The ballots had my brother’s name printed FIRST, and the chair at the head of the council table sat empty like it was already his.
The congregation counted tomorrow, right after second service.
Both of the others who filed against Duane had pulled their names inside a week.
He phoned each of them at home. TWICE.
I was the last name left on the sheet under his.
My hand stopped halfway to the gavel.
We were in the basement of Zion Lutheran in Glencoe, folding chairs pulled into a horseshoe around the long table.
A fluorescent tube over the coffee urn ticked twice and went dark.
Duane stood at the table in his good navy sport coat, both palms flat on the wood.
He skipped the tie.
He only skipped it when he figured a thing would be done by lunch.
“Pull your name,” he said. “That seat is mine.”
Pastor Hoff sat at the end of the front row with his hands on his knees and his eyes on the empty chair.
His collar tab had a brown coffee ring on one side.
I’d carried the church’s zippered deposit bag down two flights, past the furnace room and the choir closet.
The bag held a photocopy.
I came across it chasing a missed premium on the furnace policy, the kind of thing I do with a calculator and a highlighter after supper.
The missed payment led back to a folder labeled 1974.
I unzipped the bag.
Duane’s fingers moved first.
He went for the paper and quit when I laid my palm on top of it.
“Pull the 1974 folder, Duane,” I said.
His face gave in a single spot.
A crease folded in beside his left eye, the same one he got lying to our mother about where the egg money went.
“Pull your damn name, Lori. TONIGHT.”
His hand came down on the table and the gavel hopped an inch.
Pastor Hoff turned both palms up. “The congregation hasn’t voted,” he said.
That was too careful.
I turned over the first sheet.
A baptism certificate.
Duane Wendell Ostby, May 11, 1974, with the pastor’s name typed along the bottom.
The line for the father’s signature was BLANK WHITE PAPER.
Duane let out one laugh, more cough than laugh.
“The old man signed everything.”
I balanced our father’s checkbook for twenty-two years after his stroke.
His right hand quit on him in October of ’74.
The certificate said MAY.
My thumb found two staple holes in the top corner and no staple.
A second sheet had been PULLED.
Behind me, up the stairs, the fire door thumped shut.
Pastor Hoff’s eyes went from Duane to me.
“That wasn’t the only page,” he said.
Duane reached for the gavel.
I pressed the folder flat against my sweater. “The only page of what, Pastor?”
He didn’t answer.
Pastor Hoff reached inside his cardigan and brought out a sheet folded in thirds.
My father’s notary seal was pressed into the corner.
That embosser sat in his roll-top desk the morning he died. I’d dusted around it for a month afterward.
Pastor Hoff unfolded it on his knee and read the top line.
His mouth went thin.
Then Duane took his hand off the table and stepped back.
“Lori,” he said, “ask him who put that folder where you’d find it.”
Pastor Hoff’s cardigan
I kept my eyes on the pastor.
“Did you?” I said.
He didn’t make me wait this time.
“I did,” he said. “I moved it into the insurance drawer two weeks ago. I knew you’d be in there after the furnace money.”
Duane laughed his cough again.
“Hear that, Lori? He’s been leading you around by the nose.”
Pastor Hoff held the sheet out across the gap between our chairs. His hand shook. The paper didn’t.
I took it.
Onionskin, typed, gone the color of weak tea. The top line said Council of Zion Lutheran Church, Glencoe, Minnesota.
Beneath it was one paragraph.
I, Wendell J. Ostby, give the north eighty acres to this congregation, to hold for my son, Duane Wendell Ostby, baptized this day in my presence. It is my wish that the council return the land to him whenever he asks it.
May 11, 1974.
Then his name in blue ink, in the long slanting hand I hadn’t seen him make since I was ten years old.
The seal sat in the corner. I could feel the bumps of it through the back with my thumb.
Duane buttoned his sport coat.
“Read it out after the count,” he said to Pastor Hoff. “Word for word. Then the council does what the old man wanted.”
He picked up the gavel, looked at it, and set it down square in front of the head chair.
Then he took the stairs two at a time. Up top, the fire door thumped again.
The tube over the urn stayed dark. Pastor Hoff sat looking at that chair like it might talk.
“Then why was it in your sweater?” I said.
He stood up slow, one hand on his knee.
“I’m the one who stapled it in,” he said. “Come over to the parsonage, Lori. Give me ten minutes.”
