Part 3 — The Third Son
The officer read the name from the letter slowly. “Raymond Dahl, of Canton, South Dakota.” A murmur went through the yard, because everyone knew Ray Dahl. He ran the wheel and alignment shop on Main Street, and for fifty years he had fixed the flats of half the county without once sending a bill to a widow. He was standing at the back of the barbecue crowd with a paper plate of brats, and he looked as though the ground had tilted.
Dad had written it all down in his careful hand. In 1952, before he married our mother, he had known a young woman named Elsie Dahl who worked at the creamery in Canton. Her father had sent her away to an aunt in Iowa when she turned up expecting a child, and Dad had been a young man of twenty-two with no money and a hired-man job on a farm that was not yet his. He had written to her for a year. The letters came back unopened.
The boy was born in the spring of 1953 and raised by Elsie and the man she later married, Mr. Dahl, who gave him his name. Dad did not find out until the boy was grown, and by then he had a wife and two sons and a farm and a fear that the truth would break the house. So he did the only thing he knew how to do. He watched from a distance. He bought every flat repair and every set of new wheels for the farm from the shop on Main Street for forty years, and he always paid in full.
Leland had known. That came out in the yard, in the low voice of a man who has been carrying a stone for a decade. He had found the letter in the desk of Dad the week of the funeral, and he had understood at once what it meant: a third heir, and an older one. So he had hidden the will, filed the old one, and sent the papers where nobody would ever look, in the spare wheels of his brother, with the one order that no wheel shop was ever to touch them.
I walked through the crowd to Ray. It took a long time because people kept stepping aside. He set down his plate and wiped his hands on his shop apron, because he had come straight from work. We stood facing each other, two old men with the same big ears. “I changed the oil in your truck for thirty years,” he said. “You never asked me why I would not take your money.” “I thought you were being neighborly.” “I was,” said Ray. “I just did not know how neighborly.”
The deputy took charge of the will, the deed and the sixth spare, and a lawyer from the county was called that evening. The law was plain. The will of 2013 was valid, the earlier will was revoked by it, and a person who hides a will to profit commits a felony in South Dakota. The court would reinstate the will and name Augustus the heir of the home place, with a gift of forty acres along the creek to Raymond Dahl, as Dad had written in the last paragraph.
Leland pleaded guilty in the spring to concealing a will and to converting the property of the estate. The court calculated what a driver is paid by law for ten years of miles, set it against what he had paid me, and ordered the difference repaid, $187,000 in all. Rademacher Freight was sold to cover it. Leland moved to a small house in Harrisburg. In the hallway of the courthouse he said, “Dad loved you more, Gus.” I said, “Dad loved all three of us. He just never said.”
Bev took my arm on the courthouse steps. “Gus, I am sorry I told you to let it lie.” “You said what you knew,” I told her. “So did I, for ten years.” She laughed and wiped her eyes with the back of her glove, and we walked to the pickup together. For the first time in a decade I did not feel like a hired hand in my own marriage.
I drove the Kenworth to the shop of Ray on the Monday after the hearing, and he put six new wheels on it free of charge. I tried to argue. He pulled the sixth old spare off the rack and showed me the cut in it. “Your father hid his heart in here,” he said, “and mine is the only shop in the county that would have found it.” We shook on it. Neither of us said the word brother, but it sat on the counter between us like a wrench.
The home place is mine now, in the way a farm belongs to a man, which is to say that I belong to it too. In April Ray and I walked the forty acres along the creek where the old orchard stands. The apple trees were in blossom, white against the black bark, and he stopped under the oldest one and put his hand on the trunk. “He told me once that this was his favorite spot,” he said. “I thought he was just talking.”
A man can hide a will for ten years, but he cannot hide a good father from the sons who finally read the handwriting. I keep the Christmas card in my road atlas, folded into the Iowa page, and sometimes at night I take it out and read it by the light of the kitchen window.
The following Thanksgiving there were three of us at the table of the home place. Leland came late with a pie he had bought at the Hy-Vee, and he sat at the end, and nobody said anything about it. Ray carved. The chair of Dad stayed empty, and the window behind it showed the field in the last light, gold stubble and a long blue shadow, and I thought that this was exactly how he had meant it to be.