That winter, I sat down with Walter Brekke and made my will.
The home eighty goes into a trust for Henry when I die. Don Halverson’s son, Greg, a CPA in Mason City, is the trustee, at Don’s insistence. Mabel is named as Henry’s guardian if anything happens to me before he turns eighteen, with Barb and Don as backup.
Truman isn’t named anywhere in it. Not yet.
“Someday maybe,” I told Walter. “Not yet.”
“That seems right,” he said.
I also paid him $650 to draw up a custom harvesting agreement, the first written agreement I’ve ever had with anybody to cut their crops. Starting the next fall, I’d harvest Truman’s forty with Morris’s combine at the going custom rate: $38 an acre for soybeans, $42 for corn. That’s $1,520 a year for beans. He’d pay it out of his grain check, the same way everybody else around here does.
“You’re charging him?” Mabel asked when I told her.
“Morris would have,” I said. “He’d have charged him the neighbor rate, a few dollars under. And Truman would have paid it, so he wouldn’t feel like a charity case.”
Mabel laughed, really laughed, for the first time since the funeral.
“You’re right,” she said. “That’s exactly what Morris would’ve done.”
The Kruse brothers lost about a fifth of their beans to the rain that week. They’d quit their own harvest to come look for my keys. Every bushel they lost was on my account, as far as I was concerned.
In November, after harvest was done, I wrote them a check for $3,800. The Kruses tore it up in front of me at the co-op, in front of half the town.
“You’ll get us back,” Lyle said. “Next time one of us is down, you show up with a flashlight. That’s how it works out here.”
So I did something else. I called the eleven people who had walked my bean field in the dark, plus Ethan, and invited every one of them, with their families, to a supper at the Lutheran church hall in December.
I bought the ham. Mabel made scalloped potatoes, enough for forty. Barb made her famous rhubarb pie. Pastor Ingrid brought the hotdish she’d promised. Marlys Fenske brought tomatoes she’d canned from Morris’s old garden plot, which I hadn’t even known she’d been tending.
Truman came. He stood at the back of the hall in his clean flannel shirt, holding a paper cup of coffee, looking like he wanted to disappear.
Then Don Halverson walked over to him, set a hand on his shoulder, and steered him to a seat at the end of a long table.
“Sit,” Don said. “Eat. You’re family.”
Specialty: Quiet Comebacks & Personal Justice
David Reynolds focuses on stories where underestimated individuals regain control of their lives. His writing centers on measured decisions rather than dramatic outbursts — emphasizing preparation, patience, and the long game. His characters don’t shout; they act.