Dale called on Thursday.
I was in the garden behind my rental, planting peas along the back fence with dirt up to my wrists and a straw hat pushed back on my head. I let the phone ring three times before I picked up.
“Annie.” His voice was thick and furious. “What the hell is going on?”
“Hello, Dale.”
“I just got off the phone with Reinhardt. He’s pulled out. He says there’s a problem with the access. He says you own a strip.”
“I do.”
“What strip?”
“The north fence line. As surveyed.” I pressed a pea into the soil. “It’s in Dad’s will. You laughed.”
Silence. I could hear him breathing hard. Far behind him, the television was playing a game show.
“You’re telling me,” Dale said very slowly, “that you own the road.”
“I own the gate. And the culverts. And the lane, up to the fork.”
“And the well?”
“And the well.”
“The tile?”
“The main line. Yes.”
Another long silence.
“That’s insane. He can’t do that. I’ll sue.”
“You can try.”
“I’ll call Haskins.”
“He drafted it.”
“I’ll get my own lawyer. A real one. From Omaha.”
“Please do.”
“Dale.” I set down the trowel and sat back on my heels in the cool dirt. “Can I ask you something?”
“What?”
“When did you last walk the north fence?”
He didn’t answer. A robin hopped across the garden, cocked its head, and pulled a worm from the soil.
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“I’m just asking.”
“I don’t know. Years.”
“Do you know where the main tile runs? How deep? Who laid it? Do you know why Dad put the well on the north side instead of by the barn?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the farm,” I said gently.
The line went quiet. I heard him swallow.
“I don’t know,” Dale said. His voice had changed. It had gone small and flat. “Dad never showed me.”
“He tried. In 1983, when you were standing in the yard with your bag packed, he asked you to stay one more week so he could show you the tile. You said you had a bus to catch.”
A sharp, quick breath.
“I was eighteen.”
“I know. I’m not telling you this to make you feel bad. I’m telling you because I think there’s something nobody ever told you.”
“What?”
“That he wanted you to stay.”
The silence went on so long I checked to see if the call had dropped.
“Dale?”
“I’m here.” A short, cracked laugh. “No, I’m not all right, Annie. I’m standing in Dad’s kitchen next to a flat-screen TV, and I just found out I can’t sell my own farm, and my sister owns the road, and I’m sixty-one years old and I don’t even know where my own well is.”
“I can show you.”
“What?”
“Come out Saturday. I’ll walk you along it.”
“Why would you do that?”
I thought about a pencil letter and a bucket of orange flags.
“Because Dad asked me to hold it for you,” I said. “Until you were ready.”
“Ready for what?”
“To ask.”
I heard him breathe. Then I heard my loud, easy, handsome brother say, in a voice I hadn’t heard since I was twelve:
“Annie. Will you show me where the tile runs?”
He called his Omaha lawyer the next morning anyway. I knew he would. I’d have done the same.
He told me about it on Saturday. The lawyer, a man named Strickland, charged $425 an hour. He spent two hours on the phone with Dale and with Mr. Haskins, and reviewed the deed, the survey, and the gift tax return.
“He said we could fight it,” Dale said, standing at the gate at six in the morning in a pair of brand-new boots and a down vest, holding a thermos. His face was gray from lack of sleep. He’d shaved badly and nicked himself under the jaw. “He said I might even win, eventually. Easement by necessity. Two years in district court. Thirty grand, maybe forty. And in the meantime, I couldn’t sell, couldn’t borrow, couldn’t sign a lease.” He laughed bitterly. “Then he asked me a question I couldn’t answer.”
“What?”
“He said, ‘Mr. Dekker, why do you think your father did this?’ And I didn’t know.” He looked at me. “So I came out here.”
I was wearing my old canvas coat and Dad’s John Deere cap, which I’d started wearing. He looked at the cap, and his mouth worked.
“That’s his.”
“Yes.”
“I haven’t seen it since the funeral.”
“I’ve had it.”
He nodded. He looked down the long line of orange pin caps stretching east into the early light.
“Where do we start?”
“At the beginning,” I said.
We walked for four hours. I’d never talked so much in my life.
I told him about the tile: the twelve-inch clay main and the laterals that fed it. I told him about the lateral that failed in 1987, which Dad dug out by hand over a weekend in a thunderstorm because the county wouldn’t come. I told him about the well and the pump, and the night in 1998 when the pressure switch burned out and Dad hauled water to the cattle in five-gallon buckets until dawn. I told him which fence posts were cedar and which were Osage orange, and why.
I told him about the money too. The cash rent the Pruitts had offered was $290 an acre. Dad had turned down $250 from them in 2015 because he didn’t trust them to keep the tile clean. The property taxes on the farm were almost $19,000 a year, and Dad had paid them in two installments from the farm account every April and September for fifty years without ever missing a date.
“Nineteen thousand?” Dale said.
“You’ll get the bill in September.”
He laughed weakly. “I didn’t even know that.”
He said very little else. He walked beside me with his hands in his pockets, and he looked. Really looked, I think for the first time in forty years, at the ground.
At the well, he stopped.
He put his hand on the tin side of the pump house and slowly ran his palm along it, the way you’d touch a horse.
“Dad dug this.”
“With Uncle Ray. In 1967.”
“I remember.” His voice cracked. “I was two. He held me up so I could see down the hole. I remember the cold coming up out of it.”
I stared at him.
“I thought I’d made that up,” Dale said. “For years. I thought I’d imagined it.”
“You didn’t.”
He pressed his forehead against the cool metal, and his shoulders started to shake.
I stood beside him with my hand on his arm while my older brother wept against a pump house in the early light of a Nebraska morning.
