“I never saw the books in my life.”
“I know that now.”
He looked down at the page in my hand.
“I was always going to split it. I had that written down before you’d hauled your last load of cows off this place. But I wanted to hand it to you after harvest. A check. Off a crop I’d put in on this farm myself. Just one time.”
He shook his head.
“I’m fifty-six years old. He told me when I was nineteen that I was no farmer. And I’ve been trying to hand that sentence back to him ever since. So I hired strangers. And I made a mess of his best field. And I proved him right.”
“He didn’t say it in there to be right,” I said. “Read it again. He says he made you that way. That’s him owning it, Phil.”
