“…offered to buy that land two months ago,” Neil said, and he held his telephone up so that I could read the message on the glowing screen. I sat in the dim back booth of a diner on Minnesota Avenue in Sioux Falls, with my late husband leather camera case on the vinyl seat beside me, and I read the words slowly. Interested in the creek strip. Will pay cash. No questions. The sender was a man named Roy Fenner, a developer from Brookings. The date was in March, four months after Walter passed, and the message had been sent to my stepson.
I had known Neil since he was nine. I had met him the year I married his father, a thin, wary boy in a hand me down parka, who sat at the kitchen table doing long division and would not look me in the eye. Over the years he had grown into a tall, bearded man of fifty one, a manager at a hardware distributor, with a quick laugh and an ease I had come to trust. When he came to the house after the service and asked if he could have his father old camera, I had said yes without thinking. I had thought it sentimental.
But the camera had been Walter most private possession. He had carried it for forty years. When I opened the case, three weeks later, to put away the old lenses, I found that the bottom was a false panel, held by a small brass snap. Under it lay a long envelope, a small key stamped with the number 114, and a folded survey from 1998 of a narrow strip of land along Beaver Creek, sixty feet wide and nearly a quarter mile long. I sat at the kitchen table for an hour before I opened the envelope.
A camera case with a false bottom, a numbered safe deposit key, and an agreement signed by a stepson in 1998.
The envelope contained a note in Walter slow, careful printing. Marian, this key opens a box at the First Dakota credit union. Everything is in there. The creek strip is yours, not mine, and not Neil. I bought it with my bonus in 1998, put it in your name, and signed an agreement with Neil that said so. He agreed to it then. I never told you because I did not want you to think I had gone behind anyone back. But I have seen how he looks at that land. If he asks for the camera, he may know. Be kind. Be careful. W.
The box was in a vault on Phillips Avenue. A courteous clerk led me into a tiny private room with a green lamp and a metal table, and I sat, with the key trembling in my fingers, and opened box 114. It held the deed to the strip, in my name only, recorded in 1998. It held twenty five years of tax receipts, every one marked paid. And it held a single typed page, titled Agreement, with two signatures at the bottom. One was Walter. The other was Neil. The date was beneath it. I read every word. Then I closed the lid and put my hand over my mouth.
That was the paper I now laid on the diner table in front of my stepson, next to his telephone. He looked at it for a long time. His face moved, the way a field moves under a cloud, and then went still. He did not say it was fake. He did not say it was a mistake. He took a slow breath and said, “I forgot I signed that. Or I told myself I did.” He turned the paper over, as if he might find something written on the back. He found nothing. Then he said, very quietly, “Marian, I am so ashamed.”
I let the waitress refill our coffee before I spoke. I said that I was not there to punish him. I said that Walter had known him a good deal better than he had known himself, and that his father had loved him enough to write the agreement down in order to keep him honest. Neil laughed once, hoarsely. He said that he had been drowning in debt since his divorce, and Fenner had approached him in February, and the offer had been so large, and the land had seemed to belong to nobody. He had never intended to hurt me.
I asked him if he had signed anything with Fenner. He said no. He said he had been waiting for the camera, because Walter had once mentioned that important papers were kept with it. He had stalled, and stalled, and then he had come to my house, at the service, and asked for it as if it were a keepsake. I said, “And you did not look in the bottom?” He shook his head. “I did not know it had a bottom, Marian.” I believed him. I think I wanted to believe him more than I had ever wanted anything.
We made a decision at that table, over cold eggs. I would keep the strip. Neil would answer Roy Fenner himself, in writing, and withdraw from any discussion. He would also, in exchange for my silence about the whole business, meet with a counselor about his debts, and I would pay one third of what he owed, from the sale of a single stand of timber, on the condition that he never ask me for money again. He would come to my house every second Sunday for supper, as he had when he was a boy.
In the spring, we planted the strip together. It was a thin ribbon of dark earth along the creek, studded with willow stumps and wild plum. Neil brought a rented auger and a wheelbarrow of saplings, and we set twelve little cottonwoods in a straight line, eight feet apart. I dug the holes. He tamped the dirt. Near the end of the afternoon, he raised Walter camera, which I had returned to him, and took a single photograph of me, on my knees, in a sunhat, with a trowel in my hand. When he showed me the little screen, I did not recognize the old woman smiling back. She looked happy.