Part 3 — The Last Picture
The face in the picture belonged to my daughter. Annika lay on her back under the Farmall in her barn jacket, a flashlight in her teeth and a wrench in her hand, and the camera had caught her so clearly that you could see the freckles on her nose. The warden did not say a word. Neither did anyone in the bleachers. The auctioneer, a heavy man who had cried more than once at a calf sale, looked at his boots.
Annika came down from the bleachers one step at a time. She stopped at the rail, a few feet from me, and held on to it with both hands. “Dad, I was only taking out the starter wire,” she said. “Corey told me you were going to hurt yourself. He said if the tractor would not start, you would stop trying, and I could sleep at night. I took out one wire. That is all I did. I swear on Mom.”
The warden advanced to the next photograph. The same camera, the same hill, 3:10 in the morning. Annika was gone, and a man in a Packers cap was kneeling alone by the front wheel with a pair of cutters. It was Corey. He had waited until his wife went back to bed, and then he had gone out and done the one thing she had not been asked to do. The picture was as plain as a church bulletin. The warden closed the laptop with great care.
In the silence that followed, a veterinarian named Dr. Halvorsen stood up in the third row and said that he would be a witness to the condition of the brake line, since he had looked at the Farmall in September and thought it odd. A mechanic from the co-op said the same. The sheriff of Vernon County, who had been drinking coffee by the gate, came into the ring, and the auctioneer, without being asked, gave him the microphone.
Corey tried one more time. He was a handsome man with good teeth and a way of looking sad that had worked on bankers and priests. “I only wanted to stop the old man from hurting himself,” he said. “I was thinking of the family.” The sheriff said that the family would be pleased to hear it from a judge, and he asked Corey to come along. Corey took off the new Carhartt vest, folded it, and laid it across the rail.
The law has a clear view of all this. Corey was charged with forgery of the credit papers, theft from the farm accounts, unlawful hunting at night with a spotlight, false reports to the Department of Natural Resources, and tampering with farm equipment. The warden also referred the anonymous call, which she traced to his own telephone, for prosecution. He pleaded guilty to most of it in the winter. The judge sentenced him to years, not months, and set a restitution order of $52,000, which the bank accepted as the first step in cancelling the line of credit.
The bank was, in fact, a decent bank. The Farm Credit officer who had telephoned me in the spring came to the farm in person with a folder and a bad conscience. The line of credit had been opened with a signature that was not mine, and under the law a loan that is not authorized is not a debt. He stamped the page VOID and put it in my hand. I thanked him. I asked him to look harder at signatures from now on, and he said that he would.
Annika was charged with a single misdemeanor for tampering with the tractor, and the district attorney, after reading all the pictures, offered a deferral. She accepted it. She did a hundred hours of service at the county fairgrounds, and she repaid, from her own wages at the cheese plant, the cost of the repair. In March she came to my kitchen table with a pie and a long letter. I read the letter. I put it under the sugar bowl. I did not say I forgave her. I said I would walk the cows with her in the morning.
Clover came home from the sale barn that same afternoon. The auctioneer himself backed the trailer up to the gate and opened it, and the big Holstein, number 114, stepped down into the lane as if she had just been to town for the day. The rest of the herd were already coming across the pasture to see her. Cows are not sentimental. But they stood in a line at the fence, and Clover walked down it, touching noses with every one.
The warden returned my rifles on the Friday before Thanksgiving. She laid them on the kitchen table, one after another, wrapped in clean white cloth. “Mr. Grady,” she said, “I have been doing this for nineteen years. I have never had a landowner who kept better records.” I told her that I had put the trail cameras up for the deer, and she said that the deer had been the least of it. Then she asked if I would teach a class at the DNR on placing cameras for evidence. I thought about it for a day, and said yes.
A man who swaps the memory cards every Sunday for nine years is not a fussy old farmer, he is the best witness the county ever had. The old Copenhagen tin is still taped under the seat of the Farmall, with the newest card in it.
The Farmall has new brake lines now, and a new seat cushion, and a bell on the dash that Annika bought for me at the fair. On the first warm morning in April I started her up, and she caught on the first turn, and I drove her down the hill past the silo, slowly, with my daughter walking beside the wheel. At the bottom I stopped, set the brake, and sat there in the sun. Ruthann used to say I would be buried in my barn boots. She was right about the boots. She was wrong about the hurry.