Dad’s kidneys failed in 2019.
That meant dialysis on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at the clinic in Holdrege, forty minutes each way and four hours in the chair. I drove him. For four years, a hundred and fifty-six round trips a year, in a Buick whose heater only worked on one side. I brought a thermos and a crossword. He brought silence.
Medicare covered most of the dialysis. His supplement plan through the co-op picked up the rest, $214 a month, which I paid out of his checking account on the first of every month. I kept the receipts in a folder labeled DAD — MEDICAL, because that’s what I do.
Somewhere around the second winter, he started talking.
Not about feelings. About ground.
He told me where the drainage tile lines ran under the fields, which I already knew, and where they’d been laid wrong in 1962, which I didn’t. He told me what his own father used to say about the river. He taught me how a piece of land is described in a deed, the old language of it: thence south sixty-six feet, to the place of beginning. He told me why the old surveyors measured with chains.
“A chain’s sixty-six feet,” he said once, while the dialysis machine hummed beside him. “Four rods. Eighty chains to the mile. Everything out here is built on it.”
“Why sixty-six?”
“Easy to count. Easy to divide.” He closed his eyes. “And a road right-of-way out here is always a chain wide. You remember that.”
I said I would. I thought it was just a man passing the time.
He died on March 9th, 2023, in his own bed, at seventy-nine, with the window cracked open. I held one of his hands. Dale, who’d flown in the night before, stood at the foot of the bed with his arms folded and his phone in his pocket.
Dad’s last words weren’t to either of us. He looked up at the ceiling and said, quite clearly, “Pins are good.”
Dale looked at me. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know.”
I didn’t. But I wrote it down on the notepad by the bed, because I write things down.
The will was read at the kitchen table three days after the funeral, in the house where I grew up.
Dale sat at the head of the table, in Dad’s chair. I noticed and didn’t say anything. I sat on the side. Mr. Haskins sat across from me. He was eighty, thin and stooped and courtly, and he read legal documents the way other men read scripture, one syllable at a time. He wore a brown suit and a bolo tie, and his manila folder sat squared in front of him.
“Last Will and Testament of Walter J. Dekker,” he began. “Being of sound mind…”
I looked down at my hands, folded on the oilcloth, the same wheat-sheaf pattern I’d wiped down ten thousand times.
“To my son Dale, I give the home place, the house, all machinery and equipment, and all my real estate more particularly described in Exhibit A, being the four hundred eighty acres, less and except the north strip previously conveyed.”
Dale didn’t even try to hide it. A slow smile spread across his face. He leaned back in Dad’s chair and settled into it like a man sinking into a warm bath.
“To my daughter Annie,” Mr. Haskins read in the same level voice, “I confirm the north fence line, as surveyed, together with the ground it occupies, which I conveyed to her by deed during my lifetime. I direct that she receive the original survey.”
Silence.
Then Dale laughed.
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