I was tired and wanted it off my mind, and that she would handle the paperwork. He had believed her because it was easier. Then she wanted the rest, and he had gone looking for the lease in her drawers, and found the copy. “Bannock Ridge is her brother Corey,” he said, and his voice broke. “It is an empty company with a mailbox in Boise. There is no bank, Mom. There was never any bank. The Thanksgiving deadline was theirs.”
I looked at the probe in his hand. Three feet of brass, hollow, with a screw cap in the handle that I had polished for forty years and never once opened. “How did the mud get on the tip?” I asked. “I went out to the north eighty at dawn to see for myself,” Lane said. “I pushed it into the ground, and when I pulled it out, the cap came loose in my hand. There was something rolled up inside.” He unscrewed the handle there on the courthouse floor and slid out a tube of paper, thin as a cigarette, wrapped in a rubber band gone brittle.
A farmer who cannot say the hard thing out loud will sometimes hide it in the one tool he never lets go.
I unrolled it on the recorder counter and smoothed it with my palm. The square carpenter hand of Arvid, in pencil, dated the ninth of May. Etta, if you are reading this, somebody has sold the north eighty with a name that is not yours. I found the deed at the recorder this week and did not tell you because of your hip. I have left a sworn paper with the lawyer of Hal, Miss Okamoto, with a sample of your signature and mine. It is a forgery. The one who did it is closer than you want to think. Forgive me for dying before I could say it.
I could not read the last line aloud. It said, You always did the numbers right. I put my hand over my mouth. The clerk, who was a good girl, slid a box of tissues across the counter without looking up. Lane was crying openly, big and ugly, the way he cried at six when his dog was killed on the highway. I put my arm around the shoulders of my son, in the middle of a government building, and I held him up. “We are going to see Miss Okamoto,” I said. “Right now. And you are going to tell her every single thing.”
Miss Okamoto had the affidavit in her safe, with the sample signatures and a letter from a handwriting examiner in Boise dated three weeks before Arvid died. She was a small, brisk woman in a green suit, and she had been waiting for months for someone to walk through her door. By four that afternoon, the county attorney had the forged deed in an evidence sleeve and Lane had given a sworn statement that took two hours. He did not leave out one word. He did not ask for a lawyer. When he came out, he looked ten years older and ten pounds lighter.
Jolene arrived at the farmhouse that night in the white Tahoe, as I knew she would. She stood in my kitchen in her good coat with her colored folder pressed to her chest and said that she had only done it for Lane, for the future of the family, that old women never understand. I let her finish. Then I said, “A woman who writes my name has to answer for it.” She opened her mouth, and for the first time since I have known her, no words came out. She left the folder on my table and went.
The county voided the deed in October. Bannock Ridge was dissolved by the state, and the brother of Jolene agreed to repay every dollar he had borrowed against my land, with interest, under the eye of a judge in Burley. Dolly Brandt lost her commission. I did not go to the hearing. I stayed home and baked a pie, rhubarb, from the last of the frozen stalks of Arvid, and ate it on the porch with my feet up on the rail, and watched the geese going over in the long light.
Lane moved into the spare room in November. He did not ask. He came with a duffel bag and the sorry look of a boy sent home from school, and I gave him a clean towel. He worked the ground of Hal for wages, and he fixed the leaking gutter on the shed, and on Sundays he sat down across from me and ate pot roast without a single word. In December he found the brass probe where I had leaned it by the back door. He ran his thumb along the screw cap and asked if he could keep it for the grandchildren someday.
The lease with Hal renewed in March, for five years, at three hundred and ten dollars for every measure of ground. I set the pen to the paper at the title office in Rupert and signed Etta Halvorsen with every sharp point and a hard slash for the t, and Lane stood behind my chair. “Sign it, Mom,” he said. This time he was smiling, and so was I. We both knew that it was the only signature in the county that could not be copied.
