I slid my finger under the flap of the envelope and drew out the single sheet, folded in three, while the lanterns swayed above us in the draft and Lars sat on the hay bale with the crowbar across his knees. I read the heading first, and then the legal description, and then I read the name of the grantee, which was my own. Solveig Marie Tollefsrud. Not Halvor. Not both of us. Only me. It was a warranty deed, recorded in the spring of 1990, for a parcel of eighty acres.
“Eighty acres,” Lars said hoarsely. “Where?” I told him I did not know. I had never heard of it. I turned the page to the plat, a little hand drawn map with the compass at the corner, and I found the road. It was the ridge road above Spring Grove, the old Haugen place, which had been sold at auction the winter our youngest left for college. I remembered Halvor driving off that day with a cap pulled down and a sack lunch, saying he was going to look at a heifer.
There was a second sheet folded in the envelope. It was written in pencil, in the slow, upright hand of Halvor, the same careful hand that had carved our initials over the haymow door. “Solveig,” it began, “if you are reading this, someone is trying to take the old red building down, and I am sorry I am not here to stop them. I bought the Haugen eighty in 1990 and put it in your name only. I did not want you ever to be without.”
I stopped, because my voice had gone, and Lars took the page gently from my hand and finished it aloud. “The red building and the yard and the house belong to the farm, and the farm belongs to the two of us, and I have made the arrangement so that the building cannot be sold without your signature. Your son is a good boy. Do not let him hurry you. Let the music keep the building standing. I love you. Halvor.” His voice failed on the last line.
A man who builds with his hands also builds with his foresight, and sometimes the best protection is a word left behind a board.
I looked at my son. He was fifty one years old, with the broad red forehead of his father, and he sat on that bale looking like the boy who had broken the window. “Mom,” he said, “I did not know any of this. I thought the farm was in the name of Dad alone. The lawyer said that after he passed, it was ours to do with as we wished. I never asked to see the papers.” He wiped his face. “I wanted the money. I had a loan on the machine shed and I was afraid.”
I took his hand in both of mine. I told him that I had been afraid too, and that fear makes people clumsy. I said that if he had told me of the loan, we would have found a way, the two of us, at this very kitchen table. “I am not angry,” I said. “But I want you to hear what your father wrote. Do not let him hurry you.” He nodded, with his head down. Then he got up and took the crowbar back to the milk house, to its nail.
We drove out to the ridge road the next morning in my old Buick. The Haugen eighty was lovely land, rolling, with a spring at the bottom of the coulee and a stand of white pine at the north end. A young couple from Decorah, who farmed organic vegetables on rented ground, had been asking Kari for months about a place to grow. I rented them the whole eighty for a fair sum, with a lease I wrote myself. By December the money covered the loan of Lars, and a little over.
He came to the house one evening with his cap in his hands and said he would like to help. He asked what a man did at a wedding in a hayloft. I put him to work the next Saturday hanging lanterns. He turned out to be a splendid hand with a ladder and an extension cord. By the third wedding he was parking the cars in the lower field and carrying the tables. The brides adored him. He told every one of them that the beams had been put up in 1911 by his great grandfather.
In November, Kari asked if I would play at the wedding of her own daughter. The little pump organ in the corner of the loft has a wheeze in the bellows, and I had never tuned it. Lars found a man in La Crosse who did, and drove it there himself in the back of his truck. When it came back it sounded like a church. I played the processional on a cold bright afternoon, with sun slanting through the cracks in the old boards, and the guests wept.
After the dance that night, the guests went home and the lanterns burned low. I sat on the stool of Halvor by the door, and Lars came and stood beside me. We looked up at the beam over the haymow door where the initials still showed, rubbed smooth by fifty years of dust. H.T. and S.T. 1971. Lars reached up, and with his thumb he traced the carving, one letter at a time, as a man does who has been shown how to read.
The old red building has stood through three winters since. The wood dealer from the Cities sent me a Christmas card last year, which I put on the piano, and I wrote back to thank him. On the first Sunday of each month, the parish gathers in the loft for hymns and pie. I have never needed a man to tell me what an old thing is worth. I only needed one to leave me the key, and he did.
