That was when Mr. Haskins slid the paper across the table.
I unfolded it. It was an old-fashioned survey on heavy linen paper. In the corner was a surveyor’s stamp: Gilbert Okafor Sr., Registered Land Surveyor, Nebraska No. 211. It was dated April 2022, almost a year before Dad died.
It showed a long, thin drawing of the north edge of our property, with a hatched strip running along it. There was a row of small circles labeled PIN SET, distances in feet and tenths, and notes in cramped handwriting. Along one side, a line read 66.00′.
I didn’t understand it. Not then.
I looked up. Mr. Haskins was watching me with mild, steady eyes.
“Your father said you’d know when you needed to,” he said.
“Know what?”
“He didn’t say.”
There was one more document in the folder. Mr. Haskins showed it to me without comment: a copy of a warranty deed, recorded at the Harlan County Register of Deeds in April 2022, transferring “a strip of land sixty-six feet in width, lying along the north boundary” of the Dekker farm from Walter J. Dekker to Annie R. Dekker. Behind it was a copy of a federal gift tax return Dad had filed that same year, listing the strip’s value at $41,000.
My father had given me that strip of land a year before he died, and he’d never said a word.
I folded everything and put it in my purse.
Dale was still in the doorway, shaking his head and grinning with a look of enormous, affectionate pity.
“Sis, I’ll tell you what,” he said. “When I sell the back eighty, I’ll buy you a nice new roll of wire.”
“That’s kind,” I said.
He didn’t hear the tone. Men like Dale never do.
He moved into the house two weeks later. He brought a U-Haul full of leather furniture and a flat-screen TV the size of a barn door, which he hung over the fireplace where Mother’s wedding portrait had been.
I’d moved out the Sunday after the will was read, into a small rented bungalow on Oak Street in Alma, with a front porch and a crabapple tree. The rent was $725 a month. I took Mother’s portrait with me. I took Dad’s John Deere cap. I took the old wheat-sheaf oilcloth off the kitchen table and folded it into a box.
Dale didn’t notice. He was busy.
In the third week, a sign went up at the end of the road: FOR SALE — 80 ACRES PRIME BOTTOMLAND. LAND AUCTION. INQUIRE. A real estate company from Kearney had printed it in red and white, with a phone number.
Dale called me that night from the kitchen table I’d wiped down ten thousand times.
“Nothing personal, Annie. I’m not a farmer. I’m cashing out the back eighty and renting out the rest.”
“Renting to whom?”
“The Pruitt boys. They’ll farm the whole thing for cash rent. Two-ninety an acre.”
“And what does the back eighty bring?”
“Realtor says sixty-five hundred an acre. Maybe seven thousand.” He couldn’t keep the pleasure out of his voice. “Call it half a million dollars.”
“That’s the best ground on the place.”
“I know.”
“Dad used to say it’d grow corn on a rock.”
“Dad said a lot of things.” He laughed. “Look, I’m not selling the farm. I’m restructuring. It’s business.”
“Of course,” I said.
I hung up and sat on my little porch with the phone in my lap, in the first warm week of April, with the crabapple coming into bloom. I took the survey out of my purse, unfolded it on my knee, and read it again slowly, the way I’d read a ledger.
I still didn’t understand it.
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