“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.”
