The young clerk turned her monitor so that I could see it, and her voice dropped to a whisper. “Mrs. Lindqvist, there is something strange about the deed.” She was perhaps twenty five, with a lanyard full of pins, and I could see that she was frightened of her own screen. On it was a scanned page, the one I could not remember signing, and a notary stamp in the corner. She put her finger beside the stamp. “This notary is not in our county. And her commission expired in March.”
I took out my glasses and read the line twice. The deed transferred the four hundred and twenty acres to an entity called Lindqvist Land Holdings, LLC, formed in May, and the transfer bore the signature of Doris Lindqvist, dated April the ninth. My sons had brought the form to my kitchen on April the eleventh. The clerk saw me counting on my fingers and said what I could not. “It was signed two days before they came to you, Mrs. Lindqvist.”
I asked her to print every page and to stamp them as certified copies. Then I spread the ledgers of Arne on the counter, forty one years of my own handwriting in the margins of his. In one of them, in 1987, I had signed my name to a loan for the new milking parlor. I laid the old signature beside the new one. The loop of the D in the ledger faced forward, the way it has since I was a girl. The loop on the deed was backward.
The clerk, whose name was Kayla, walked me to the office of the Register, a stout and kindly man named Mr. Dunleavy, who read the deed, studied the signatures, and called the county sheriff and the district attorney in that order. He told me not to speak to my sons until I had spoken with a lawyer. I thanked him, and drove to Green Bay, to a woman named Ingrid Solheim, who had helped Arne with his will, and who stood up from her desk when she saw my face.
Ms. Solheim worked faster than any person I have ever met. By noon she had filed a notice against the title of the property, which meant the development firm could not close. By two in the afternoon she had a handwriting examiner on the phone. By four, she had called the title company that was insuring the sale, whose agent turned out to be a calm and honest man who thanked her and said his company would not insure a transaction with a forged deed. By evening the closing on the fifteenth was off.
I did not sleep. At midnight, Kurt called. He was crying. He said he was sorry, that the buyer had promised him half a million dollars just for arranging it, that Brian had talked him into it, that they were in trouble with the bank over the equipment loans and the debt on the new house in De Pere. He had meant to tell me at the closing. He had meant to explain it all. I let him talk. When he finished I said, “Come to the kitchen in the morning. Bring your brother.”
They came at seven, hats in hands, like boys. I made coffee, because that is what you do. I set a plate of toast in the middle of the table and the certified copies next to it. Brian could not look at me. Kurt stared at the deed, at the backward D, and said, “Mom, I practiced it for a week.” Nobody spoke for a very long time. Then I said that Ms. Solheim and the district attorney would decide what the law required, and that I would tell the truth to anyone who asked.
The law required less than I feared, and more than they wanted. The district attorney, after reading the file and talking to me, agreed to charge Brian and Kurt with a single count of forgery each, which they pleaded to, with probation and a requirement of restitution. The notary who had stamped the document lost her commission. The buyer, a man named Prescott, had acted within the rules of the title company and withdrew politely. The land stayed in the family, but not in the hands of my sons.
Land passes through many hands, but it belongs most surely to those who loved it before anyone thought to sell it.
Ms. Solheim and I drew up a trust that same month. The four hundred and twenty acres would stay in the Lindqvist name, held for the benefit of my grandchildren, with a neighbor named Ole Hanson, who rents the south pasture, as the trustee. My sons would be permitted to work the dairy for wages, under the supervision of Ole, and they would repay the legal costs a little at a time. If they proved themselves, the trust allowed them a share of the profits in ten years. If they did not, it did not.
Brian was the first to come around. He started at four in the morning, as his father had, and he learned the herd again, cow by cow, by their names and tempers. Kurt took longer. But on a cold morning in January, I saw both of them in the barn lot with steam rising off their shoulders, pitching hay side by side, not talking. I stood at the kitchen window with my coffee and watched them for a long time. It was the first time in a year I had not felt like an old woman alone in a house.
On the first anniversary of the death of Arne, we held a small supper at the long table in the dining room. The whole family came, grandchildren and all. Before we ate, I brought out one of the old ledgers and read the first entry, in the pencil of Arne, from 1969. Fourteen cows, one tractor, one wife. The children laughed. Kurt wiped his eyes with a napkin. I closed the ledger and said, “Eat, before it gets cold.” And they ate, and it was good, and the D in my name stayed forward.