My uncle’s grandson walked into his care home with a land agent’s printout that put his 240 acres at $1.9 million, and in front of the nurses he said, “Pop, you won’t miss it, you can’t even find the bathroom.” Uncle Seymour didn’t argue with him. He pointed at the crayon picture taped above his chair and made them an offer instead.
My son Judah had sat in that dayroom every Sunday since he was four.
Garrett and Bailey came at Christmas, when the roads were clear and somebody could post about it after.
The picture over the chair was older than Judah’s front teeth.
Green crayon, brown crayon, a blue smear across the top, a lump of black down in one corner.
The tape had gone the color of weak tea.
Nobody ever looked at it, the same way nobody looked at the fish tank by the nurses’ station, where one orange fish had lived so long the aides kept a betting pool on it.
That Sunday I drove Judah to the care home in Mitchell straight from his shift bagging groceries.
Garrett already had the papers spread across Uncle Seymour’s tray table, right on top of his pudding cup.
“It’s a dairy outfit,” he said. “Cash. They want to close by March.”
Bailey had her phone up, filming the papers, filming Seymour, filming nothing.
“We just need the power of attorney, Pop,” she said. “Initials here and here.”
Seymour was eighty-seven.
He’d farmed that ground for sixty-one years and buried a wife on it.
He didn’t pick up the pen.
Judah stood by the window with both hands in his hoodie pocket.
He never said much around them.
“Pop.” Garrett tapped the paper twice. “You’re not going back out there. You know that, right? You can’t even work the TV remote.”
A nurse’s aide named Latasha was refilling water pitchers two chairs down.
She stopped pouring.
Uncle Seymour looked past all of us, up at the wall.
“Whoever tells me what’s in that picture gets the farm,” he said.
Garrett laughed.
Bailey lowered her phone.
“All two hundred and forty acres,” Seymour said. “The house, the machine shed, the pond. Latasha, you heard me.”
“I heard you, Mr. Mathis.” She set the pitcher down and took a pen out of her scrubs. “I’m writing down the time.”
Pink came up Bailey’s neck in blotches.
“Okay,” Garrett said. “Fine. It’s a cow.”
“No.”
“A tractor. The old red one.”
“No.”
Bailey leaned over the recliner to get close to it. “It’s the farmhouse. That’s the roof, see, and that’s the chimney.”
“That’s not a chimney,” Seymour said.
Two residents had turned their wheelchairs around to watch.
A man at the puzzle table put his piece down.
Garrett pulled the picture toward him so hard one corner of the tape gave up.
He took a photo of it, ran it through some app on his phone and stood there waiting while it thought.
“It says a DOG,” he said. “Running. In a field.”
“Never owned a dog,” Seymour said.
“Everybody owns a dog.”
“I didn’t.”
Bailey turned all the way around to Latasha.
“You need to write down that he’s confused,” she said. “This is a competency thing. He has no idea what he’s saying.”
Latasha didn’t look up from the clipboard.
“He told me my oldest’s birthday this morning,” she said. “Before I did.”
That was when Garrett lost it.
“IT’S A GODDAMN SCRIBBLE, POP,” he said. “A KID DID IT IN FIVE MINUTES. There’s nothing in it.”
The man at the puzzle table said, “Language.”
I put my hand on the back of Judah’s hoodie without meaning to.
He was shaking a little.
Not from nerves.
Seymour didn’t even look at Garrett.
“Judah,” he said. “You want a turn?”
Bailey actually snorted.
“He’s not even a grandkid,” she said. “He’s Amber’s.”
“He’s here,” Seymour said.
Two words.
Eleven years of Sundays, and that was the only time he ever said it out loud.
Garrett crossed his arms and grinned at me like the two of us were in on a joke together.
“Go ahead, buddy. Tell us what the masterpiece is.”
Judah came away from the window.
He didn’t look at the picture.
He looked at the tray table, at the papers with their yellow sticky flags, at the pudding cup squashed underneath.
Then he looked at Garrett.
“Did either of you ever ask who drew it?” he said.
Nobody answered him.
Uncle Seymour reached up with his good hand and started working the tape off the wall.
Pencil on the back
It took him three tries. He had to rest between them.
