Wednesday at eight, I was first in line at the county recorder's counter.
The courthouse smells like floor wax and wet coats.
Darlene Fiske runs that counter.
She was two years ahead of Glenn in school and never liked him, which helps.
"Nell, honey."
"I'm so sorry about June."
"Thank you."
"I need everything recorded on our parcel."
"Everything?"
"Everything since the deed."
She typed.
The printer under the counter groaned awake.
She slid me a sheet with two lines on it.
Bk 412 Pg 88 — WARRANTY DEED — Ostrander, June A., to Ostrander, Nell J.
Bk 431 Pg 12 — MANURE APPLICATION EASEMENT — Ostrander, June A., to Harlan Swine Partners LLC — recorded May 2
"Can I see the second one?"
Darlene turned her monitor around.
She isn't supposed to.
She did it anyway.
Six pages, scanned crooked.
A twenty-year right to spread hog manure on "all tillable acres of the Ostrander farm, approximately 108 acres."
A hundred and eight.
The number Dwight's guy had fought about in the group chat.
He hadn't been measuring to buy.
He'd been measuring what he thought he already had.
Page five had the signature.
June A. Ostrander
It was a beautiful signature.
Round, steady, every letter leaning the same way.
Mom hadn't written like that since her second stroke.
Her checks the last year looked like a heart monitor.
Her signature on my deed was shaky but hers.
This one was steady and somebody else's.
"That's a pretty hand," Darlene said.
She was looking at me, not the screen.
"For a woman on dialysis."
"Can you scroll down?"
Page six.
The notary block.
Signed and acknowledged before me on April 20, at the Ostrander farmhouse.
April 20 was Easter Sunday.
I knew exactly where Mom was on Easter Sunday.
Saint Agnes in Fort Dodge, third floor, Room 318.
Fluid on her lungs.
Admitted the Thursday before, home the Tuesday after.
I slept in the recliner by her bed all five nights.
I have a picture on my phone of her frowning at a plastic egg the aides left on her tray.
She hated pastels.
Then I heard Krista at the kitchen table on the day of the funeral, her smile not moving.
We were all here at Easter.
They had been.
Here.
At the house.
With Mom forty miles away and me asleep in a recliner.
"Darlene, can I get a certified copy?"
"Six dollars a page."
"I'll take two."
She pressed the county seal into the corner of each page with both hands, like she was making a point.
I called Pruitt from the Buick in the courthouse lot.
I read him the book and page.
He was quiet so long I checked whether the call had dropped.
"Nell, listen carefully," he said.
"A life estate can't give away more than it has."
"Whatever your mother signed, if she signed it, ended when she did."
"So it's nothing."
"To you, it's nothing."
"To Dwight Harlan, it's his permit."
He told me to look up the state DNR database, so I did, with the engine running.
Harlan Swine Partners had applied to build two finishing barns on the Kruse place across our road.
Four thousand eight hundred head.
The manure plan listed the fields where it would all go.
Our fields.
Our section, our township, 108 acres.
Landowner agreement on file.
The county supervisors had the public hearing on it set for Thursday, November 6.
Dwight hadn't wanted a farm.
He'd wanted somewhere to pour.
And yesterday, in Pruitt's office, his somewhere had disappeared.
"Has he started building?" Pruitt asked.
"I don't know."
"Find out."
I drove home the long way, past the Kruse place.
Somebody had already staked the barns.
Two long rectangles of pink-flagged lath in the weeds, square to the road.
A survey crew's pickup sat by the old silo with a Harlan magnet on the door.
The flags all leaned the same way in the wind.
Toward our fields.
I pulled onto the shoulder with Pruitt still on the phone.
"He's staked it," I said.
"Of course he has," Pruitt said.
"Men like that pour concrete so nobody can say no to them."
"One more thing," Pruitt said.
"If June didn't sign that page, someone did."
"And someone swore she did."
I put him on speaker and pinched the notary block bigger, the way Glenn had pinched the parcel card.
Same gray type.
A stamp, a commission number, an expiration date.
And a name I'd sent birthday cards to for twenty years.
Notary Public: Krista L. Ostrander