My brother laughed so hard he had to leave the room.
It started small, a breath through the nose. Then it grew. He put his hand over his mouth, his shoulders started to shake, and he stood up so fast the chair scraped across the linoleum. He walked out onto the porch, and through the screen door I heard him: a big, rolling, delighted laugh carrying across the farmyard, going on and on.
Then he came back to the doorway, wiping his eyes.
“A fence, Annie!” he said. “He left you a fence! Four years of driving him to dialysis, and you got barbed wire!”
I sat very still at the kitchen table.
Across from me, Mr. Haskins, my father’s attorney for forty years, did not laugh. He didn’t even look at Dale. He took a folded paper from his manila folder, slid it across the oilcloth to me with two fingers, and said very quietly:
“Your father had this done last spring. He asked me to make sure you got the original.”
My name is Annie Dekker. I’m fifty-eight years old. For sixty years, people in Harlan County, Nebraska, have been telling me who I am, so let me tell you myself.
I kept the books for the Farmers Co-op elevator in Alma for twenty-six years, and I kept my father’s farm books for thirty-one. I know the difference between a margin and a hope. I never married. People say that like it’s a diagnosis, and I’ve stopped correcting them.
My father, Walter Dekker, farmed four hundred eighty acres of corn and soybeans in the Republican River bottoms, the same ground his father first plowed in 1938. Dad was a big, slow, watchful man who wore his John Deere cap indoors and had a habit of saying nothing for a full minute before saying the one thing that mattered.
My mother, Ruth, died of a stroke when I was thirty-four. After that it was the three of us. Then, since my brother was long gone by then, it was really just the two of us.
My brother Dale is sixty-one. He’s handsome, loud, and easygoing. He sells commercial insurance in Omaha and wears cowboy boots he’s never worked a day in. He left home the week after his high school graduation in 1983 and only came back for Christmases, for Mother’s funeral, for Dad’s, and for a handful of Fourth of Julys. Each time, he walked around the farmyard like a man touring a museum.
I don’t hate him. I want to be fair about that. But he was the son. Out here, among men my father’s age, that still carries a weight you can feel in a room, like humidity.
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