Nobody got up to help. Garrett kept his arms crossed. Bailey had the phone back up.
Seymour got the last corner loose, laid the picture face down across his knees and smoothed it flat with the side of his hand, the way he used to smooth a seed bag before he cut the string.
On the back, in pencil, in Aunt Philomena’s slanted handwriting from forty years of church bulletins:
Garrett. Age 5. July.
Seymour held it out across the tray table.
Garrett didn’t take it. Bailey leaned in, read it, and the phone came down to her hip.
“Okay,” Garrett said. “So I drew it. So what. I was five.”
“So you get another turn,” Seymour said.
“I don’t remember drawing it, Pop. Nobody remembers anything from when they’re five.”
“You told me what it was. The day you made it. You stood at the kitchen table and told me and your grandma both.”
Garrett looked at the front for a long time. Green. Brown. Blue across the top. The black lump in the corner.
“It’s the farm,” he said.
“Everything you drew that summer was the farm,” Seymour said. “What’s in it?”
Latasha clicked her pen.
Judah hadn’t moved from the end of the tray table. He was looking at Garrett the way he looks at a customer who puts the eggs at the bottom of the bag.
Seymour waited. He’d always been good at waiting. He used to wait out a wet spring without saying a word at supper.
“Come on,” Seymour said. “What did you tell me?”
The seed-corn magnet
I was the one who taped it up there.
Two Novembers before, Seymour fell in the machine shed and lay on the concrete four hours with his arm under him before the propane man found him. After the hospital, the doctors said not alone anymore, and Garrett said on the phone from Omaha that he’d love to help but work was crazy.
So I packed the farmhouse.
The picture was on the refrigerator under a seed-corn magnet, a yellow plastic ear with wings on it. It had been there my whole life, as far as I knew. I was seventeen the summer it went up and I never once looked at it.
I pulled it off with the junk mail and the calendar from the co-op and put it on the pile for the burn barrel.
Seymour was at the kitchen table with his arm in a sling.
“Not that,” he said.
He made me peel the tape off the fridge one corner at a time. The brown crayon was put on so thick the paper had gone shiny in that part and torn through in one spot, like somebody had pushed down with everything they had.
He rode to Mitchell with it on his lap. He wouldn’t let me tape it until he’d sat in the recliner and pointed at the exact spot.
On that same drive he made me put a number in my phone. Marcos Thorsen, the lawyer on Main Street who did Philomena’s will.
“If anybody shows up with papers,” he said.
I put it under T and forgot about it.
Here’s what I didn’t forget. Seymour’s son Harry, Garrett and Bailey’s dad, rolled a grain truck on the county road in April of 1999. Garrett was five. Bailey was two. Their mom Kimberly sent them out to the farm for the summer because she couldn’t get out of bed, and Garrett followed Seymour everywhere, even into the hog barn, crying the whole way.
Harry is buried on the forty by the pond, in the little plot Seymour fenced himself. Philomena went in beside him in 2014.
Seymour mowed around those stones every Saturday until the fall.
And one Sunday when Judah was nine, he asked what the picture was. Seymour had him wheel the recliner over to the window and they talked a long time with their heads together. I was in the hallway on hold with Medicare about a bill.
In the car I asked what Uncle Seymour told him.
“It’s his,” Judah said, and turned the radio up.
Now Garrett was holding the thing at arm’s length, and then he turned it upside down, like that might help.
Kimberly
“This is stupid,” Bailey said. “I’m calling Mom.”
She put it on speaker and held it out over the tray table like a microphone.
“Sey, honey,” Kimberly said. “Nobody’s taking anything from you. This is about your care. You know Harry would want the kids to handle it.”
Seymour didn’t answer her. He was looking at the picture in Garrett’s hands.
“He’s making them play a game for the farm, Mom,” Bailey said. “In front of the staff. Amber’s here. Amber’s kid’s here.”
“Amber,” Kimberly said. “Is that you?”
“It’s me.”
“Do you understand what you’re doing to this family?”
I didn’t think I was doing anything. I’d driven my kid over from Hy-Vee in his name tag.
But I tried to fix it anyway. I reached for the papers, to stack them and hand them back to Garrett and say come back on a Saturday with your mom and let’s all sit down.
