The county zoning hearing on that rezoning was the first Tuesday in December, seven o’clock, developer’s posters already up on the easels, and I got there at six-thirty and walked in the front door of that meeting room with old Harland himself beside me, folder in his hand, the same folder he’d been putting together with me every afternoon that whole November.
What Harland had drawn up wasn’t a will or a simple deed. Back when my own health scare first started two years ago, before my son’s “folder with the little colored tabs” ever showed up at my kitchen table, I’d already gone to Harland and set the section up as a family limited partnership, with myself as sole general partner, permanently, for as long as I lived and remained willing to farm it. My son held a limited partnership interest, same as I’d always intended he eventually would. What he didn’t hold was any voting authority over the land itself, not without my consent, no matter whose name eventually showed up on ownership percentages.
Harland read the relevant clause to the zoning board himself, since I asked him to.
“The General Partner shall retain sole and exclusive authority over all decisions regarding use, sale, rezoning applications, or development of the partnership’s real property, notwithstanding any limited partner’s percentage interest in the partnership.”
My son had apparently been so confident that a signature from me would settle the rezoning that he’d never once checked whether the partnership itself, the very structure through which he’d eventually inherit an interest in that ground, actually gave him any say over what happened to it while I was still alive and still farming it myself.
The developer’s own attorney, standing near his posters, didn’t have much to say once Harland finished reading. A rezoning application built on the assumption of my consent doesn’t move forward without my consent, full stop, and the board tabled the whole matter that same night once Harland’s filing was entered into the record.
My son called me again that night, past midnight this time, a different tone than the one from eleven-thirty. He hadn’t known about the partnership structure. I hadn’t told him, mostly because I hadn’t imagined I’d need to defend my own wheat against my own boy. We had a long, hard conversation over the following weeks, some of it about money, most of it about what he actually saw when he looked at that ground versus what I still see when I look at it.
Sixty-one years farming the section my father broke outside Wichita taught me plenty about patience with weather you can’t control. Turns out it applies just as well to a son who forgot, for a little while, that a stubborn old man’s dirt sometimes comes with paperwork a good deal more stubborn than he is.