I did not raise my voice. I have never seen the point of raising my voice. But I have also never in my life signed a thing I did not read, and I was not going to start at sixty-six with two men I did not trust sitting at my father’s table.
“I’ll read it,” I said.
Pruett’s smile tightened just slightly. “Wallace, there’s really no need. It’s forty ranches, all the same form. If everybody sat and read every line we’d be at this till Christmas.”
“Then leave it with me,” I said, “and I’ll read it, and I’ll bring it to town when it’s signed.”
That was when Sturgis spoke for the first time. He leaned back in my chair, the one my father used to sit in, and he looked around my kitchen, at the old cabinets and the wood stove and the photograph of my grandfather on the wall, and he said the thing I will remember for the rest of my life.
“Wallace,” he said, gentle as anything, “let’s be honest with each other. You’re one dry summer away from losing all of this. A man your age, running this place alone. You should be grateful anybody’s still willing to do the paperwork to keep you legal. Sign it, or don’t. But nobody’s going to fight the county for a piece of ground like this. Not for you.”
He said it kindly. That was the cruelest part. He said it the way you would tell an old dog it was time. Like my whole life, and my father’s, and my grandfather’s shovel in the frozen creek bed, added up to a piece of ground that nobody would fight for.
I did not answer him. I stood up, and I walked to the door, and I opened it, and I said, “You know the way out.”
They went. Pruett gathered the papers and left me a copy, the way you leave a copy with a man you have already decided has lost. Sturgis stopped at the door and put his soft hand on my shoulder, and he said, “Think it over. This is me being a good neighbor.” And then his truck went down my drive and turned east toward his land, and I stood in my kitchen with fifteen pages of small print and a penciled X, and I began to read.
It took me until dark.
