“There is a transfer on file from six months ago,” the clerk said, her voice completely flat as she tapped her fingernails against the laminate counter of the county office.

I remember the exact smell of the room. It smelled like old floor wax and cheap vanilla air fresheners. My brain honestly just stopped working for a second.

“It’s a quitclaim deed. The hundred and eighty acres went to Gerald Walker.”

I stood there, my hand still holding the envelope with the twenty-two hundred dollars in cash I’d saved to file the probate. Gerald was my uncle, a man who hadn’t stepped foot on that property since my grandmother’s funeral back in ninety-eight.

“That’s not possible,” I said. My voice sounded thin, like it belonged to someone else. “My grandfather wrote his own will. It’s right here in this green metal tackle box. He left the farm to me.”

The clerk didn’t look up from her monitor. She was a woman named Brenda who had worked there since I was a teenager. She finally looked at me with a little bit of pity.

“The deed was recorded six months before his death,” she said. “A deed overrides a will. I’m sorry, but according to the county, Gerald owns the land.”

Let me back up for a second because this won’t make sense unless you know about the farm. It was a hundred and eighty acres of rolling pasture and thick oak trees just outside of Cedar Falls. Grandpa bought it in 1964.

He paid twelve thousand dollars for it, which seemed like a million back then. He was a quiet man who drove an old blue Buick LeSabre with a rusted driver-side door. He wore the same denim overalls every day until the cuffs frayed into white threads.

He didn’t believe in spending money on anything he could fix himself.

I started working that land when I was twelve. Every single summer, while my friends were hanging out at the public pool in town, I was out in the heat.

I baled hay until the skin on my palms peeled off. I cleared limestone rocks from the north pasture so the tractor wouldn’t throw a rod.

“This is all yours someday, kiddo,” he would say. He always said it at six in the morning while he was drinking his black coffee. He kept his documents in an old green metal tackle box on the top shelf of his closet.

The original 1964 deed was in there, wrapped in a yellow rubber band. We raised twenty head of Hereford cattle. It was hard, dusty work, but I loved every inch of that dirt.

Grandpa and I had a routine. We’d work till noon, eat ham sandwiches on the tailgate of his truck, and talk about the future. He promised me the farm because he knew I’d keep it as a farm.