Chapter 7 - The Division of Dust
Dinner was not eaten.
Judy sat with her face in her hands, her apron strings coming undone, weeping with the quiet, helpless hysteria of a woman whose social standing had been unstitched before her children. "Ronald... tell them it's not true. Tell them Arthur gave you that land. You told my father you owned the ridge clear! You told him you had the deed in thirty-eight!"
Ronald did not look at her. He sat staring at the green dairy certificate, his thick, hairy fingers splayed flat on the linen, as if he were trying to keep the table from tilting into an abyss.
Jeff was the first to stand. He pushed his chair back with a scrape that grated on the silence. He didn't look at his father; he looked at Nate, his eyes full of a strange, defensive anger.
"So what are you going to do?" Jeff asked, his voice cracking slightly. "You going to sue him? You going to bring some federal auditor out here to look at the ridge titles? We've got mortgages on our houses, Nate. If Dad’s title to the north eighty is clouded by some sixty-year-old probate claim, the bank will call my construction loan."
"That’s your business, Jeff," Nate said, not rising from his chair. "I didn't ask Dobbs to call the auction on the homeplace. The county did that because the Millers didn't pay their taxes. And I didn't write the ledgers. Grandfather did."
"You shouldn't have brought her here," Kim hissed, pointing a trembling, manicured finger at Opal. "She’s eighty-eight years old! She’s confused! She’s living in that apartment in town on her pension, and you’re using her to get back at Dad because he didn't give you twenty thousand dollars at Easter!"
Opal turned her head slowly toward her granddaughter. The small velvet bow on her hat trembled, but her eyes were like two blue flint stones struck together.
"I am not confused, Kimberly," she said. "I remember the day you were born in the county hospital. Your father wouldn't pay the fifteen-dollar charge for the nursery fan, so I sat by your mother’s bed for twelve hours waving a pasteboard fan from the funeral home so she wouldn't blister with the heat. Your father has always known the cost of everything and the value of nothing."
She reached out with the tip of her umbrella and tapped the heavy ledger on the table.
"Take your houses," Opal said to them. "Take your three-car garages and your golf course lots. The county won't touch them. Nathan isn't going to court. Becker men don't drag their blood before a township magistrate."
Ronald’s head jerked up. A small, desperate spark of hope flickered in his eyes. "You're... you're not filing the claim?"
Nate stood up. He picked up the letter from Arthur, folded it three times, and slipped it back into his pocket. Then he picked up the registration certificate from 1924.
"The money in the can is sixty-two thousand dollars," Nate said, looking down at his father. "In silver certificates from the thirties. At a coin shop in Fort Wayne, it’s worth about three times that to the collectors."
Ronald swallowed hard. "Nathan... we can divide it. We can set up a trust for the family. We can—"
"You're not touching a nickel of it, Dad," Nate said. The words weren't loud, but they had the finality of an anvil falling into wet sod. "I’m taking five thousand to pay off the implement dealer for the combine parts and the seed drill. I’m taking eight thousand to pay the delinquent county taxes so Dobbs doesn't ever put that name on the courthouse steps again. And the rest of it is going into a high-yield certificate of deposit at the farmer’s mutual in town, in Opal’s name alone."
Opal smiled—a small, sharp curve of her thin lips that didn't show her teeth.
"And when I die," she said, looking straight into Ronald’s eyes, "every cent of what’s left goes to the county library to build a history wing named after Arthur Becker. Not a penny to the ridge. Not a penny to the four-bedroom houses. You’ve had your inheritance, Ronald. You ate it fifty years ago."
Ronald looked as though he had been struck with a cedar post between his eyes. He reached out to touch the leather ledger, but Nate picked it up first, tucking it firmly under his arm.
"Come on, Emily," Nate said, reaching for my hand. "We’ve got eighty rods of fence to mend before the rain hits tonight."
"Nathan!" Judy cried, rising from her chair, her hands outstretched like a beggar. "Don't leave like this! It’s Sunday! We have pie in the kitchen!"
Nate didn't turn around. He walked through the dining room, through the air-conditioned hall, and out the front door into the heavy, honest heat of the afternoon.
I paused on the porch to help Opal down the three concrete steps. As her lace-up shoes hit the driveway, she turned and looked back at the yellow brick house, at the white-painted stones around the fake iron pump, and at the ornamental pear trees whose leaves were already turning yellow from the shallow soil.
"It looks like a cemetery," she remarked to no one in particular. "A very clean cemetery with a three-car garage."
May you like
We helped her into the cab of our battered Chevy, seating her between us on the cracked vinyl bench. Nate climbed in, turned the key, and the old engine roared to life, shaking the cab with its familiar, rhythmic vibration.
We pulled out of the driveway, our tires throwing up two small sprays of limestone gravel that pinged against Ronald’s mailbox. In the rearview mirror, I could see Ronald standing in the shadow of the garage, his blue dress shirt unbuttoned, his hands hanging limp at his sides, watching us descend the ridge toward the willow bottoms where the real water ran.
