The second page of the clipboard was a signed agreement between Gulf Coast Senior Equity and a man named Grant Hollis, the boyfriend of my daughter, and it paid him seventy five thousand dollars for delivering Del Strickland. That was the word. Delivering. Roy Beckett watched me read it in the shade of the barn, sixty years gone from our days in Clewiston, with his hat crushed in both hands. “Del,” he said, “I took this job in March because I needed it. I did not know who the lead was until last week. When I saw your name on the list, I could not sleep.”
The first page was a reverse mortgage application on my house and the last two hundred acres I kept, with a line at the bottom for my signature, and a power of attorney naming Kimberly as agent for my accounts. The second page told the rest. Grant had been carrying a list for two years of older farmers in Lee, Hendry and Glades counties, with notes beside each name: lives alone, widowed, daughter nearby, sold land. Beside mine he had written, in a small neat hand, SOLD 12.6. EASY. DAUGHTER WILL PUSH. I read that last line several times, and the heat in my face was not from the sun.
Rogelio came out of the shed wiping his hands. He had run the farm with me for forty years, and he looked at my face and then at Roy, and said, in Spanish, something his mother would not have wished him to say. I told him to set out three chairs. We sat in the shade by the old sprayer, an old foreman, an old classmate and a retired farmer, and I asked Roy if he would stand beside me that evening when Grant and Kimberly came to supper. He took a long breath. “Del, I would be proud to.”
A clipboard handed over in the shade of a barn gave one retired sod farmer the length of a single supper to bring his daughter back to the truth in Fort Myers.
I gave my terms to Grant and Kimberly at the long table on the porch, with Roy Beckett in the chair at my right and a roast chicken cooling between us. Grant would end his arrangement with Gulf Coast Senior Equity and give the Florida attorney general the full list of the farmers he had marked. He would repay every dollar he had ever been paid for a name. And he would leave this house, and my daughter, by Friday. I said it kindly, at the same speed I used to say grace. I wanted Kimberly to hear every word.
Grant tried to explain it as business. Older people needed liquidity, he said, and he had only helped them find it. Then Roy slid a second printout across the table, a list of eleven farmers who had signed with the company in two years, and four of them had lost their land. Grant stopped talking. Kimberly picked the page up. She read each name aloud, slowly, and when she came to the fourth she said, “I went to school with her granddaughter.” She put the paper down and looked at him as if she had met him that moment.
Grant snatched the clipboard and the printout off the table, meaning to run to his Tahoe and leave before anyone could copy a page, and he bolted off the porch and down the shell drive with the papers fluttering behind him, past the oleanders and the mailbox, toward the road where his car waited with its engine already ticking in the dusk. Roy half rose from his chair. Rogelio only smiled, because he had spent forty years watching that driveway, and he knew exactly who used it.
He did not reach it. A gopher tortoise the size of a hubcap had chosen that exact moment to cross the drive, and it stopped in the middle, as tortoises do, to consider the world. Grant tried to leap over it and landed in the oleander. He tried to go around and found Rogelio standing there with a hose. A tortoise cannot be hurried. Everybody on the porch knew it, even Kimberly. She began to laugh until she cried, and Grant sat on the shell drive beside the tortoise, defeated, with a leaf in his hair.
Grant gave the list to the state, and it saved three farm families from signing. He left Fort Myers in March and, last I heard, was selling pest control in Tampa. Gulf Coast Senior Equity lost its license and paid a large fine. Roy Beckett got a call from the office of the attorney general asking if he would testify, and he did, in his Sunday suit, for four hours. Kimberly moved back into my guest room. For a month she hardly spoke. Then one morning she came out to the sod field in boots and asked what she could do.
In the name of Jolene, who passed in 2020, I started the Jolene Strickland Sod Fund. It pays for legal review of reverse mortgages, deeds and powers of attorney for older farmers in Lee, Hendry and Glades counties. In the first year we reviewed sixty one documents and stopped nine unfair ones. One cattleman in Labelle, ninety two years old, drove his truck forty miles to the office with a signed paper that he did not understand, and when we explained it he said a word I will not repeat. Then he asked for a cup of coffee.
On Saturdays Kimberly and Rogelio and I walk the rows together, the way Jolene and I did, and Kimberly learns the names of the grasses. Bahia, zoysia, St. Augustine. The tortoise, whom we named Beckett, lives at the end of the drive and sits in the sun beside the mailbox. When the wind comes off the Gulf and moves across the green, the whole field ripples like water, and I tell my daughter that my wife once said that this was the closest thing to the sea that a man could grow.