My Father Left the Farm to the Neighbor’s Kid, and My Brothers Blamed Me Until I Read the Second Letter

Part 4: The Porch

I called Caleb at nine the next morning.

He answered on the first ring.

“Ma’am.”

“Caleb. I told you to stop calling me that when you were nineteen.”

There was a small sound on the other end. Not a laugh. Close.

“Sorry, Nora.”

“My brothers and I need to come over. We have something of my mother’s. It’s for you.”

He was quiet for long enough that I thought I’d lost the connection.

“Nora,” he said. “I want you to know I didn’t ask him. I didn’t know he was going to do it. I didn’t.”

“I know that, Caleb.”

“I’ve been sitting here trying to figure out how to give it back.”

“Don’t.”

“Nora.”

“Don’t give it back. That isn’t what he wanted and it isn’t what my mother wanted either. We’re coming over at eleven. Is that all right.”

Another long silence.

“Yes, ma’am.”

He hung up before I could correct him.

At ten forty-five Danny put on his coat and Paul put on his coat and I put the box under my arm and we walked. Not drove. Walked. Across the yard and through the gap in the east fence where a gate had been put in sometime in the last year that I had not noticed before, and across the Ruess field, and up to the back of Caleb’s house.

He was waiting on the porch.

He stood up when he saw us. He is a tall boy. Warren’s height, but not Warren’s build; leaner, and quieter in his body than his father had ever been. He had put on a button-down shirt.

Danny reached him first.

Danny is not a man who hugs other men. He put out his hand.

Caleb shook it.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Caleb said.

“He was yours too,” Danny said. “In whatever way he was. I’m sorry for your loss.”

Caleb’s mouth moved but nothing came out.

Paul went up the steps next and did the same thing with his hand, and said almost the same words, and then it was my turn and I did not shake his hand, I just gave him the box.

“Sit down,” I said. “Read what’s in there. We’ll wait inside if you want, or we’ll wait out here, or we’ll go home and you can call us. Whichever.”

“Stay,” he said.

We sat on the porch. It was cold. Diane came to the back door and looked out at us and did not come out, and I understood that she had known some of this for a long time too, maybe not all of it, and that she was not ready to be part of whatever was happening on her son’s porch.

That was all right. There would be time.

Caleb read the letter.

He read it once through fast and then he read it again slow. When he was done with the second time he set it down and picked up the photographs and looked at the one of Vernon holding the baby.

“That’s my grandma,” he said.

“Yes.”

“My great-grandpa.”

“Yes.”

He put the picture down and put his hands over his face and sat like that for a while.

None of us said anything.

When he took his hands away his eyes were wet but his voice was even.

“I don’t want it,” he said.

Danny opened his mouth.

“Wait,” Caleb said. “Let me finish. I don’t want it the way he gave it to me. I’ll take it. I’ll work it. But I’m not going to hold the deed by myself. That isn’t right. Not after this.” He put his hand on the letter. “I want it in all our names. Yours and yours and yours and mine. Equal.”

“That’s not what he wanted,” I said.

“He didn’t know about this letter when he wrote his.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do know it. Because if he’d known, he would have written it different.”

I thought about that.

I thought he was probably right.

Paul said, “Caleb. If we do it that way, Danny and I will sell our shares eventually. That’s just true. Danny to a developer or to you, Paul to whoever will lease the mineral rights. That’s how it will go. Even if we don’t mean it to.”

“Then sell them to me,” Caleb said. “For a dollar a year. Same as I’ve been paying him. I’ll take on the debt if there’s any. I’ll keep it as land. But your names stay on it. Nora’s especially.”

“Why especially,” I said.

He looked at me.

“Because you were the one who came to get me,” he said. “Five years ago. When I was in my dad’s garage doing nothing. You didn’t have to. You said your dad needed a hand and I knew you were lying and I came anyway. Everything after that started with you.”

I did not know what to do with that.

I nodded.

We sat on the porch a while longer. Diane came out eventually with a plate of coffee cake and set it on the little table and did not say anything and went back inside. Danny took a piece. Paul did not. I did, because it was Diane’s grandmother’s recipe and I knew that and I wanted her to know I knew it.

Before we left, Danny asked Caleb if he could see the equipment shed.

Just the two of them walked over.

They were gone about twenty minutes. I don’t know what they said. Paul and I sat on the porch and did not talk much. At one point Paul said, “I’m going to call more.”

I said, “Okay.”

He said, “I don’t know if I’ll be good at it.”

I said, “You won’t. Call anyway.”

That was the end of that conversation.

Danny and Caleb came back. Danny’s face was red from the cold and something else. He did not say what they’d talked about and I did not ask.

We walked back across the field.

At the fence Danny stopped and put his hand on the top wire and looked back at the Ruess house.

“He looks like Dad in that one picture,” he said. “The one of Vernon and Dad by the tractor.”

“He does.”

“I didn’t see it before.”

“You weren’t looking for it.”

He nodded.

We went back to the house and Paul made lunch, which was the first thing I could remember Paul making in that kitchen since he was in college. Danny washed the dishes. I sat at the table and did not help them and they did not ask me to.

Nothing was fixed.

Paul and Danny went back to their lives at the end of the week. Paul called twice in the next month, both times short, both times awkward. Danny did not call but he did send a text with a picture of the lake at his lake house and no caption, which for Danny was a lot.

The paperwork on the farm took months. Marilyn did most of it. Caleb and I signed things in her office and my brothers signed things in theirs and mailed them back. The deed ended up in four names, the way Caleb wanted, with a lease agreement that made him the operator for as long as he wanted to be and a right of first refusal on any share that ever went up for sale. Paul drafted it. He did it for free. He did not make a joke about it, which was how I knew he meant it.

Caleb calls me ma’am still. I have given up.

I go out to the farm most Sundays. Sometimes Caleb is there and sometimes he isn’t. When he is, we sit on the back porch and drink coffee and don’t say much, the way I used to sit with my father. When he isn’t, I sit alone.

The screen door still slaps the way it did when I was a girl.

One Sunday in the spring I found a small thing on the porch railing. A key. Brass, old, the kind that goes to a box.

There was a note under it, in Caleb’s handwriting, which is bad.

*Found this in the shed. Think it was his. Don’t know what it goes to. Thought you should have it.*

I put the key in my pocket.

I sat on the porch for a while, listening to the wind come across the field from the east, from Vernon’s old house, from Caleb’s house, from the line my father had crossed in 1971 and spent the rest of his life trying to walk back.

I did not know what the key went to.

I still don’t.

I keep it in the drawer by my bed anyway.