I sat on the edge of the bed of my father with his good hand in both of mine and listened to the rest of it, in the thin gray light of a November morning. His voice was slow and cracked, and he stopped often to breathe. “Your mother wrote it to Ingrid on the second of July,” he said. “The copy that boy showed me said, I am afraid of m, and then it stopped. The page was torn. I read it a hundred times. I thought it meant that she was afraid of me.” He turned his face to the wall. “Karen, I have carried that for forty seven years. That my own wife died afraid of her husband.”
I did not know what to say. I only knew that my father, Arvid Lindholm, the proudest and gentlest man I ever met, had signed away six hundred and forty acres because a piece of paper was cut in the wrong place. He had never once raised his hand to anyone. He had never raised his voice to my mother. And he had believed, in the long nights since the stroke, that some part of him must have done something he could not remember. I stood up, kissed his forehead, and said, “Daddy, I will find the rest of that letter.”
The sheriff arrived at noon, a young man with a mustache, and he arrested my brother in the barnyard beside the trailer, with Elvis the bull standing peacefully in the mud behind them. Dale did not argue. He sat in the back of the patrol car and stared straight ahead. Then I drove four hours east to Grand Island, with a thermos of coffee and the bank statements of Daddy on the seat beside me, and parked in front of a small yellow house on Locust Street that had belonged to Ingrid Pike, the sister of my mother, who had died in May.
A page torn from a letter may silence a mother for years, but the truth writes itself again in the end.
Her son Wesley was not home. A neighbor told me he was in Kearney, closing on the sale of a different farm. The house was unlocked, because the lawyer of the estate was inside, a gray haired woman named Beverly Struck, who was cataloguing the contents of a roll top desk. When I told her my name, she took off her glasses. “Karen Lindholm,” she said. “Your aunt left a letter for you with my firm in April. She told me, if anyone from the Lindholm family ever came, I should hand it over. I have been wondering for six months if I would ever get to.”
She went to the safe and returned with a brown envelope, thick with age. Inside lay the original letter in the blue ink handwriting of my mother, three full pages, and a note from my aunt, written in a shaking hand just before her death. Karen, I kept this for you. My son tore off the last page and kept it for himself. I did not know until after he left. I am so sorry. I read the third page standing up in that quiet yellow kitchen with the clock ticking, and then I sat down on the floor, because my knees would no longer hold me.
It read: I am afraid of my brother in law, Gordon Pike. He has been after our farm since we bought it. Last week he told Arvid that the pond is dangerous in July and that someone should keep an eye on me when I go out at night. If I should ever have an accident, Ingrid, it will not be an accident. Tell Arvid I loved him every day. Tell Karen to be brave. I have written it down so that the truth will outlive me. I put the page in my lap and laughed and cried at once.
Gordon Pike had died in 2001. Wesley, his son, had found the full letter among the belongings of his mother, torn off the page that named his father, and used the cut piece to blackmail a stroke ridden old man out of his land. When the Nebraska attorney general read the original, the case against Wesley took eleven days to assemble. They arrested him in Kearney in a hotel lobby. The charges were extortion, fraud on a vulnerable adult, and theft by deception, and they added a count for tampering with evidence in a death that was now being reopened.
The sheriff of Custer County reopened the file on my mother, and a retired deputy named Orville Hess came forward, eighty three years old, with a wooden cane and a folded newspaper clipping. In 1979, he said, he had found a man standing at the pond that night, a stranger in a blue pickup, who gave his name as Gordon. He had written it in his notebook and been told by the old sheriff to forget it. He had carried that for forty seven years. I thanked him. I held his hand. He looked at me, a man at the end of a long road, and said, “Miss, I should have told it sooner.”
The deed was voided in January. Dale pleaded guilty to neglect and theft and was given three years of probation and a requirement to work off his debt to our father, which he did, sullenly and then less sullenly, on the farm itself, with a pitchfork. By spring he was mucking out the barn on his own. The cattle recovered. Two new heifers were born in April. I took a leave of absence from my school and moved into the old room at the back of the house, and I learned from Daddy how to read the weather in the sky.
On a bright morning in May we drove to the pond, the three of us, Daddy in a wheelchair and Dale pushing. The grass was long and the cattails were green. I read the third page of the letter of my mother out loud, standing at the water edge, while Dale held his cap in both hands. When I finished, Daddy lifted his good arm and pointed at the sky. “She was never afraid of me,” he said. And the wind came across the pond and ruffled his hair, and Elvis, the big black bull, bellowed once from the hill like a trumpet.