The vet, Dr. Janssen, was shaking when she told me over the phone, and I had to sit down at the kitchen table to hear it. The coffee was laced with a poison used to kill rats, she said, the kind that builds up slowly over weeks. It was in the feed too, in the same amounts, enough to take a cow a little at a time and an old woman more slowly still. My blood was loaded with it. “Lorraine,” she said, “if you had drunk one more month of that coffee, I do not think you would have lived to see April.”
She sent me to the hospital in Green Bay in her own truck, and she made me promise not to touch another drop or bite from my kitchen. The doctors there were calm and kind. They gave me an antidote through a drip in my arm, and for three days they kept me in a bed with white sheets and a window that looked out on a parking lot full of snow. My hands stopped tingling by the second day. By the third I was complaining about the oatmeal, which the nurse said was the surest sign of recovery.
Meanwhile the sheriff of the county, a big gentle man named Bud Kowalski whom I had known since he was a boy in my Sunday school, drove out to the farm with two deputies. He did not find Kurt and Dale. They had gone in the night, the neighbor told him, in the gray pickup of Kurt, with their bags in the back and the dog left behind in the barn. The sheriff found the dog, a cold and frightened shepherd, and fed it his own sandwich. Then he found the tin of poison in the machine shed, behind a can of grease, with the fingerprints of Kurt on the lid.
They did not get far. The sheriff had put out word by radio, and a state trooper stopped the pickup on Highway 41 at four in the afternoon, outside Oshkosh, for a broken taillight. Kurt tried to talk his way out of it. He said he and his friend were going to look at a job. But Dale, who was driving, did something I never expected. He pulled the pickup over to the shoulder, put it in park, and got out with his hands up. He told the trooper, “I want to talk. I have wanted to talk for a month.”
Sometimes the quiet man in the corner, who seems to see nothing, has been quietly breaking the plan of a worse man for weeks.
Dale sat in the office of the sheriff that night and told everything, and later he told it to me, in my hospital room, with a deputy standing at the door. He said that Kurt had come to him in November with a plan and a promise of twenty thousand dollars. Dale was a poor man with a bad back and a mother in a nursing home, and he had said yes. But from the first week he had been unable to do it. He had watched me hum while I milked. He had watched me bring him coffee on the coldest mornings, and he had never in his life been treated so kindly.
So he had cheated. Every day, he said, he emptied half of what Kurt gave him into the snow, and put only the smallest pinch into the feed bunks and the coffee can. It was why the cows had died slowly and I had stayed alive. It was also why he had told the vet, two weeks ago, in the parking lot of the feed store, in a low voice and without giving his name, that she should look closely at the bunks. “I did not know how else to warn you,” he said, “without Kurt knowing it was me.”
I looked at that tired, ashamed man for a long time. I was angry, and I was not angry. I said, “Dale, you put poison in my coffee.” He said yes. I said, “And you saved my life.” He said, in a barely audible voice, that he supposed both things were true. I told him that was the most honest thing anyone had said to me in a year, and that I would tell the judge so.
Kurt was charged with attempted murder and fraud. It turned out the will he had waved about, the one that supposedly left the farm to him if I died before spring, was a clumsy forgery, and the lawyer in Green Bay proved it in ten minutes. The real will lay safe in his vault, and it said what I had always known. Everything to Lorraine, and after her, to the church and to the county dairy school. Kurt sat through the trial with his arms folded and his jaw set. He was sentenced to fourteen years.
Dale pleaded guilty to a lesser count, and because of what he had done, the judge gave him probation and two hundred hours of service. I wrote a letter on his behalf, and so did the vet, and so did half the neighbors, who by then had heard the story. The first Saturday after the trial, he drove up to my farm in an old Ford, with his hat in his hands, and stood at the end of the lane, not daring to come closer. I walked down in my barn coat and told him the heifers were coughing and I could use a hand.
That was eighteen months ago. Dale lives in the little room over the machine shed now, and he draws a fair wage, and he does the milking at five while I make breakfast. He still does not talk much. But on Sundays he drives into town and visits his mother, and he sings with her, tuneless and happy, and every Thursday he brings me coffee, the plain kind I buy myself, in a thermos with a lid, and watches me drink the first sip. Then he nods and goes back to work.
We rebuilt the herd, twenty cows to thirty, with calves from the neighbors, who each sent a heifer as a gift. At the spring fair in Seymour the county gave me a ribbon for the best butter. I tied it to the barn door where Arnold once hung his hat. I stood a long time in the cold morning with my mug of plain coffee and the steam rising off the backs of the cows, and I told Arnold, out loud, that his farm was in good hands.