The Form With Seventeen Signatures
An export certificate needed seventeen signatures, and by the end I had collected one from a county judge, a vet and, somehow, a very patient steer.
The first time I shipped a pallet of cheese overseas, the buyer asked for a certificate. I said fine. The man on the phone said it needed to be signed by a series of officials and witnesses, and he read the list. I counted seventeen. I wrote them on the back of a milk receipt and drove into town like a man on a treasure hunt.
The first few were easy. The vet signed in about a minute. The plant manager signed twice. A woman at the county office stamped it, looked at me over her glasses and told me to go see her cousin across the street, who stamped it too. By noon I was on signature eleven. By two I had run out of officials and started getting creative.
Number fourteen was the county judge, who was fishing, so I drove out to the lake and held the paper on the hood of my truck while he signed with a stub of pencil. Number fifteen was a notary at the feed store. Number sixteen was the buyer's agent, who signed over the phone by asking me to read each line aloud, which took forty minutes and used most of my day.
The seventeenth line was labeled Witness. I looked around the lot. There was nobody. Just a lone steer named Gerald looking over the fence. I held the pen up to him as a joke, and he pushed his nose against the paper so hard it left a perfect round print right on the line. I stood there staring at it. Then I wrote the word Witness under it and walked inside.
The buyer accepted the form without comment. I never did find out whether they noticed the nose. I check the latest rules on the federal export pages every month, because I have learned the lists grow when you are not looking. And I put the story on farm.FM, where somebody asked if Gerald could cosign. He could not, but he did get an apple.
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