Tyler used the card of Jeannette because he knew I would never look at it. I learned that from Roland Pelletier at the Registry of Deeds in Bangor, who sat me down in his back office with a cup of coffee and a printout of a charge for forty seven dollars. It was a recording fee, paid on a Visa that Jeannette opened in 1998 for the lumber yards and that I never had the heart to cancel. The statements still came to my post office box, and I paid them every month without opening them, because opening them meant seeing her name. Tyler knew. He had watched me do it at Thanksgiving.
The deed the blonde woman tried to record would have moved our camp on Moosehead Lake, the one my father built in 1952, from me to a company called Thibault Shoreline LLC. The signature was mine, copied very well from the Christmas card I send every year to Tyler. The woman was a cousin of Madison who sells boat insurance in Portland. She was supposed to hand Roland a clean packet and leave, but the clerk saw the name of Jeannette on the Visa and the name of Gordon on the deed and made a call. Roland clicked his pen. “Gordon, I have known your family for forty years. This never got recorded.”
I drove to Greenville that night with the printout on the seat beside me, the way I used to drive up with Jeannette every Friday in July. The road was empty. Somewhere past Dover Foxcroft I started talking to her out loud, the way I do, and I told her the boy she held in the hospital had spent a year learning how to be me on paper. By the time I saw the lake in the moonlight I was not angry anymore. I was only very steady. A man who sold four lumber yards can read a sawmill ledger and a lie, and I intended to read this one aloud.
A recording fee gave one grandson the length of a Friday night to bring his grandfather back to the truth in Bangor.
I gave my terms to Tyler and Madison on Saturday morning on the dock of the camp, with a thermos between us and the Registry printout under my coffee cup. I had asked them to drive up for a surprise, and they came smiling, carrying a cooler. I said the plan was finished, that the deed would be shredded in front of me, that the company would be dissolved by Monday, and that Tyler would write to every person he had asked for a signature. I said the camp would still be his someday, if he earned it. A loon called somewhere across the water, as if it had been waiting.
Tyler took off his baseball cap and turned it in his hands. He said he had lost money in an online trading app, a lot of it, and that the family of Madison had a home in Cape Elizabeth he could not afford to match. He said he told himself I was old and the camp was only an empty cabin. He said he used the card of Jeannette because he knew I would not see it, and then his voice broke. “Grandpa, I used Grandma name because I knew it would hurt you too much to look.” I said, “That is the worst thing you have ever done, and I understand it perfectly.”
Madison stood on the dock saying nothing. Then Tyler snatched the folder with the deed inside, meaning to run for his truck and drive down the camp lane before anyone could stop him, and he bolted up the path with the papers pressed to his chest. Madison called out his name. I did not rise from the bench. I have known that lane since I was a boy, and I knew exactly who was standing in the middle of it at that hour, because he comes every morning to drink at the culvert.
A bull moose, taller than the truck of Tyler, stood in the lane with water running off his antlers. He lifted his great head and looked at Tyler the way a bank manager looks at a late payment. Tyler stopped so fast he sat down. The folder dropped. The moose took one slow step forward, sniffed the deed and ate the corner of it. Madison, who was brought up on a golf course, said in a very small voice, “Is that normal?” I said, “It is Maine.” Tyler stayed on the gravel until the moose finished the paper and wandered off.
The company was dissolved on Monday. Roland Pelletier flagged my parcel at the registry so that any document touching the camp would call me first, and a lawyer in Bangor named Denise Cyr drew up a trust that leaves the camp to Tyler on one condition: he spends a week there every August with no phone. Madison went home to Cape Elizabeth and has not called. The cousin returned the signature copies with a note of apology. Tyler paid back every dollar he took, in installments, working weekends at a boatyard in Hampden.
In the name of Jeannette, who passed in 2021, I started the Jeannette Thibault Birch Fund. It pays for deed alerts, title watching and lawyer hours for older landowners whose family property has been targeted with forged papers, in Penobscot, Piscataquis and Hancock counties. In the first year we helped twelve families, and the first was a retired logger from Millinocket named Mr. Gagnon, whose two cousins had filed a deed on his sixty acres. Roland Pelletier sends me every suspicious filing with a sticky note that says, “Gordon, look.” I look. It is the best use of a quiet morning I have found.
Last August Tyler came to the camp alone. No phone, no cooler, just a duffel bag and a pie from the bakery in Greenville. He cleaned the screen porch, split the wood and sat with me on the dock until the stars came out. At midnight he said, “Grandpa, do you think Grandma would forgive me?” I said she already had, in the part of her heart that never wrote a rule down. He put his head on my shoulder, a man of thirty, and we listened to the loons call across the black water, until the cold finally sent us in.