“Let the deputy come, Kyle,” I said, in my slow wheat country voice. “I would like to meet him. I would like to tell him that I know exactly where I am. I am at pump four of the Casey store on Vine Street in Hays, Kansas, and it is the third Saturday of October, and my truck is a 2004 Ford F 150 that I bought used in Russell for four thousand dollars.” I turned to the tow driver. “Young man, put the bed down. I will take the work order, and I will keep it.” He lowered the bed with a hydraulic whine and handed me his clipboard without a word.
The Ellis County deputy arrived in four minutes, a woman in her thirties with a blond braid and a pair of sensible boots, and the name Voss on her badge. She stepped out of the cruiser and stood a moment looking at the scene. Kyle with his toothpick, the tow truck, Shelby on the porch of the store, a crowd of five or six early customers holding their coffees. “Mr. Brandt?” she said. “We got a call about a confused gentleman.” I smiled at her. “Deputy, that call was made by my stepson. He wants you to think I am confused. I am not. But I would like you to look at a title.”
I handed her the paper. She read the seller line, and the date, and then she turned to Kyle. “Mr. Hollister, this is dated November nineteenth of last year,” she said. “That was Mrs. Brandt service, was it not? The one at the Methodist church?” Kyle stopped chewing his toothpick. “I was at that service,” the deputy said. “I sat in the fourth row. Mr. Brandt was in the front pew from ten in the morning until the dinner in the fellowship hall at two. Two hundred people saw him. A notary stamp on a document signed that day is going to be very hard to explain.”
A forged title was torn up at pump four, a coffee can was opened at last, and a combine cut wheat with two men in the cab.
Kyle took his hat off and put it back on. He looked at me, and for a flicker I saw the seven year old boy in the farmhouse kitchen, holding a toy tractor, deciding whether or not to trust me. “Leon, I need the money,” he said, hoarsely. “I have a hundred and ninety thousand dollars in margin calls. I put everything into cattle futures. Mom said there was a coffee can, and that she had left me something, and I thought it was cash, and I thought you were going to give it all to the church.” He closed his eyes. “I did not know what else to do.”
“Kyle, there is a coffee can,” I said. “I think you ought to see what is in it.” Deputy Voss asked if she might come along, as an officer of the court, and I said I did not mind. We drove out in a convoy: my pickup, which was not on the tow truck, the cruiser, and the Silverado of Kyle. It was eleven miles. The stubble was gold in the morning, and when we pulled into the yard, I saw the old kitchen window, and the yellow curtain June sewed in 1975, and I felt her there the way you feel the sun on your neck.
The coffee can was a Folgers can, red, dented, on the top shelf of the pantry where it had sat for eleven months. I set it on the kitchen table. Kyle, Deputy Voss, and I looked at it. It had a plastic lid, and the lid was held down with a rubber band. I opened it with hands that shook more than I would have liked. Inside there was a folded letter, in June handwriting, a recorded deed, and a small brass key. I handed Kyle the letter. “She wrote it for you,” I said. “The night after the doctor in Salina gave her the diagnosis. She made me promise not to give it to you unless you came to harm.”
He read it standing. I watched the words travel across his face. Later, June letter would be copied for the file in the county clerk office, by his request. It said: “Kyle, my darling boy. I know you. You will come for the money first. That is all right. You were seven and you had nothing, and I know what that does to a boy. Leon and I have put the farm into a family trust. A hundred and sixty acres are yours, forever, on one condition. You come for harvest. Every year, you climb into the cab with Leon, and you stay until the last bushel is in. Come for the money first. Stay for the wheat.”
Kyle sat down at the kitchen table. He did not make a sound. He sat there with his mother letter in both hands, and tears ran off his chin onto the oilcloth, and for a long time Deputy Voss and I looked at the floor. “Mr. Brandt,” she said at last, gently, “the title is a felony. You could press charges.” I was quiet a minute. “Deputy, I would like to ask that this be handled without a prosecution,” I said. “If Kyle will make restitution to the tow company, withdraw the sale barn order, and meet with a financial counselor, I will not ask for more.” She nodded. “That is generous,” she said.
Kyle sold the Silverado to settle part of his debt and took a job with the Ellis County Farm Bureau. In June, at the first cutting of the wheat, he showed up at five in the morning, in a pair of work boots I had never seen. We climbed into the combine cab together, as June had asked. He sat on the buddy seat. I ran the header. For ten hours we cut the wheat, in the heat, and neither of us said anything, which in Kansas is the same as saying everything.
Around sundown, when the last bushel was in, Kyle climbed down, took off his cap, and wiped his face on his sleeve. I opened the glove box of the old pickup and took out June reading glasses, which had sat in the door pocket for a year. I handed them to him. “She would want you to have them,” I said. He turned the glasses over in his fingers, and then, to my surprise, he put them on, and looked out at the long gold field and the red sky, and said in a small voice, “Dad. I can see it. I see what she saw.”
