Dale did not answer the deputy. He looked up from the phone toward the truck where Kyle sat with the engine running, and I saw something terrible move across his face, the look of a man hearing a door close somewhere deep in his own house. “Only Kyle,” he said at last. “And a friend of his from Menomonie who comes on weekends. Brett.” On the screen, the figure at the porch post raised a hand, waved toward the bunkhouse window, and held up two fingers in a small, jaunty V. Then he pulled up the hood of his sweatshirt and trotted off the porch toward the road.
The deputy asked for the second clip. It came up at 7:44 p.m. The window of the bunkhouse, a yellow square in the dusk, and behind it a silhouette. It was the shape of a man with a mug in his hand, calmly watching, like a spectator at a ballgame. The silhouette lifted the mug in a salute. Dale put his hand over his mouth. “He told you he saw me from that window,” I said to the deputy. “He did. He saw all of it, because he planned all of it.”
Kyle was still in his truck when the deputies reached him. He had not heard the barn door, or the footsteps, until a flashlight was in his face. He tried to start the engine, but the second deputy had already taken the key. He sat very still with both hands on the wheel. “I did not mean for him to die,” he said. “Brett told me the rail would just break, and Grandpa would sprain an ankle, and then it would look like Sandra had been careless. I only wanted him to change his mind about the farm.”
A farm remembers every hand that worked it, and a camera in the barn remembers every eye that watched.
Brett Hansen was picked up at a gas station in Menomonie at two in the morning, still wearing the sweatshirt, with the crowbar in the back seat of his car. He agreed in the first hour to testify against Kyle in exchange for a lighter sentence. Kyle had paid him eight hundred dollars. The plan had been entirely the idea of Kyle: a loosened rail, an old man who always rested his weight on it, and a woman alone in the kitchen with no witness. He had thought of everything except the barn door.
Pop woke up on the fourth day. I was at the bedside with Dale, holding a damp cloth to his forehead, when his eyelids fluttered and he said in a dry cracked voice, “Is the farm still there?” Dale laughed and cried at once. “It is still there, Pop. It is yours. It is always yours.” Pop turned his head and found me. “Sandra,” he said, “somebody told me you were on the porch.” “I was in the kitchen, Pop. Washing dishes.” “I know,” he said. “I could smell the soap.”
Kyle was sentenced to fourteen years for conspiracy to commit murder, and Brett received six. Dale went to the sentencing alone. He told me afterward that he looked at his nephew across the courtroom and felt only an enormous tiredness. “Every family has one,” he said. “I just thought it would be somebody else.” He sat on the edge of our bed that night for an hour with his boots still on, and I did not say a word, because there was nothing that a word could have done.
Pop came home on the first of November, in a van with a wheelchair lift, with a patch of white hair shaved from the back of his head and a scar like a zipper. He was eighty seven and he was furious about the wheelchair. For the first week he refused to use it. In the second week he fell in the bathroom, and in the third he sat in it grumbling while Dale rolled him to the barn, and he allowed that perhaps it was a tolerable invention. He inspected every one of the heifers by name.
The farm papers were signed at our kitchen table in December. Pop had called his lawyer from the hospital bed, still half groggy, and insisted on it. Everything would pass to Dale and me, as he had said at supper that Friday, with one condition written in his own shaky hand on a yellow legal pad: a share of the milk check would go every year to a scholarship fund at the agricultural school in River Falls. “Boys who want to farm,” he said. “Girls too. Anybody who gets up before the sun.”
Dale rebuilt the porch rail himself over the winter, out of white oak from a neighbor with a small mill, thick as the wrist of a grown man. He set the posts in concrete, and sanded the top smooth, and tested it by hanging his full weight from it, all two hundred and ten pounds, until it did not so much as creak. Pop supervised from a lawn chair, with a blanket across his knees, offering corrections nobody needed. When the last coat of paint dried, Dale stepped back and said, “Well, Pop?” The old man inspected it for a very long minute.
“It will do,” said Pop, which was the highest praise that anyone in that family had ever heard him give. That night at sunset he walked out to the porch, slowly, with his cane, and rested his forearms on the new rail and looked out across the pasture, where the cattle were drifting toward the barn. I came out and stood beside him. We did not speak. The sky turned pink and then gold, and a pair of geese crossed it, and Pop whispered, “Sixty years of sunsets, Sandra. And that was the best one.”