I did not take the paper. I stood on my own porch in my barn coat and looked at my only son, holding out a pen like a man offering a cigarette to a prisoner, and I said, “Kurt Vandenberg, put that away.” “Ma, the cheese company deal is void. If that money was stolen, the bank can come after the farm. Mr. Schultz says we have to move before anyone finds out.” I turned to the lawyer, who stood by the truck looking like a man who wished he were in Appleton. “Mr. Schultz, is that true?” He cleared his throat. “That is one possible reading, Mrs. Vandenberg.”
“Then let me give you another one,” I said. “The check was never cashed. Not once, not in thirty nine years. Gerald never spent a dime of it. The sale to the cheese company closed in October with title insurance and a lawyer of my own, a woman from Kaukauna named Mrs. Hendricks, who read every line. If the bank wanted anything from Arnie, it had thirty nine years to come get it.” Kurt opened his mouth. Brenda, in the passenger seat, put her hand on her forehead and looked straight ahead. “You called Arnie last night, Kurt. Why?”
Kurt did not answer for a long moment. When he did, he did not look at me. “Because I was in trouble, Ma. The equipment dealership is in trouble. I owe the bank four hundred thousand. I thought if I got the farm, I could borrow against it. And when you told me you had already sold it, I thought, maybe there is something in the old files. Something I could use.” He looked like a boy again, a boy of nine who had broken Gerald good pocketknife and hidden it in the hay. I felt my anger go out of me like air from a tire.
A rusty cream can sealed in wax held an uncashed check, a brothers confession, and the one letter nobody ever mailed.
Arnie spoke from the car, slow and dry. “Kurt, put that pen in your pocket. You are not a bad man. You are a frightened one. I know exactly what that looks like. I looked at it in the mirror for sixty years.” He turned to me. “Marlene, there is one more thing in that can. Under the letters, at the very bottom, there should be a sheet of tablet paper folded in four. I never wrote it. It came back to me last year, in the mail, from Gerald.” My heart stopped. “Gerald wrote to you?” Arnie chin shook. “He wrote to me. But he never mailed it.”
Jenna met us at the milk house with the cream can on a folding table, its wax seal cracked, the brass lid on the table beside it. Inside, under hundreds of Arnie letters, I found it. Gerald handwriting on the lined paper, shaky, from the last winter of his life. “Arnie. I never cashed the check because I could not make myself take your sin as my own. I was proud. I should have called you thirty years ago. You are my brother. Come home. Marlene will make you hot dish. She makes it better than Mother. Do not tell her I said that. Gerald.”
I laughed. I could not help it. I laughed and cried at the same time, standing in front of a rusty can with the cold Wisconsin wind pulling at my coat. Gerald never said I made anything better than his mother in fifty three years of marriage, and here it was in ink. Arnie took the paper from my hands, read it, and folded over like a man who had been hit in the stomach. I put my arm around his thin shoulders. He felt like a bundle of kindling. “Come on, Arnie,” I said. “Come in. Supper is at five.”
Over the next week, Arnie went to the bank in Green Bay himself, a bank that is now owned by another bank that is owned by another one. A very polite young woman looked up the old file. The statute of limitations had run in 1991. She said the bank had written the loss off decades ago and there was nobody left to pursue. Arnie sat there in his good jacket and asked if he could pay it anyway. She told him he would have to talk to a lawyer. He came home and sat at my kitchen table with the uncashed check, turning it over and over.
In the end I made the decision. The check was made out to Gerald, so it was mine to decide. We took the two hundred forty thousand dollars, which Arnie covered from his savings with interest, and gave it to the Outagamie County dairy hardship fund, in Gerald name. Arnie said it was a drop in the bucket. I said that is how you fill a bucket. When the news photographer from the Post Crescent took our picture beside the old cream can, Arnie wore his Sunday suit, and he smiled the first full smile I had seen on him since 1985.
Kurt came to the house on Sunday. He stood in the kitchen doorway holding his hat. He said he had closed the dealership. He said he had a job offer as a service manager in Green Bay and he wanted to take it, if I thought it was right. I said I thought it was. Then I handed him a cookbook, Gerald mother worn Lutheran church cookbook, and told him to learn the hot dish. He looked at it as if I had handed him a live grenade. Brenda was behind him on the porch, and she was crying and smiling at the same time.
Bessie, the old Holstein, stands in the pasture now with Arnie leaning on the fence beside her in the evenings. He talks to her about Arizona. She chews and looks at the sky with the patient face of a cow who has seen everything twice. I watch them from the kitchen window while the oven warms. Gerald initials are still painted on top of the silo, faded from the sun. When the light hits just right, they glow. I raise my coffee cup to them. “Your brother came home, Gerald,” I say. “And the hot dish is better than your mother.”
