“…I told him the back eighty was not for sale, not for any price, not to any man who ever wore a necktie,” Doc Pruitt said, and he set his pen down on the porch rail with a ceremonial little click. He was eighty eight years old, in a faded plaid shirt and a cap with a feed store logo, and he had signed the deed that night with a hand so steady it might have belonged to a surgeon. I sat in the wicker chair across from him with my father old coffee mug in both hands, and I watched the fireflies lift out of the pasture in the dusk.
He told me the rest while the evening cooled. The realtor, a smooth young man named Hollis in a pale blue suit, had telephoned that afternoon and offered a hundred and sixty thousand dollars cash for the back eighty. Doc had asked who the buyer was. The realtor had hesitated, and then said it was a family matter, and that the Holloway brothers would be glad to see the sale go through. “So I asked him,” Doc said, “whether a man could sell what he did not own. And he went real quiet.”
Greg and Mike had understood the value of the land, it turned out. They had read the survey. They knew the well was on the back eighty, the one that supplied the farmhouse, the barn, and the old stock tank. They had planned to buy the eighty from Doc, quietly, hold it, and then sell the farmhouse with a well easement at a handsome price, or else leave me with a dry house and a broken heart. It had been a clever scheme. But they had forgotten the oldest rule of that country, which is that a man who shakes your hand on a fence line will not forget it.
A handshake from 1998, a deed recorded with a cheerful thump, and a well house painted white at the edge of the clover.
The following morning, Doc and I drove to the county courthouse in Lexington in his old Ford, with the deed on the dashboard and a thermos of coffee between us. He wore his one good jacket. We stopped at the register of deeds, where a clerk named Mrs. Tillman, a woman I had nursed through a gallbladder surgery in 1998, recorded the paper with a cheerful thump. She said, “Well, Diane, that is the loveliest thing I have stamped all month.” I thanked her, and Doc said, gruffly, that it was no more than a handshake, made official.
I telephoned Greg that afternoon. He picked up on the second ring, in his Louisville office, and said hello in the clipped tone of a man in the middle of something important. I told him that the back eighty acres had been transferred to me by deed, recorded that morning, from Doc Pruitt, under a contract signed in 1998 by our father. There was a pause. I could hear him breathing. Then he said, very coldly, “Diane, you are making a mistake.” I said, “Greg, it is already made.”
He drove to the farm that weekend with Mike, in a black SUV. They stood in the kitchen of the house where we had been born, and they argued with me for two hours. They said that I had tricked an old man. They said that the well was a technicality. They said that Dad had always intended to treat us equally. I listened. I poured coffee. I waited for them to finish. At last, when they ran out of words, I told them what I had decided, and it was not what they expected.
I said I would not keep the farmhouse for myself alone. I said that Dad would have been ashamed of that. The house, the land, and the well were worth, by my estimate, four hundred and eighty thousand dollars. I would buy their shares from them at a fair price, over ten years, with a note signed at the bank, and I would pay them interest. They would each receive a hundred and sixty thousand dollars, which was precisely what the law would have given them. But the house would stay in the family, and the well would stay with the house.
Mike spoke first. He sat down heavily on one of the kitchen chairs and said, “Diane, why would you do that?” I said, “Because he was our father, and he built this place for all three of us, and he gave it to me only because I stayed.” I said that nothing in the world could make me a better sister than I had been to him in those last years. And I said that I would rather be fair than be right. Greg looked at the floor for a very long time. Then he said, “Okay.”
They signed the note that Thursday. The bank manager in Versailles, a gray haired woman who had known Dad, said it was the most civil family settlement she had seen in thirty years. Greg shook my hand in the parking lot. Mike hugged me, stiffly, and said he would try to come at Thanksgiving. I did not believe him. But in November, a black SUV did pull up the gravel drive, and two grown men carried in a turkey and a pie, and ate at the table where they had been children.
On the first warm evening of spring, Doc Pruitt and I sat on the porch with our feet on the rail, watching the new calves wobble in the back eighty. The well house, freshly painted white, stood at the edge of the clover. Doc said nothing for a while. Then he took out his pocket watch, looked at it, and tucked it back. “Your father would have liked this,” he said. I said I thought he did. And somewhere in the green dusk, a cow lowed once, softly, like an amen.