Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, February 1967: three grown children have fought for two months over their father's house, and his executor, an insurance adjuster who kept the pinochle score, writes them eight rules and borrows a die from the family's Parcheesi box. A story about what a fair procedure lets people say.
by Gary Gygax, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
Emil Rademacher named Harold Voss his executor for the same reason he had played pinochle with him every Thursday for twenty-two years: Harold kept score in ink.
The will ran to a page and a half. The house, three blocks up from the lake on the east side of town, was to be sold and the money split three ways, and nobody fought about that, because money divides by three and leaves no remainder anybody can see. The contents were another matter. The contents of my house to be divided among my children as they shall agree. Emil had written that in 1961, when he was sixty-eight and still an optimist.
By the second week of February 1967 his children had not agreed, and they were not going to. Stoltz, the lawyer, had them in his office on Broad Street twice. The first time they got as far as the Parker shotgun. The second time they did not get as far as anything, because Ruth came in from Milwaukee with her husband and a typed list, and Dale looked at the list and said, "You've got Mother's china on here," and Ruth said, "Somebody has to put it on a list," and Dale said, "Somebody who was here would know she wanted Lorraine to have it," and Lorraine, who had driven up from Rockford and had not taken off her coat, said, "Leave me out of it," which nobody did.
Stoltz telephoned Harold at the agency afterwards. "Harold, you're the executor. Execute."
Harold had been adjusting fire and property claims for thirty-one years. He had stood in a great many burnt kitchens with a great many people, and he had learned early that they seldom argued about the thing. They argued about who got to say what the thing was worth. A sofa was a sofa until two people had to agree on it; after that it was a question of standing.
So on Sunday night, after supper, he sat at his own kitchen table with a yellow legal pad and a fountain pen and did not think about the shotgun at all. He thought about what happened when three people wanted things and there was no way to decide. You got Stoltz's office. You got the loudest one winning, or nobody winning, and a house full of furniture going to the auction out of spite.
What was needed was a way to decide that none of the three of them was deciding.
He wrote a rule, and then he asked of it the question he asked of every clause in every policy he had ever read: what does this let a person do that he could not do before? If the answer was nothing, the clause was there for the company's sake and not the policyholder's, and he crossed it out. By eleven he had nine rules. By half past eleven he had eight.
The one he struck was a time limit: two minutes to a pick, by the kitchen clock. He had put it in because he could see Ruth standing in the dining room for a quarter of an hour over a gravy boat. Then he asked what it made possible, and the answer was that it made it possible to hurry somebody, and he could not see that anybody in that family needed help being hurried. Let them stand there. It was their mother's gravy boat.
On Monday he had Mrs. Ecklund type it at the agency on the good paper, four copies.
PROCEDURE FOR THE DIVISION OF THE EFFECTS OF EMIL A. RADEMACHER
He mailed one copy to Milwaukee, one to Rockford, and walked one over to Dale at the hardware store, where Dale read it standing at the register with a customer waiting.
"Dice," Dale said.
"One die."
"Dad would've laughed."
"Your father," said Harold, "trumped my ace of hearts in 1953 and I have not forgotten it. He would have read every word and then asked what rule four was for."
"What's rule four for?"
"So nobody picks one teacup."
Dale folded the paper into his shirt pocket and rang up the customer's furnace filter.
On Tuesday evening Gerald Kessel, Ruth's husband, telephoned from Milwaukee. Gerald was a dentist, and a careful one, and he had drawn up an improvement.
"Everything gets appraised first," he said. "Professional appraiser, I know a fellow on Wisconsin Avenue. Then each of them gets a thousand points and spends them. The Parker might be three hundred points, the table forty. That way it comes out even in value."
Harold had his pad by the telephone. He wrote appraiser on it and underlined it.
"Who picks the appraiser?" he said.
"I know a fellow."
"Then Dale will want to know a fellow too. And Saturday we'll be arguing about fellows." He waited, but Gerald did not say anything. "Tell me what your points let Ruth do on Saturday that she can't do under the eight rules."
"It makes sure she doesn't come out behind."
"Behind in what?"
"In value, Harold."
"Gerald, the gun is worth more than the table. I don't believe anybody in that family has ever been arguing about which one is worth more."
Gerald said he would think about it. Harold drew a line through appraiser, and under the line he wrote, in case he needed it later, points system: lets them argue about the numbers instead of the things. No.
Saturday was clear and eleven degrees. From the front porch of the Rademacher house you could see down the street to the lake, white all the way across, and two iceboats working far out toward Williams Bay, their sails tiny and very bright.
Ruth came without Gerald. Harold took that as an answer.
The tagging took until a quarter to twelve. They went through the house in a clump, the three of them and Harold behind with the tags and a pencil, and it was stiff at first. Ruth tagged the Haviland china in the dining-room cabinet and did not look at Dale while she did it. Dale tagged the Parker in the hall closet and did not look at Ruth. Then Lorraine tagged the oak kitchen table, and Ruth tagged the mantel clock, and after that it went faster, because a tag was not a claim and everybody could see it was not. By the time they reached the basement they were tagging things for each other. Ruth tagged the Evinrude on its sawhorse and said, "For whoever wants it," and nobody made anything of it.
