I opened the door of my car in the sleet in front of the stone house in Lancaster and stood there with my coat open and my good navy dress getting wet, while the woman in the bay window took off the glasses of my husband and set them on the table. I am Irene Stoltzfus, seventy six years old, of Kutztown, Pennsylvania, and I had a ham in the back seat and four pies, and I did not know what to do with my hands. The front door opened. The woman came down the steps in her slippers, small and silver haired, and stopped at the bottom, with the sleet falling on her bun.
Her name was Naomi. She was the older sister of Abe, seventy nine years old, and she had left the old order Mennonite church at nineteen to marry a man from outside it, in 1980. The bishop had put her under the ban, and the family had agreed to treat her as if she had passed. Abe had been twenty seven. He had obeyed his father. He had told every person he ever met, including his wife, that he had no sister. “He cried at night,” Naomi said. “For forty six years I wrote to him, and he never wrote back. But he kept my letters.”
Naomi told me that she had found my daughter Jessica in September, through a letter in a box that Abe had kept in the barn. Jessica had telephoned her and invited her to Lancaster for Christmas. It sounded like a kindness. But it was Jessica, Naomi said, who had asked her to come early, to the table, to keep me away, and who had put a legal paper in her hands on Friday, the deed to a share of the forty acres that their father had left to both of his children. The paper had my name crossed out on it.
A keypad flashing red on Christmas Eve gave one farm widow the length of a car ride home to bring her daughter back to the truth in Lancaster.
I gave my terms in the front hall of the stone house, in my wet coat, with Naomi holding my hand and the sleet melting on the carpet. “Jessica, I would like you to come downstairs. Grant, please put down your wine glass. Naomi did not ask for the land. She asked to meet the wife of her brother, and the two of you have kept me on a porch in the cold. I would like to hear the whole of it, from you, in front of your aunt, before I take off this coat. And I would like it quickly, because my ham is getting cold.”
Jessica came down the stairs in her red dress, her face as pale as the candles. She did not try to deny it. “Mom, we owe a hundred and eighty thousand dollars,” she said, in a thin voice. “Grant lost our savings in a restaurant. I thought if Aunt Naomi signed her half of the farm to me, we could sell the forty acres and fix it, and you would never know the difference. I changed the code because I did not want you to see her before she signed. I am so ashamed.” Grant stared at the floor. He had not said a word since I came in.
Grant moved first, and he moved fast. He snatched the quitclaim deed and the pen from the sideboard, the half signed paper with the name of Naomi, and the folder of listings from a realtor in Lancaster, and ran for the garage door, meaning to start his Lexus and drive away with them before the sleet turned to ice. The wine glass shattered. The aunt cried out. Eleven relatives rose from the table. And at the end of the drive, where I had left it with the engine running, my old Buick sat sideways across the entrance.
Grant slid to a stop in the garage doorway with the papers crushed against his vest, because the Buick, with its lights on and its door open, filled the whole width of the drive, and I stood beside it in the sleet with the keys in my hand. “Grant,” I said, as calmly as I could, “I have driven that car for twenty years, and I have never once backed into anything. Please give the papers to Naomi.” He looked at his wife, at the relatives crowding the porch, at the woman with the silver bun. He walked back through the sleet and placed the papers in the hand of Naomi.
The consequences were gentle but plain. Naomi took the deed in both hands, looked at it a long moment, and tore it in half, saying that she had come for her family, not for land. The farm stayed with me, and the half share of Naomi went into a trust for her great nieces and nephews. Jessica and Grant sold the stone house and paid their debts, and moved into a smaller one in Reading. Jessica wrote me a long letter, and I answered it, and slowly, over the winter, the letters began to feel like conversation.
In the name of my husband Abe, who passed last March, I started the Abe Stoltzfus Fund. It pays for travel and housing for families separated by long estrangement and for legal help for farm families sorting out an inheritance, in Berks, Lancaster and Lehigh counties. In the first year we brought together sixty seven families and helped forty one farms stay in the family. One was an eighty one year old Mennonite grandmother from Ephrata who rode the bus to Reading to see a brother she had not spoken to in fifty years and said only that he had gotten old.
On a quiet morning in February, I sat at the kitchen table of the farmhouse near Kutztown with two cups of coffee set out, and for the first time in a year I did not stop to wonder why. Naomi sat across from me in a wool shawl, with the cracked glasses of Abe on her nose, reading aloud from his old almanac. The cows lowed in the barn. The snow lay on the alfalfa. “Irene,” she said, “he marked every year on the first of April with a small cross. Do you know why?” I said I thought I did, and I poured her coffee.