Garrett put his hand flat on the stack before I got there.
“Don’t touch those.”
“I’m just getting them off his pudding.”
“You don’t get a vote, Amber. You’re not his kid. You’re his niece. You’re the one who stuck him in here.”
The man at the puzzle table said, “Hey.”
Bailey brought the phone back to her own face and talked lower, which meant everybody heard it better.
“Mom, I’ve got Christmas on here. Three Christmases. Him calling me Philomena. Him asking when Harry’s getting back from town.”
“Send them to Garrett,” Kimberly said. “Garrett, did you show him the second page yet?”
The second page
Garrett said, “Mom, I’ll call you back,” and Bailey hung up on her.
“What second page,” Seymour said.
“It’s nothing. It’s the buyer’s layout. It’s for the bank.”
He tried to slide it to the bottom of the pile. That moved the whole stack off the pudding cup, and I picked up the printout before he could get his hand back on it.
The first page was the one Garrett had walked in waving. A photo of the house from the road, 240 ACRES, $1.9 million in a red box.
The second page was a map.
Somebody had drawn the dairy on top of the farm in thin blue lines. Free-stall barns where the machine shed is. A feed pad where Philomena’s garden was. Down on the forty, around the pond, a big dotted shape labeled LAGOON CELL 2.
I’d been to enough county fairs to know what goes in a lagoon on a dairy.
“Give me that,” Seymour said.
I gave it to him. He held it close and then far. Latasha came over with his reading glasses from the windowsill without being asked.
“Pop,” Garrett said. “It’s standard. They’ll take care of it. There’s a company in Sioux Falls that does it, it’s like six thousand a stone, the buyer pays. It’s in the offer. Page four.”
“Takes care of what,” Seymour said.
Nobody said it.
Bailey looked at the floor. Two chairs down, the woman in the wheelchair with the afghan said, “What’s he say?” and the puzzle man said, “Shh.”
Seymour ran his thumb along the dotted line, slow, the way he’d follow a fence on foot. It went all the way around the pond and down into the corner of the forty.
Inside the line was a little square I’d have missed.
FAMILY PLOT, it said. Under that, in smaller type: (REL. BY BUYER).
The forty by the pond
Seymour put the map face down on the tray table and laid the picture on top of it, face up.
He didn’t say anything to Garrett.
He looked at Judah.
“It’s still your turn,” he said.
Judah took his hands out of his hoodie pocket. He wiped them on his jeans first. He has done that since he was little, before he touches anything that isn’t his.
He didn’t pick the picture up. He bent over it and put one finger on the blue.
“That’s the pond,” he said. “Not the sky. He drew it at the top because he was standing at the bottom, by the fence, looking up.”
He moved his finger to the green.
“That’s the forty.”
Then the brown. The shiny part, where the paper had worn through.
“That’s where they dug. In April.”
Garrett’s face did something.
Judah put his finger in the corner, on the black.
“And that’s the stone. It was a black one, at first. A temporary one, from the funeral home. Uncle Seymour said the real one didn’t come till August.”
“That’s not a chimney,” Bailey said, very quiet, to nobody.
“He told Uncle Seymour it was where his dad went,” Judah said. “He said his dad was in the brown part and he colored it hard so nobody would step on it.”
The dayroom was so quiet I could hear the pump in the fish tank.
“Took him all afternoon,” Seymour said. “Your grandma made him stop for lunch and he cried. Then he went back and did the brown again.”
Garrett looked down at the picture. Then at the map underneath it, sticking out on every side, the dotted line running out from under his own crayon.
“You told him,” he said. “You told a kid and you never told me.”
Seymour took his glasses off and folded them.
“He asked me, Garrett. He was nine. He asked.”
2:41
“That’s not a real answer,” Garrett said. “None of this is real. It’s a guessing game in a nursing home. You can’t give away a farm because some kid memorized a story. There’s no court in South Dakota that’s going to look at that clipboard and say, oh, okay, the grocery boy gets two hundred and forty acres.”
Latasha turned the clipboard around so he could see it. “2:41,” she said. “That’s when he said it. I’m putting that the boy answered at 2:58.”
