Chapter 7 What the Will Says

The will was four pages, typed on a machine in Dunnage Center in February of 2004, and it had never been read aloud in the family, and it named all three children and one grandchild and made a mess of the low field that took the lawyer two sittings to explain and Corrine three glasses of water to absorb. She had her own copy, because Corrine had been named executrix in 1999 and had carried the document in the glovebox of every car she had owned since 2004, and she took it out on the kitchen table on the second Sunday in May, and read article seven aloud, and her mother's face did not change at all. Article seven, said Corrine. "The testator leaves the quarter section of section eight, township six north, range four west, and the improvements thereon, including the house, the barn, the hog buildings and the tile system, unto her daughters Corrine Jo Ambrose and Loretta Ann Ambrose in equal shares, upon condition that neither sell, partition, or encumber the same during the lifetime of the surviving daughter without the written consent of the other." "That's a joke," said Boone. "That is an actual joke you are reading me out of a document." "It is dated 2004. You were twenty-one. It was drafted before you were twenty-one, and your father had been dead fourteen years, and I am not going to have you explain to me what he was thinking about." Corrine turned the page. "Article eight. The testator leaves her interest in the personal property, the household goods, the tools, the sow and her pigs, and the two hundred and eleven dollars remaining in the savings account at the schoolhouse credit union, unto her son Boone Elmore Ambrose." "Six hundred and forty in savings," said Boone. "In 2004." "And article nine." Corrine read it more slowly, because she had read it a hundred times and still had to go slowly. "The testator leaves the thirty-one acres of low ground lying south of the lane, and the drain tile therein, unto her son Boone Elmore Ambrose, outright and forever, upon the express condition that he shall keep the tile in repair, that he shall not surrender the tenancy of 1947, and that he shall pay to the surviving daughter the sum of nine thousand dollars in three annual payments of three thousand, the first payment to be made on the first day of April following the testator's death." Loretta put her hand flat on the paper. "There's no such thing as surrendering a tenancy from 1947," she said. "It ended when Wendt died. It's been sixty-three years. Clovis is dead, Cordie's dead, and Cordie's boy lives in Muncie." "Article nine says he shall not surrender it." "Article nine says it because I told the lawyer to say it, and because I was thirty-nine and angry and I wanted one sentence in a piece of paper that meant my father could not be told to give it up." Loretta's voice was perfectly level. "I've known for twenty-two years that sentence doesn't bind anybody. I've watched three lawyers walk past it with their hands in their pockets." "Then why didn't you change it." "Because changing it meant writing down what I actually wanted, and what I actually wanted was for the Hollow to stay in the Ambrose name and for all three of you to be alive at the same time in one county, and I could not find a sentence that said that, and the ones I could find said it in a way that made it a condition, and I was not going to hand a condition to you at thirty-one." She looked up. "That is the truth of it. It isn't noble and it doesn't scan. Are you going to write it down in the file?" Corrine wrote it down in the file, word for word, and then read the next article, which was the one nobody had ever mentioned at that table in twenty-two years. Article ten, said the testator, leaves to her son Boone Elmore Ambrose the use of the house, the yard and the outbuildings, together with the right to occupy the farmhouse rent free for so long as he shall maintain it in repair and shall keep the lane passable and shall not permit its condition to be used as a ground for any claim against the testator or against her estate, for a period of twenty-four months from the testator's death, after which the buildings shall revert to the surviving daughter and the son shall pay rental at a rate to be agreed, or vacate. "There's no rental," said Boone. "I never paid rental. Twenty-four months was 2006. I moved out in 2008." "You paid rental for eight months," said Loretta. "You paid it in potatoes and you did it without telling me, and I never asked you for it, and if you think I didn't know, you have been very kind to me for eighteen years." He looked at the table. She went on. "Article eleven leaves to the testator's grandson Corby Louis Ambrose, in the event he shall survive the testator, the sum of five hundred dollars, and the testator directs that the said grandson be advised that the testator considered a larger provision, and that the reason for the smaller sum is that the testator had in 1998 made the boy a promise of a different kind, which promise was not a promise of money." Boone looked up sharply. "Corby was eleven in 1998." "Corby was eleven in 1998," Loretta said. "And he was at this table in August of that year with his father and a bad cold, and his father said he could not keep the boy off the low ground because the boy had been told there was a hole down there a man had to go and look at. And I took him down. Just me and him and a rod and a lunch. He was the only child in that family I ever took down into that field." Corrine had not known this. She read the article again to see if there was any more of it, and there was not. "What kind of promise," she said. "That is not in the document," Loretta said, "and it is not going to be, and if you go and ask him he will tell you it was a tractor ride and it will be the exact truth, and he will have been kind about it, and that is how that family works." Boone got up and went and stood at the window with his back to the table for a while. "There's a note at the end," Corrine said. "In pencil. It's in your handwriting and it's not part of the document." She read it out. "If any of the three of you ever find a reason to sell any part of this ground, do not sell it to a stranger on a Tuesday, and do not sell it because a number came." Loretta's hands were flat on the table. "That is exactly what it says," she said. "You signed a will in 2004 and then wrote a note to us on it." "I wrote it the same afternoon, at the kitchen table, while the man who typed it was still putting his coat on." Loretta looked at her hands. "And I did not have the nerve to write it in the document, because it is not a clause, it is a wish, and I wanted a clause. And every year since then I have had the same thought, which is that the reason nothing has ever gone wrong with this family is that the three of us are three people who will not do a thing on a Tuesday. And I have never known for one single day whether that is a virtue or a habit." Then she read the rest, which was conventional, and which named a bank account in Dunnage Center and gave three hundred dollars to a church and nothing else to anybody at all, and at the bottom, in the article that the lawyer had added by hand and initialled and which read: "I have delivered this my last will and testament in the city of Dunnage Center on the ninth day of February 2004 in the presence of the persons named below, whose names I do not know, and whose addresses I do not know, and who were kind enough to sign where I asked them to." "Two strangers," said Boone. "Two strangers from the courthouse," said Loretta. "I asked for strangers because I did not want a neighbor in it. I'd had enough of a neighbor in it by then." She turned her cup around on its saucer, which was the only fidget Corrine had ever seen her do. "What does that make me." "It makes you a woman who was carrying it alone," Corrine said. "Which is not the same as a woman who wanted it." "No. It isn't." Loretta's hands settled. "And now there's a deadline with a company name on it, and I'm sixty-eight, and my daughter who does the numbers won't tell me what they are, and my son who does the work won't tell me what he owes. So if you have something to say to me, girl, say it before the twelfth, because on the twelfth I'm going to the bank in Fetterling and I am taking out what I can take out, and after that this stops being a conversation and starts being a thing that happens to me." ---