“To my son Wade,” the lawyer read, “the 1994 International feed truck, with the mixer box, and its title.”
He stopped there. Because that was where the sentence stopped.
I waited for the next one.
There wasn’t a next one.
It was a Tuesday, the last week of February, in a little office above the hardware store in St. Paul, Nebraska. The radiator ticked. Somebody downstairs was cutting a key, and you could hear the grinder through the floor.
My brother Phil sat across the table from me in a sport coat, with his reading glasses folded in his hand. He didn’t look up.
The sentence right before mine had been his.
“To my son Phil, the home place, being the home quarter, the east eighty, and the creek pasture, with the buildings, the irrigation equipment, and the machinery.”
Four hundred acres. The center pivot. The house we were both raised in. The shop where I’d spent twenty-two winters with my hands inside one piece of iron or another.
Phil is fifty-six. He sells insurance in Omaha. He hadn’t driven a tractor in thirty years.
I’m fifty-one. I hadn’t gone more than nine days in a row without driving one since I was a boy.
The lawyer’s name was Don Jensen. He was a decent man who’d known my father since they were both kids in 4-H. He set the paper down on the table and squared it with two fingers.
“Wade,” he said. “He came in here in November, and he was in his right mind. I want you to hear that from me. He knew exactly what he was signing.”
“I don’t doubt it,” I said.
“He didn’t say why. I asked him.”
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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