At the workbench Dale stopped with his hand on the green tackle box.
"Harold. Rule four. This is one item?"
"Is it closed?"
It was open. There were three trays of lures inside that Emil had tied himself, bucktails and a few spinners, each one in its own compartment, and the smell of old line and oil.
"A closed container is one item with whatever is in it," Harold said.
Dale shut the lid and snapped both catches. Harold tied tag number forty-four to the handle.
There were fifty-one tags when they finished. Harold wrote each number in the book, a green clothbound ledger from the agency, with a short description beside it, in ink.
Then he went to the hall closet, where the Parcheesi box had been on the top shelf since before any of them could reach it, and brought it into the kitchen, and took off the lid, and took out one of the two dice in front of them all. It was yellowed and one corner was worn round.
"Nobody can say this is mine," he said.
Ruth laughed, the first time that day, a short surprised laugh. "Lorraine used to hide that one in her shoe."
"I did not."
"Mother made you give it back at Christmas."
Harold put the die in the lid of the box. "Eldest first."
Ruth rolled a four. Dale rolled a two. Lorraine picked it up, shook it for a long time in her closed hand, and rolled a six.
So the youngest, who had said least and wanted to be left out of it, had the first pick. Harold saw Dale take this in. He saw Ruth take it in. Nobody said anything, because there was nothing to say about it. None of them had given Lorraine the first pick, and none of them could take it away.
"Lorraine," Harold said.
She stood by the stove with her coat on, as she had in Stoltz's office. Harold waited. Ruth was looking at the hall closet. Dale was looking at his boots.
"Forty-one," Lorraine said. "The table."
The table they were standing around. Harold wrote it in the book, 41, kitchen table, oak, L. Pruitt, and cut the tag off with his penknife and gave it to her, and she put it in her coat pocket.
"Ruth."
"Twelve. The china."
He wrote it. Then it was Dale's turn, and under rule three Dale would pick twice, third and fourth, one after the other. Everybody in the room could count to four. Harold waited for the Parker.
"Forty-four," Dale said. "The tackle box." And then straight on, before anybody could look at him: "And the Evinrude. Twenty-nine."
Harold wrote them both.
Ruth took the mantel clock. Lorraine took their mother's sewing basket, closed, which under rule four brought with it a pincushion, four hundred buttons in a coffee can, and a pair of German shears Lorraine said she had been forbidden to touch until she was twelve. Lorraine took the photograph albums from the piano bench, all six, a set kept together in one place. Ruth passed. Dale took the snow shovel, and said it was because his was cracked, and it probably was.
In the fourth round Lorraine held up her hand like a girl in school.
"Question of procedure. Can I pick a thing and not keep it?"
"You can pick any tagged item," Harold said. "What you do with it after rule seven is your own affair."
"Thirty-eight."
Harold looked it up in the book, although he knew what thirty-eight was, because he had watched her tag it that morning in the drawer of the telephone table: the score pads, twenty-two years of Thursdays held together with a rubber band that had gone hard. He had not tagged them himself. The executor did not tag. He wrote 38, pinochle scores, L. Pruitt and cut the tag and did not look up for a moment.
The Parker stayed in the hall closet with tag number three on its trigger guard while they went round the rest of that fourth time and a fifth.
On the sixth round, second in order, Ruth said, "Three."
The kitchen was quiet. The furnace came on underneath them.
"For Tommy," she said. "When he's older. He used to go out with Dad on the marsh. You remember, Dale. You took them."
"I remember."
Harold wrote, 3, Parker 12 ga. double, R. Kessel, and went into the hall and cut the tag off the trigger guard and brought it back and gave it to her. It had taken them two months and two meetings in a lawyer's office to fight over that gun, and it had gone in the sixth round of a Saturday afternoon without anybody raising a voice.
He did not say anything about it. It was not the executor's business what a thing was worth.
They were finished by three. Seven tags were left on things nobody picked after all, and they went to the auction with the rest. Harold ruled once more that afternoon, when Ruth asked whether the leaves of the dining table were part of the dining table, and he said a table was one item and its leaves went with it, and nobody argued, because nobody had tagged the dining table in the first place.
When the last tag was off, Dale said, "Rule seven," and Harold said, "It's none of my business," and went to wash his hands. When he came back Dale had put the Evinrude down as Lorraine's, for the cottage she had kept in the settlement, and Lorraine had written down the German shears as Ruth's and the score pads as Harold's, in her own hand, before he could object, and Ruth was crying a little at the table that was now Lorraine's, and Harold read the green book aloud from the top so everybody could hear it and nobody could say later that it said something else.
Lorraine's last pick, in the sixteenth round, had been number fifty, the Parcheesi box from the hall closet. Harold had written it down without a word.
She was putting her gloves on at the door when he remembered. He took the die out of his vest pocket, where he had put it at some point without noticing, and she held the lid up, and he dropped it in beside the other one.
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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, prīdiē Kalendās Octōbrēs (30 September 2026), ā Garyō Gygāce per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.
Gary Gygax, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org
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