The roll-top desk
My father bought that desk at an auction in Biscay in 1961, three years before I came along.
It sat in the front room of the home place west of town, under the window that faced the road. His notary seal lived in the second pigeonhole from the left. Car titles, mostly, and township business. People drove in at supper with their caps in their hands.
October of ’74, the stroke took his right hand. He was forty-three. I was ten.
That winter I wrote his checks at the kitchen table and he signed them with his left hand, in block capitals. W OSTBY. The W leaned back like it was bracing against wind.
He let me balance the register, and every time it came out to the penny he pressed his seal into the back corner, a star in the middle, and turned the book around to me.
“Audited,” he said.
I kept that checkbook from fifth grade until the week we buried him. A register a year. They’re in two liquor-store boxes in my basement.
A padded envelope came from St. Paul in the spring of 1985. A new embosser. The rim said the same thing the old one did, but the star was gone, and in its place was the shape of the state, with the little bump up top where the Angle sticks into Canada.
He pressed the old one into that year’s register one last time. Then he slid it across the oilcloth to me.
“Don’t go notarizing anybody’s horse,” he said.
I kept it in the drawer under the phone. For eleven more years I pressed that star into the corner myself, and he always ran his thumb over it before he put the book away.
The baptism was a different story, and Duane never liked it.
He was a month old. I had chicken pox so bad our mother kept a sock over each of my hands. She took the baby to the parsonage that afternoon, to Pastor Tollefson, and my father stayed home with me and read Black Beauty out loud with his glasses down his nose.
The line on the certificate is blank for that reason.
Mother told it at Duane’s birthdays like it was a funny story. He never once laughed.
The same year, our father gave the north eighty to Zion. The photocopy in my deposit bag was that deed. One page, his name in that long right-hand slant, the land to the congregation and nothing more.
Duane started renting it back from the church in 1997, at fifty-five dollars an acre. Keeping it in the family, he called it.
When the roof leaked over the altar in 2022 he wrote a check for forty thousand, and the council screwed a brass plaque with his name on it next to the coat rack.
I took over the church books in 2015. I said it at three council meetings: the neighbors pay two-sixty an acre for ground like that.
The council looked at the plaque.
My father died in his chair at that desk one morning in October of ’96. His coffee had a skin on it.
The seal was in its pigeonhole. I dusted around it for a month, the way you’d step around somebody sleeping.
The will gave Duane the home place and everything in the house. I got eight thousand dollars and the Pontiac.
The last day of that month, Duane and Kathy backed a stock trailer up to the porch for the desk. I had the new embosser in my hand. I’d meant to keep it with the old one.
Duane took it out of my fingers and dropped it back in the pigeonhole.
“That stays with the desk,” he said.
That night I laid Hoff’s sheet on my kitchen table beside the deed.
The deed gave the land to Zion. The word son wasn’t on it.
The parsonage porch light
The parsonage is a brick ranch across the church lot, with a basketball hoop on the garage that hasn’t had a net since the Tollefsons. A sparrow built in the rim one year and nobody ever took it down.
Pastor Hoff had the door open before I knocked. His collar was off and he was in slippers.
We sat at his kitchen table. He poured me coffee I didn’t want.
“Duane came to me in June,” he said. “He said he found that behind a drawer in your father’s desk when they were having it refinished.”
He turned his cup a quarter turn on the placemat.
“He asked me to put it with the 1974 papers, where it belonged. He said there was no sense making a fuss in front of the council till he was sitting at the head of the table.”
“And you stapled it behind his baptism,” I said.
“It said baptized this day,” he said. “That seemed like where it went.”
“Then what?”
“Then the lapse notice came on the furnace policy. Four thousand one hundred eighty dollars.” He took his glasses off and rubbed the dents they leave. “I called Duane about the rent. He said the church would get its rent when the land question was straightened out.”
He put the glasses back on.
“A man who wants to give the church something doesn’t quit paying the church, Lori.”
“And you hid it in your sweater.”
“I took it out. I left the rest where you’d trip over it.” He tapped the table with one finger. “Lori, you knew his hand. I came here in ’91. I never saw him write but the once, at a funeral lunch, block letters, his left hand.”
“Then stand up after second service,” I said. “Say June. Say Duane. Say a drawer. That’s all I’m asking.”
