Part 3 — The Old Survey
The second sheet in the envelope was a photocopy of a hand-drawn map, yellowed and stained with coffee, and Liesls notes ran across the top in pencil.
“Gerhard, the deed describes the land the way my father did. By the creek, by the section road, by the old oak stump. It includes the north forty.”
The fellowship hall was so quiet that I could hear the casseroles cooling.
“Otto has been telling buyers the north forty is his. It is not. It was never his. It was Papa, then me, and now it is yours.”
Pastor Paul asked if anyone present knew a surveyor. A bean farmer named Dwight, three tables over, stood up and said his daughter was a licensed surveyor in Macon County, and he would call her right then.
She came that afternoon with a clipboard and a laser, in her church clothes. She walked the line along Sugar Creek, the section road and the old oak stump, which still stood behind the hog barn, and she matched every call on Liesls map to the recorded instrument at the courthouse.
The paper said what my wife had said all those years, and what she had never said out loud: that the land would be kept for the one who stayed.
Otto drove up from Peoria on Monday in his good coat. He was holding a hat, which I had never seen him do.
He said the buyer on the north forty had backed out the moment the title company called, and he would not stand in the way of the will. He gave me Liesls gold watch and the Buick keys. The checkbook he laid on top, and under it, a folded bank statement.
He had spent three thousand dollars from it on a new furnace for his own house. He said he had meant to put it back before anyone saw.
I told him the furnace could stay where it was, and the three thousand dollars would be paid back at a hundred a month, and no more would be said about it.
Then I gave him the one thing he had really come for. In the bottom of the accordion case, wrapped in tissue, was a recipe card in Liesls handwriting. It said, “Otto, noodles, the way Mama made them.” And a note under it: “Come make them with Gerhard.”
He read it twice and sat down hard at the kitchen table where she had made a thousand batches.
The following Sunday there was another church supper. The whole hall got up when I carried in the accordion, and Otto came in behind me carrying the noodles.
At the end of the evening I pulled one long, wheezing chord and hollered across the hall in my best imitation of her voice.
“Everybody go home and love somebody!”