George didn’t want to sell.
But he was seventy. He was tired. His heart was already starting to go. And if we didn’t sell, the bank would fail within five years. The lawyers said so. The accountants said so.
So George sold. Sixty percent. Heartland Bancorp bought sixty percent of Farmers & Merchants, and we kept forty.
But George was careful.
He made them sign something first.
I remember the night he did it.
He sat at our kitchen table with the merger papers spread out in front of him. Two hundred pages. Lawyers’ language. He read every word. Three times.
Then he called our lawyer, an old friend named Walt Brennan, and talked to him for two hours.
When he hung up, he turned to me.
“Dot,” he said. “I want to put something in the agreement. Something they won’t notice until they need to.”
“What?”
