Nancy held the paper under the reading lamp, and I watched her lips move. “Ridgeline Pork Producers,” she read. “Earnest money deposit, two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, to Dale and Merle Yoder, dated the nineteenth of March.” She looked up. “Ruth Ann, you fell on the second of April. This is two weeks before.” The monitor beside me beeped steadily. I was sixty four years old and I had balanced every ledger on that farm for thirty eight years, and I did the subtraction in my head before I could stop myself. They had sold my farm before they knew they would need me to sign it.
Nancy picked up the wall phone and spoke in a low voice. Within the hour, a deputy from the Johnson County sheriff arrived, a young man named Cole Brandt with a freckled face and a notebook, and a woman from the hospital named Ms. Yoder Keller, no relation, who told me she was the patient advocate. My daughter Beth came up the elevator, still in her barn boots, from Des Moines, with her phone in her hand and a look on her face like a storm coming. “Mom,” she said. “I need you to watch something.”
Beth had installed a camera in the farrowing barn last year, so she could watch the sows from the city. She had never turned it off. That morning, on the night of my fall, she had sat in the waiting room scrolling through the footage in a daze, and only now did she understand what she had seen. She propped the phone on my tray. There, in grainy gray light, at ten minutes to six, walked Merle, in his coveralls. He went to the gate of the big sow. He lifted the pin. He swung it open, wide, and stepped back, and slapped the animal sharply on the flank before he slipped out the side door.
A fresh deposit on a farm sale and a camera in a barn told a hospital nurse what her patient had been too frightened to say.
Nobody spoke. On the tiny screen, ten minutes later, I walked into the barn with my bucket. I saw myself lift my hand to the sow. I saw the animal swing, and the gate crash, and myself on the floor. I watched Merle step out from behind the feed bin, look at me for a long moment, and turn his back. Then he went to the phone on the wall and, very slowly, dialed. Deputy Brandt stopped the video. His face had gone gray under his freckles. “Mrs. Yoder,” he said, “I am going to need a copy of this. And I am going to need your husband and his brother to stay exactly where they are.”
They were in the corridor, being watched by two security guards, and the moment the deputy opened the door, they began to turn on one another. I will never forget it. Merle shouted that it was all the idea of Dale, who had been in debt since the drought. Dale shouted that Merle had the gate and the brains of a ham. Merle said that Dale had agreed to everything. Dale said that Merle had gone too far. They were still going when the deputy put the handcuffs on them, both at once, and a nurse in the doorway said, very softly, to nobody, “Well, bless my soul.”
The lawyer from Iowa Legal Aid came on Friday, a calm old woman named Mrs. Haas, who sat by my bed and read me every deed. The north eighty was in my name alone, bought with the inheritance of my mother in 1989. The rest was jointly owned, which meant that nothing could be sold without both signatures. Ridgeline Pork returned the deposit within a week, having learned that the contract was based on a forged page, and a vice president of the company sent me a letter of apology on thick cream stationery. I framed that, too.
Dale pleaded guilty to conspiracy and fraud. Merle pleaded guilty to assault and the intentional injury of a person, and the judge, a woman who had grown up on a hog farm herself, looked at the two of them for a very long time before she spoke. She gave Merle six years and Dale four, and said that anyone who would harm the wife of his brother for money did not deserve to stand on Iowa soil. I filed for divorce the same week. There were no tears. I had already used them up in the thirty eight years before.
Rehab took four months. I learned to stand on the leg, then to walk with a walker, then a cane. Nancy came to see me every Friday after her shift, carrying a plastic bag of oranges, and sat for an hour. By the time they sent me home, we were friends. My granddaughter Molly came with Beth on the day I left, with a basket. In it was a blue ribbon, pinned to a square of felt. “It is the one from the fair,” she said. “I want you to keep it in the barn. For luck.”
Beth and I run the farm together now. We got rid of the confinement houses and brought the sows out onto pasture, where they root in the clover and raise their young under the sky. We sell to a co op in Iowa City, and to a restaurant in Cedar Rapids that puts our name on the menu. The books are balanced on my kitchen table every Sunday evening. The north eighty is green. And in the spring, when the first litter came, I stood in the barn door, leaning on my cane, and counted eleven healthy piglets.
I still check the farrowing barn at four in the morning, hobbling in with a flashlight and a thermos. The blue ribbon hangs from a nail above the door, a little faded now. Last week a card came in the mail from Nancy, in her slanting hand. It said, Ruth Ann, I think of you every time I see a tall woman in a hospital hallway. She did not have to add anything. I put it in the drawer with my deeds. I have never felt so free in my own kitchen. And I have never been less useless in my life.
