Where I drove that morning was a real-estate lawyer’s office in town — because Earl was wrong about one thing when he told me a handshake don’t hold up in court. It’s true a handshake is hard to prove. But fraud is a different animal, and what Earl pulled was fraud.
The papers he had me sign weren’t the deal we shook on. We’d agreed on four hundred acres at a fair price. What the recorded deed described was near double the acreage, at the price we’d set for four hundred — he’d slipped the back canyon and the water rights into the legal description, betting an old man wouldn’t read the metes and bounds. When a contract is gotten by lying about what’s in it, the law calls that fraud in the inducement, and a court can set the whole thing aside.
And I wasn’t as alone on that handshake as he thought. My banker had been standing right there when we made the deal — he’d come out to talk about the loan against my wife’s bills, and he heard every word of the four hundred acres. My hired man heard it too. Earl shook on one thing in front of witnesses and wrote down another.
When my lawyer laid the recorded deed next to what two honest men swore we’d agreed to, Earl’s toothpick-chewing confidence dried right up. A judge doesn’t take kindly to a man who rewrites a deal a dying woman’s husband couldn’t afford to fight.
Earl settled rather than sit in a courtroom in a county where everybody’s known us both since we were boys. The deed was corrected to the four hundred acres we shook on. I kept my canyon and my water. And I still got the cash I needed for my wife, at the honest price.
He said I was getting soft in my old age. But a man’s word is still worth something out here — and when it isn’t, the law will make it worth something.
Sixty years of friendship is gone, and that’s a grief of its own. But my wife got her care, my land is whole, and I can still look every man in this valley in the eye. Earl can’t say the same.