He was shaking his head before I finished.
“I’ve got seven months to my pension,” he said. “And a roof with his name on it.”
“My father’s name is on that sheet.”
“That paper’s in the church file now,” he said. “Duane asks me, I’ll read it. Word for word, like he wants.”
“As true.”
“As what it says.”
He walked me to the door and held it for me like I was company.
I was on the second step when the porch light went off behind me.
A pan of scotcheroos
Kathy’s Silverado was in my driveway when I got home, parking lights on.
She came up the walk with a nine-by-thirteen under foil and her purse hooked on her elbow.
“Scotcheroos,” she said. “The boys ate half the first pan.”
I let her in. She sat in my chair at the kitchen table, the one by the window, the way she sits in everybody’s.
“Duane feels terrible about tonight,” she said. “He’s got a temper. The Ostbys all do. You know that better than me.”
She took an envelope from her purse and slid it under the edge of the pan.
“He wants you to have this, for all those years with your dad’s checkbook. He always said it wasn’t right, you never getting a thing for that.”
I lifted the corner of the envelope with one finger.
A check on Ostby Grain LLC. TWENTY-FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS, in Duane’s block print.
The memo line said N 80.
“He never said that once in thirty years,” I said.
“Well, he’s saying it now.” She smiled at the foil. “Ione understood, Lori. Arlo too. Ione’s grandson drives truck for Duane every harvest. Duane doesn’t want hard feelings at church.”
That check was three years of my Social Security.
“Pretty steep for a church seat,” I said.
“This is for family,” she said.
“Kathy. That eighty’s corn ground. He’s farmed it for a song since ’97. And he needs it back for a dollar?”
She laughed like I’d told a joke at a funeral lunch.
“Corn on top,” she said. “Meeker Aggregate drilled along the fence line in July. They pulled cores down past twenty feet. They don’t do that for corn.”
“Duane let them on the church’s ground.”
“He’s the renter.”
“And they offered him how much?”
“A MILLION ONE.” She picked a crumb off the foil and ate it. “Zion would get a nice gift out of it. He’d see to that.”
She stood up and buttoned her coat to the chin. She left the envelope where it was.
“Call Hoff in the morning. Pull your name,” she said. “Don’t make him the bad guy over a field, Lori.”
The star in the corner
Her taillights went left at the stop sign, toward the highway.
I went down to the basement and carried up the box that said REGISTERS 74-96 in my mother’s marker. It was heavier than I remembered, or I was older.
I took out 1975 and opened the back cover. The star sat in the bottom corner, pressed a little crooked. He’d done it with his left hand, holding the book flat with his bad one.
I got the old embosser out of the drawer under the phone, from behind the rubber bands and the church directory, and squeezed it on a paper napkin.
A star.
Then I held Hoff’s sheet up under the light over the stove and tipped it until the bumps threw shadows.
The middle of that seal was the state. The bump up top, where the Angle sticks into Canada.
I laid them in a row on the counter. The napkin. The 1975 register. The sheet.
May 11, 1974, the sheet said. Baptized this day in my PRESENCE.
I had socks on my hands that day. He read me the part where Ginger dies twice, because I asked him to.
By 1985 he had been signing W OSTBY in block capitals for eleven years. He couldn’t have made that slant on the sheet with a gun to his head.
I picked up the deed photocopy and laid the onionskin on top of it and held them both against the bulb.
His two names sat one on top of the other. Every loop. The tail of the y stopped in the same spot.
I wrote 1985 on the napkin in pencil and folded it in half.
Then I zipped it all into the navy deposit bag. The napkin, the 1975 register, the old embosser, the sheet. Kathy’s envelope went in last.
The paper said 1974. The seal on it came to our mailbox in 1985.
Second service
The basement was full by a quarter to twelve. We had chairs out to the furnace room door and coats on every back, and somebody’s baby was chewing the corner of a hymnal.
Arlo Dietz and the council secretary sat at the card table by the urn with the ballot box between them. Ione Kuehn sat in the front row with her purse on her knees and wouldn’t look at me.
Kathy sat in the second row in her church sweater.
Duane stood at the head of the table in the navy sport coat. He skipped the tie again.
Pastor Hoff was in his spot at the end of the front row. His collar tab was clean.
