I did not sleep. I took Grandpa out of that camper at midnight, wrapped him in my pea coat, and put him in the back seat of the rental car with the heater on high. He kept saying, “Jakey, you will wake Brent.” I said, “Grandpa, I want him woken.” But first I took photographs of the camper, the bucket, the cord, and the laptop upstairs, with the timestamp turned on. Then I drove to the only place I trusted in Dodge City at that hour, the home of Sheriff Ray Delgado, an old friend of my grandfather.
Ray Delgado came to his door in a flannel robe, looked at Grandpa, looked at me, and went to get his boots. He did not ask a single question until the old man was in the kitchen, wrapped in an afghan, with a bowl of soup. Then he said, “Earl, I have known you since 1971. Tell me what you remember.” And Grandpa told him. The papers in April. The missing glasses. The camper. The sale agreement he had never seen. When he got to the part about the bucket, the sheriff stood up and walked to the window with his back to us.
At seven in the morning I called the Navy Legal Service Office in Norfolk, and a lieutenant commander with a calm voice listened for ten minutes. “Chief Holloway,” she said, “forging the signature of an attorney in fact on a real estate contract is a felony in Kansas. And exploiting an elder is a second one. Do not confront your cousin. Let the sheriff do it.” She gave me the number of the district attorney, and the name of a title company officer who would, she said, be very interested to hear from me.
A farm that has been paid off with sixty years of sweat cannot be sold by a man who never worked a single day of it.
The closing was at nine at a small title office on Wyatt Earp Boulevard. Brent arrived at five minutes to the hour in a clean shirt, with a briefcase, smiling, and sat across the table from two men in suits who represented the land company. He had the sale agreement. He had a power of attorney with my name forged on the seller line, dated in April, apparently signed in my absence. He did not see me in the corner of the room, behind a potted fern, in my dress blues. I had put them on that morning because I wanted him to see a sailor.
“Good morning, Brent,” I said. He turned around so quickly that his chair tipped. The color left his face as though a drain had opened. At that moment Sheriff Delgado walked in from the hall with two deputies and the title officer, a gray haired woman named Mrs. Lindgren, who held up the forged document and said, “Mr. Holloway, I have just confirmed by telephone with the real Chief Petty Officer Holloway that he was at sea in the South China Sea on the day this was signed. Would you like to explain?”
Brent did not explain. He tried to explain, for about ninety seconds, and then he sat down on the floor of the title office with his briefcase in his lap and began to cry. The deputies cuffed him there. In the car he said everything: the sportsbook, the debts, the loan shark in Wichita who had given him until Friday. He had thought it would be easy. The old man did not read. The cousin was at sea. Nobody would ever know. He had counted on nobody ever looking at the old man.
The county moved with the speed that comes when a decent sheriff takes something personally. The renters, nine strangers who had paid Brent seven hundred dollars a month to sleep in the bedrooms of my grandfather, were interviewed and released; all had been told a story about a landlord and a lease. The district attorney charged Brent with forgery, exploitation of an elder, and fraud. The bank, shown the affidavits, voided the home equity loan as the product of a crime. The farm that Earl Holloway had paid off in 1987 was his again, free and clear, down to the last acre of milo stubble.
Grandpa slept in his own bed that night, in his own room, with a new mattress and an electric blanket. I slept on the couch in the front room with my boots beside me. In the morning he came out in his robe and sat down across from me at the kitchen table and said, “Jakey, when I was your age, on the ship, I used to dream about this kitchen.” I made him eggs. He ate every bite. He told me, with tears in his eyes, that he was sorry for the camper. I told him there was nothing to be sorry for.
Brent pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six years. At the hearing, before the judge, he asked to read a letter. In a cracked voice he told his grandfather that he was sorry. Earl Holloway sat straight in the first row, in his Navy cap, and listened to the whole letter, and when it was over he stood up slowly and said, “Son, I forgive you. But you are going to prison.” Then he sat down. The courtroom was silent, and the judge, gray and weathered, nodded at him once, as one old sailor to another.
I put in for a transfer to the recruiting office in Wichita, ninety minutes from the farm. Every Friday I drive out, and we spend the weekend repairing the fence and the barn and the old camper, which he insists on keeping as a reminder. On Saturday evenings we sit on the porch and watch the wheat move in the wind like water. And once a month we write a letter to a prison in Lansing, in two handwritings, one steady and one shaky, signed Love, Grandpa and Jake.