I asked Anna Friesen where she was. She said she was sitting in her kitchen in Hillsboro with a cup of cold coffee and an old ledger on her lap. “Mrs. Schroeder, my father in law kept two sets of books,” she said, in her careful voice. “One for the bank examiners and one for the families. After he passed, I found the second set in a cedar chest. It lists every farmer who put money in the Hillsboro bank in 1971, and what was owed to each one. Herman was to give the cash back, family by family, from that book. Without the book, it is only money. With it, it is justice.”
I held the phone against my chest and looked at Gus. He was watching me from the doorway with his arms crossed. Out in the yard I could hear a car door slam, and Todd voice, smooth as butter, asking a man in a short sleeved shirt where he could find the owner. I had known my son in law for twenty three years. I had watched him carve the turkey and fix the sink and tell my daughter he loved her. And somehow I had never once seen how quickly he could turn his smile on and off like a porch light.
Todd walked into the scale house with a young lawyer in a navy suit. “Velma, there you are,” he said, as if I had wandered off from a picnic. “I was worried sick. This gentleman is Mr. Pruitt, from my insurance office. Mr. Pruitt will help us sort out any confusion about the property.” I did not stand. I told him I was not confused. I told him I had a coffee can on my lap and a letter from my husband, and that I would like to know how a man could sell a roof and tell a neighbor it was a storm.
A rusty coffee can, a ledger in a cedar chest, and a Kansas widow who gave back what was never hers.
The lawyer coughed. “Mrs. Schroeder, in the state of Kansas, the contents of a structure on jointly held land belong to the heirs,” he said. “Your daughter is an heir, and so is my client by marriage. The cash should be divided among the family.” Gus took one step forward. He is a big man, and the floorboards complained. “Counselor, I have been weighing scrap for thirty years,” he said. “Anything found in the roof was never scrap. That can is going to the widow, or to the sheriff, and I already called the sheriff.” Todd looked at the window. A county car was turning in at the gate.
Sheriff Dale Unruh walked in with a deputy and took off his hat for me. He had known Herman. He listened to Gus and Darrell and read the receipt with Todd signature and driver license number. “Todd, you told the scrap yard you were the owner of this roof,” he said. “You are not. You told your neighbors it was a microburst. It was not. That is theft by deception, and I expect the county attorney will agree.” Todd began to speak, and the lawyer put a hand on his sleeve and said, very quietly, that it was time to be quiet.
Lynette came the next day. She sat on my porch swing in the cold with her hands wrapped in her sleeves and cried until I thought she would be sick. She had believed every word Todd told her, she said. He had said the roof leaked, that it was dangerous, that he was only helping. “Mom, I knew something was wrong and I did not want to look,” she whispered. I said that was the oldest sin in Marion County, and the easiest to forgive. I put my arm around her and held on until she stopped shaking.
That week I took Anna Friesen old ledger and Herman letter to the pastor at Hillsboro Mennonite Brethren and read both out loud on a Sunday. Two hundred and twelve families were listed, with amounts. Most of the farmers had passed, but their children and grandchildren filled the pews. I divided the eighty six thousand dollars by the ledger, dollar for dollar, and I added what the scrap yard returned to me for the copper. One old man, ninety years old, wept into his hat when I put a check for four hundred dollars into his hand. He said his father had never been paid back.
The county attorney charged Todd with theft and fraud, and he took a plea. He lost his insurance license and moved to Oklahoma. Lynette stayed with me for a while in the old bedroom. We talked about everything but Todd until one night in March she said his name on her own and we cried again. She has gone back to teaching school, and she comes out on Sundays, and I think we are both better women for the whole terrible business. A mother and daughter can survive anything if they are willing to sit on a porch together.
In May, the men of the church came out to the farm with ladders, scaffolding and sixty sheets of new copper, bought with the money the scrap yard sent back and a gift from Gus. Seven men from the Friesen and Schroeder families stood on the workshop and hand seamed every sheet, the way Herman had in 1962. It took them four days. Anna Friesen, ninety years old herself now, sat in a lawn chair and supervised with a thermos of coffee. By Friday evening the roof was done, and it was the color of a new penny.
I stood in the yard at sunset with my hand shading my eyes. The copper took the light and threw it back across the wheat, orange and gold and burning, as bright as the day Herman climbed down from the last sheet and wiped his hands on his overalls. I could see it from the highway two miles off, I knew, and so could anyone coming home. “Herman,” I said out loud, to the sky, to the wheat, to the roof. “I did the right thing. I always do.” And somewhere in the wind, I swear, a man laughed.
