Part 3 — The Cased Tube
Lonnie tapped the last line of the logbook, and I leaned in to read my fathers pencil over his shoulder.
“Sank it on the home place, forty feet east of the windmill. Steel casing, capped at nine feet. Dig for it, Bernie.”
Curt said something ugly under his breath. A rancher in a gray Stetson said, “Curt, hush.”
We all drove out to the old Voss homestead, six ranchers and Lonnie and me, in a line of dusty pickups. The windmill creaked, the way it had since I was a girl. Forty feet east, the grass was a little greener in a circle about the size of a washtub.
Dad had taught me to drill, whatever Curt believed. One of the ranchers brought a small rig, and in forty minutes we had the cap off the casing.
Lonnie reached down with a hooked rod, and he drew up a steel tube wrapped in oilcloth. It was sealed with wax.
I broke the wax with my thumbnail. Inside was a stack of legal papers, folded in thirds, and a letter on the back of an old invoice.
The first page was an amended partnership agreement, signed and notarized, dated three weeks before Dad died. It gave me sixty percent of Voss & Son and the right to manage the books and the crews. Curt was left forty percent, with a clause that he could buy back voting control after one year of sobriety verified by a doctor.
Dad had also changed the sign on the shop door, on paper at least. “Voss & Daughter,” it said in his careful lettering.
My father had drilled a hole his son would never look in, because he knew which of his children actually read the logbooks.
Curt read the agreement standing up. He did not argue. He said he had been wrong about the boat, wrong about the sign, wrong about nearly everything, and he had known it every morning for two years.
The judge approved the agreement on Friday. The ninety-six thousand, four hundred twelve dollars would be repaid out of Curts share over four years, with interest. The bass boat was sold the same week and paid the first third.
The rancher in the gray Stetson sent over a case of coffee. Lonnie got a plaque.
In March, Curt entered a program in Billings. He called me on the twelfth night and asked, in a voice I had not heard since we were children, if the rigs were running.
“Every one of them,” I said.
The new sign went up in May. On the first morning, I poured black coffee into a thermos, and I wrote Curts name on the lid with a grease pencil.