Eighteen thousand nine hundred and fifty dollars. That was the whole bundle, eleven years of it.
“Delia.” I turned the feed receipt around so she could see the column. “Eleven years of tax bills on this table come to forty-four thousand six hundred and ten. These slips are eighteen nine fifty. That isn’t half.”
“The rest came out of the operating account.”
“Then get me the operating account.”
“After the funeral.”
“Which day after the funeral? Because I’ve been hearing that since Thursday night and I’d like a date.”
She picked up her coffee and put it down without drinking.
“Counting slips won’t keep this place running,” she said.
I wanted her to produce another bundle. I would have accepted being wrong if it meant she hadn’t stood over my father’s dinner table and lied.
She went out to the front room and came back with a folded paper from her bag, and she opened it and read it standing up, the way she reads anything she wants to be a performance.
I, Emmett Whitfield, being of sound mind, do hereby grant my proxy to my sister Delia Vance to vote my interest in the Whitfield orchard in any matter put before the family.
There was a notary stamp in the corner, and a date in August.
“Emmett signed this in August,” I said. “Daddy was still in the hospital in August. Nobody had called a vote in August.”
“I asked him to.”
“Why would he sign a proxy for a vote that didn’t exist yet?”
“Because I’m the one who calls him on Sundays,” she said, and folded it back up.
Then she sat down across from me and put both hands flat on the table, and her voice went quiet, which is the version of Delia I have never been able to argue with.
“Sign the contract and this stays in the family. Don’t sign it, and Monday morning I file a petition in Harrisonburg to have you removed as trustee. I’ve already talked to a lawyer. I’ll say you live two hours away and you’ve been negligent and you let the taxes go.”
“I didn’t let anything go. You just showed me you didn’t pay them.”
“And I’ll stop the Maple Ridge payments.” She said it without blinking. “Seven thousand four hundred a month. It comes out of the estate account, and I sign that account. Your mother’s room gets paid when you sign.”
The kitchen clock ticked through a whole minute. I could hear the cooler running and a wasp against the window and my own breathing.
“You’d hold her room over me,” I said.
“I’d hold it over anybody who made me.”
I stacked the receipts, put them back in the folder, and drove to Maple Ridge with my hands shaking on the wheel, which is not the best way to drive Route 11 on a Friday.
They had her in the front room with her hair brushed and a blanket over her knees, and she looked up and knew me, which does not always happen. “My Nora,” she said. “Did Delia get her vote?”
I sat down on the edge of the couch. “How do you know about a vote?”
“She came Tuesday.” Ruth picked at the blanket. “She wanted me to say I agreed with selling.”
“And what did you say?”
“I said I paid the taxes.” My mother looked at me the way she used to look at a stain on a shirt. “I gave Amos the money and Amos walked it in. He keeps my receipts in his book. He’s kept them eleven years because I asked him to, and because your father never knew, and that is the worst of it and the best of it.”
“Where did the money come from? The orchard never made that kind of money.”
She was quiet long enough that I thought she had gone. Then she said, “My brother Dean. When he died he left me his half of the farm outside Remington, and I sold it, and I never told your father, because he’d have put it into this place, and then it would have been his.” Her hand came over and took mine, and it was stronger than it had any right to be. “It was mine to spend on the trees. So I spent it. Don’t you let them sell my hill.”