I unzipped the deposit bag on my lap, took out the sheet and handed it to him. He looked at me a second, then folded it in thirds and put it back inside his cardigan.
I zipped the bag shut.
Duane tapped the gavel once.
“Pastor’s got something to read before Arlo counts,” he said. “From my father.”
Pastor Hoff stood and unfolded the sheet. He read it the way he reads the lessons in Lent, every word at the same speed. Baptized this day in my presence. Whenever he asks it.
He sat down. His mouth went thin again.
Duane let the room have a minute with it.
“The old man gave that ground to God the year I was born,” he said. “He asked for one thing back, that’s all. He signed it and he sealed it, same as he did for half this township. Kathy and I aren’t here to take a dime off anybody in this room. Kathy and I kept that eighty in the family thirty years. I put a roof on this church. I’d ask you to vote like you know who we are.”
People nodded. Arlo had his hand on the lid of the box.
I stood up and unzipped the deposit bag on my chair.
I set the old embosser on the end of the long table. Then the 1975 register, open to the back cover. I took a blank offering envelope off the stack by the urn, fed the corner in, and squeezed until it bit.
I handed the envelope and the register to Ione.
“His seal,” I said. “The one he used in the seventies.”
Then I held my hand out to Pastor Hoff. He gave me the sheet without being asked, and I passed it down to Ione too.
She held them side by side, star and star and the state. Arlo leaned across the card table. The second row stood up to see.
“That one came in the mail in 1985,” I said. “Duane keeps it in the roll-top desk.”
Duane laughed. The crease folded in beside his left eye.
“The old man had two of them going the whole time,” he said. “He handed me that paper himself, in ’95, sitting right at that desk. Lori wasn’t there. Lori was in town with her calculator, same as always.”
“With his right hand?” I said.
“With whatever hand he had left. And don’t you start on the baptism.”
“He was home with me,” I said. “I had chicken pox.”
Duane’s palms came down flat on the wood.
“He was always home with you,” he said. “From fifth grade on, you and him and that goddamn checkbook at the kitchen table, and I got a funny story at my birthday. He couldn’t drive a mile to the parsonage for me. He never signed one line for me. Thirty years I farmed his ground and he never once said son.”
Ione put the sheet face down on her knee.
Pastor Hoff stood up.
“Duane brought it to me in June,” he said. “He asked me to put it with the 1974 papers and say nothing till he had the chair. I stapled it in myself.”
He sat down and took his glasses off and held them in his lap.
I slid Kathy’s envelope down the long table to the head chair.
“His check,” I said. “The memo says N 80.”
Kathy stood up in the second row with her purse in both hands.
“Duane, you said she’d take it,” she said.
Duane picked up the envelope, and then the gavel, and stood there holding one in each hand like he couldn’t remember which he’d come for.
“Count your goddamn ballots, then,” he said.
He set the gavel down in front of the head chair and went up the stairs. Kathy went after him with her coat half on.
Up top, the fire door thumped shut.
The furnace policy
The council met three weeks later, a weeknight, the basement half dark the way it always is after six.
The custodian had put a new tube over the urn. It hummed.
I sat in the head chair. The gavel was where Duane set it down.
The count had come out seventy-one to nineteen.
The furnace policy was back on. I mailed my own check the afternoon of the vote, four thousand one hundred eighty dollars from the savings I’d been keeping for a new roof on my own house. Arlo made a motion to pay me back out of the building fund. I asked him to withdraw it, and he did, and nobody looked at the plaque.
Duane’s rent never came. The north eighty goes out for bids in the spring, to anybody but Meeker Aggregate.
Duane and Kathy go to the Methodists in Plato now. His boys don’t wave when I pass the home place.
I’ve eaten Easter ham in that kitchen every year of my life. I’ll be at my own table this year.
Pastor Hoff’s last service is Easter morning. He asked me to read the lesson. I said I would.
Arlo pushed the church’s checkbook register down the table for the month. It came out to the penny.
I took the old embosser out of my purse, fed the back corner in, and squeezed until it bit.
Then I passed the book down to Arlo.
Send this one to whoever keeps the books in your family, especially if somebody there has already started calling the head chair theirs.
For more tales of unexpected turns and family dynamics, you might enjoy reading about Ron’s Sister Coming Back to My Porch With His Name Typed on a Form or even My Husband Reading Me Every Letter That Came to This House for Twelve Years.
