I locked the door of my notary office on Broadway at five minutes past two, turned the sign to Closed, and put the key in my cardigan pocket, and then I stood very still with my stamp in my hand, listening to the radiator tick. Pastor Dahl had said to lock the door and not to let either of them leave. Kevin was at the front desk, still arguing about Venmo, and the old farmer, Gunnar Aaberg, sat quietly in the client chair with his John Deere cap back on his head. He looked at me and nodded once, like a man whose cattle had finally been driven home.
The telephone on my desk rang eleven minutes later. It was Pastor Dahl, who turned out to be a retired deputy of Cass County as well as a Lutheran minister, six feet four inches tall and eighty pounds heavier than he looked on the telephone. He told me that two men in a gray rental car had crossed the state line from South Dakota at noon, and that deputies had been following them since Fargo. They were parked across the street at the dry cleaner. I looked through the blinds. Two big men were leaning against a car, looking at my door.
Kevin heard the word deputies through the open door of my office. He turned from the receptionist, saw the locked door, saw the Closed sign, and understood. “You called someone,” he said, in a thin voice. “You called them on me.” His father did not look away from him. “Kevin,” said Gunnar softly, “I called Pastor Dahl on Sunday, when the men came to the farm. They said they would take the cattle if you did not pay them by Friday. I could not let the land of your mother go for a card game in Tunica.”
An index card slid under a deed gave one notary the afternoon to bring a farmer back to his land in Fargo.
I gave my terms from behind my desk, with the stamp on the blotter and my hands folded, in the voice that I use for the reading of a will. “Mr. Aaberg, I will not notarize this deed. Not today, and not on any day that you are afraid. Kevin, your father is not a hostage and neither are you. Pastor Dahl and two deputies are going to come to this door in about four minutes, and you are going to walk out of it with them, alive and unhurt. And then you are going to tell them everything about the men across the street, and about Tunica, and about the four hundred thousand dollars.”
Kevin sagged against the filing cabinet. “Dad, I did not mean for them to come to the farm,” he said. “I borrowed forty thousand at the start, and then it was eighty, and then they added the interest, and I stopped being able to sleep. I thought if I got the deed, I could sell the cattle and pay them off before you ever knew.” His eyes filled. “I was going to put you in the home in Fargo. I had the paper. I am the worst son in the state of North Dakota, and you came in here wearing your good cap.”
Then, in a burst of panic, Kevin lunged across my desk, snatched the signed deed and my stamp, and dashed to the door. He fumbled with the lock. I had thought to put the key in my pocket, but I had not thought of the deadbolt on the inside, and it turned under his hand. He threw the door open and ran straight into the chest of Pastor Dahl, who was coming up the stoop with two deputies behind him. The pastor did not even grunt. He took the deed from the hand of Kevin, gently, as one takes a bulletin from a child.
“Son,” said Pastor Dahl, “sit down on the step.” Kevin sat on the step of my office, in the October cold, and put his head between his knees. Across the street, the two men by the gray car saw the deputies and tried to leave, but a third squad car was already pulling across the end of the block. They were handcuffed against their own hood before they got their doors open. My receptionist Marlys, who had been hiding under the front desk with a stapler held like a club, came out and set it down.
The money consequences were swift. The two men were charged with extortion, conspiracy and illegal gambling collection, and the investigation led to a ring in Tunica that was shut down that winter. Kevin cooperated and was given treatment and probation. The deed was torn into small pieces in front of his father, and the farm of two point six million dollars stayed in the name of Gunnar. I returned the twenty dollar fee to Kevin the day he was released, and he did not understand why until I told him.
Gunnar started the Helen Aaberg Fund, in the name of his wife who passed in 2019, and I sit on its board. It pays for legal help, crisis counseling and emergency feed for farm families in trouble, in Cass, Richland and Traill counties. In the first year we helped forty four families. One was a widow of seventy in Casselton whose nephew had tried to talk her into signing over her quarter section. A lawyer from our list was in her kitchen the next morning. She poured him coffee in her best cups.
I notarized my ninth thousand and first document the following spring. Gunnar Aaberg came into my office in his John Deere cap with Kevin beside him, ninety days clean, and they signed a simple paper that put the farm into a trust with a lawyer and a counselor as protectors. I checked the identification. I watched the signatures. And when the old man looked at me and said, “Free will, madam,” I smiled and pressed the stamp down as hard as I could.