It took three weeks to work out what we agreed on, and a lot of coffee. We met at Mr. Haskins’s desk, then at my kitchen table, and once in the cab of Dale’s rented Ford during a rainstorm, parked at the gate.
I didn’t sell him the strip. I want to be clear about that. It was the first thing I told him.
“I’m not selling it, Dale. Not for any price.”
“I’d pay. Whatever you want.”
“It’s not about the money.”
He stared at me with wide, tired, confused eyes. “Then what is it about?”
“Dad wanted the strip held. Not spent. Held.” I folded my hands. “Here’s what I’d like to do. I keep the strip. It stays in my name. But I grant a permanent, recorded easement, for access through the gate and along the lane, for the well and the water lines, and for the drainage tile. It goes on record with the Register of Deeds. It belongs to the farm itself, not to any one person. Whoever owns the Dekker ground, now or a hundred years from now, gets to use the gate, drink from the well, and drain through the main.”
He sat very still.
“Forever?”
“Forever. You. Whoever comes after you. Whoever buys it, if you sell.”
“But then you’d be giving up…”
“I’d be keeping the gate,” I said. “I’d just be promising to leave it open.”
“And what do you get?”
“The strip can never be sold separately from the farm, or developed, or subdivided. When I die, it goes into a trust with Mr. Haskins’s firm as trustee, so it stays with the land.” I looked at him. “And you take care of the tile. You keep the main clean. You maintain the gate and the culverts. You pay to repair the well when it needs it. Those are the conditions. You learn the farm.”
He was quiet for a long time.
“And the back eighty?”
“Sell it if you want to. With the easement recorded, a buyer will pay full price, because the access runs with the land. A bank will lend on it. A title company will insure it.”
Mr. Haskins drafted it. Dale’s lawyer in Omaha reviewed it and called Dale back after an hour.
“He said it’s the best deal he’s ever seen a landlocked owner get,” Dale told me. “He said, ‘Mr. Dekker, your sister could have bled you dry. Sign it before she changes her mind.’”
“I won’t change my mind,” I said.
“I know you won’t,” Dale said. “That’s what scares me.”
Dale signed in June at Mr. Haskins’s office, in front of a notary named Beatrice Tran, a brisk, silver-haired woman who stamped each page with a heavy brass seal.
The easement ran eleven pages. It described the strip, the thirty-one pins, the gate, the lane, the well, and three-quarters of a mile of drainage tile in the long, plain, patient language of the county records. It named me as the grantor and the Dekker farm, and every future owner of it, as the beneficiary. Mr. Haskins filed it with the Harlan County Register of Deeds that same afternoon. The recording fee was $64.
When Dale finished signing, he set down the pen.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“It doesn’t feel like much.”
“It’s not supposed to,” I said. “It’s supposed to feel like a fence.”
He laughed, short and startled and rusty, with his hand over his eyes. When he took it away, his face was wet.
“I’m sorry, Annie. For laughing at the reading. For all of it. For forty years.” He swallowed. “I thought Dad was insulting you. I never once thought, what if he’s trusting her?”
I put my hand over his.
“He was,” I said. “He trusted both of us. He just did it in different ways.”
“What did he trust me with?”
I thought about it.
“The farm,” I said. “He trusted you to learn it.”
It’s been two years now.
Dale sold the back eighty in the end. Not to Paul Reinhardt, though Mr. Reinhardt called again once the easement was recorded and offered the full price. Dale sold it to a young couple from Alma, Maria and Luis Ortega, who had a toddler, a rented combine, and a beginning-farmer loan from the Farm Service Agency. They paid $5,900 an acre, $472,000 in all. It was less than Dale had hoped for and less than Reinhardt offered.
“Why them?” I asked.
“Because Luis asked me where the tile ran before he asked me the price,” Dale said. “That’s how I knew.”
He kept the home place: the house, the machinery, and the remaining four hundred acres. And he learned to farm. Badly at first. Those first months, he called me at six in the morning with questions. Annie, the planter’s making a noise. Annie, what’s a pop-up fertilizer? I answered them. I sat on my porch with my coffee and talked him through replacing a seed tube over the phone while the sun came up.
He took a crop insurance policy through the co-op, and he called me about every line in it. He paid the September property taxes himself, on time, and sent me a photo of the receipt with no message, just a thumbs-up.
He cut his insurance practice back to two days a week. In the second spring, he quit it altogether.
“I miss the suit,” he said, grinning, on the phone. “I don’t miss the commute.”
