The name on the signature line was Jean.
My sister. Sitting two rows back with her hand in her lap where mine had just been.
Milton read it the way a man reads something he wishes he had not been handed. Jean, signing as attorney in fact for Beverly. And the whole Grange hall turned to look at her, and Jean did not look up.
I knew what it was the moment I heard it. The year after Orville passed, when I was seventy-two and alone on twelve acres, Jean had taken me to a lawyer in town and we had signed a power of attorney. In case I fell. In case I ended up in the hospital and somebody needed to pay the power bill or talk to the doctors. That is what it was for. That is what I had understood it was for.
Scott had understood it differently. He had told Jean that I was slipping, that I forgot things, that the orchard would be lost if somebody did not act. He had told her that a seventy-five-year-old woman could not hold a water right and that the state would take it back if it was not transferred to an active grower. None of that was true, but Jean did not know water law, and she trusted her brothers boy, and she signed.
She stood up in the Grange hall and said all of that, out loud, in a voice I had not heard from her since we were girls. She said Scott had told her it was to keep the orchard in the family. She said she had never once imagined he would turn the water off.
Milton let her finish. Then he said what I needed every person in that room to hear. A power of attorney lets somebody act for you. It does not let them give your property away to a third party for nothing, and it does not let them sign a transfer the principal has not asked for. The state would void it. He would send the letter himself.
Scott had not needed to steal my signature, because he had found somebody who loved me enough to be talked into signing for me.
The water came on the next morning at six. I stood in the oldest row and watched the sprinklers come up, and I will admit that I sat down in the dirt and stayed there for a while.
The state Department of Ecology voided the transfer within the month. The certificate from the Folgers can is now in a safe deposit box with a copy at the district office, and the district has a note in my file that says no change to this account without the owner present in person.
I revoked the power of attorney the same week. Jean drove me to do it. She did not try to talk me out of it. Then I signed a new one, with Jean on it again, but with a line that says she cannot transfer, sell, or encumber any real property or water right, and that line is in bold.
Scotts lease was done. The lease said the tenant had to maintain the orchard in good husbandry, and letting twelve acres go dry for three weeks in August is the opposite of that. My lawyer sent one letter. Scott did not answer it, and he did not come back for his equipment for two months.
I lost about a third of the crop. The young trees took it hardest. The oldest row, the one Orville planted the year we were married, the one I hauled buckets to every night, did not lose a single tree.
A neighbors daughter leases the orchard now. She is thirty-one and she grew up packing fruit at the same warehouse I did. She pays by the bin, same as the old lease, and she calls it Bevs orchard at the fruit stand, and she has never once said anything about my age.
Jean comes on Sundays. We do not talk about Scott. We sit on the porch and look at the trees, and some weeks she still says she is sorry, and I tell her what I told her the first time. You signed because you thought you were saving it. He turned the water off because he thought nobody would notice. Those are not the same thing, and I know the difference.