“I don’t care what you put. You’re an aide. You pour water.”
“Garrett,” Bailey said.
“No. No. I drove up here from Omaha. I took a personal day Friday to meet with these people. I’m the one who got an offer on that place, which nobody else in this family could do, because nobody wants it, Pop. It’s a falling-down house and a pond. You’re never going back. Amber’s never going to farm it. Him?” He pointed at Judah without looking at him. “He bags groceries.”
“I’m aware,” Judah said.
“And the stones are a few thousand bucks to move. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. They’ll go to the cemetery in town with everybody else. Grandma would have been fine with it. She’d want you taken care of.”
“It’s my care,” Seymour said. “I’m paying for it.”
“With what? With the farm. Which is what I’m doing.”
Seymour picked up the map off the tray and set it on his knee, face up, on top of the picture.
“When do they want to close.”
“March. I told you. March first.”
“And what did you sign.”
Garrett opened his mouth and closed it.
Bailey turned toward him.
“Garrett. What did you sign.”
“It’s a letter of intent. It’s nothing. It’s standard.”
“Did they give you money?”
“It’s earnest money. It’s refundable if the POA doesn’t come through. Mostly.”
“How much,” Bailey said.
“Twenty-five.”
“Thousand?”
“It’s in escrow.”
“Is it?”
He didn’t answer, and Bailey knew him longer than any of us, and she said, “Oh my God. The truck. You told me you got a bonus.”
“Can we not do this here.”
“You told me we were splitting it. You said fifty-fifty after his care. You sent me a spreadsheet.”
“Bailey, sit down.”
“Don’t tell me to sit down. I’ve been filming him for three Christmases because you said we’d need it.”
She looked at the phone in her own hand like somebody had put it there. Then she looked at Latasha.
“Don’t write that down,” she said.
Latasha wrote it down.
I took my phone out of my back pocket. I went to the T’s.
Garrett saw what I was doing before anybody. “Who are you calling? Amber. Who are you calling?”
It rang four times and went to voicemail. A man’s voice said Thorsen Law, leave your name and number.
I held it out to Seymour.
He took it in his good hand and held it too far from his ear, the way he holds every phone.
“Marcos. Seymour Mathis. Somebody showed up with papers. I’ll be here Tuesday. Bring the will. Bring the deed to the forty.”
He handed it back. That was all I did. I made one phone call to a number he gave me.
Garrett picked up his stack off the tray table, all of it but the map, which was under Seymour’s hand.
“Don’t come to Mom’s at Easter,” he said to me. “Don’t come to anything. I mean it. Don’t bring him either.”
He went out. The dayroom door has an arm on it so it can’t slam.
He tried anyway.
The first Sunday in March
The buyer wanted to close by March. Seymour closed on the first, at Thorsen’s office on Main, two hundred acres to the dairy at Seymour’s own price, with no lagoon on the forty because the forty wasn’t in it.
The forty is in Judah’s name now, with mine on it as his guardian until he’s eighteen. The tax bill came on a Tuesday. Twenty-three hundred and some, and it comes out of my account, not Seymour’s, because that was the only way Thorsen said it would hold up if anybody went to a judge about Seymour’s mind.
Nobody from Omaha called on Judah’s birthday.
Bailey sent him a gift card for twenty dollars with no note. He hasn’t spent it.
The fish by the nurses’ station is still alive. Latasha had March in the pool and lost.
That Sunday Judah came straight from his shift again, still in his name tag. He had a roll of new tape in his hoodie pocket that he bought at the store with his employee discount.
He put the deed down on the tray table, right on top of Seymour’s pudding cup, and Seymour slid his glasses on and read the whole thing, both pages, front and back.
Then Judah stood on the footrest of the recliner and pressed the picture flat on the wall where the old tape had left a square.
“Down a little,” Seymour said. “So I can see the stone.”
Judah moved it down.
If this one got to you, go look on your own parents’ refrigerator this week, and ask who drew what’s on it.
For more family drama involving unexpected inheritances and people underestimating the wrong person, read Mom’s last letter and the preschool teacher my sister called a gold digger and the button my mother pressed anyway. And for one more family showdown with a surprising twist, there’s the restaurant room that still costs $380,000.
