In the third week, a sign went up at the end of the road: FOR SALE — 80 ACRES PRIME BOTTOMLAND. LAND AUCTION. INQUIRE. A real estate company from Kearney had printed it in red and white, with a phone number.
Dale called me that night from the kitchen table I’d wiped down ten thousand times.
“Nothing personal, Annie. I’m not a farmer. I’m cashing out the back eighty and renting out the rest.”
“Renting to whom?”
“The Pruitt boys. They’ll farm the whole thing for cash rent. Two-ninety an acre.”
“And what does the back eighty bring?”
“Realtor says sixty-five hundred an acre. Maybe seven thousand.” He couldn’t keep the pleasure out of his voice. “Call it half a million dollars.”
“That’s the best ground on the place.”
“I know.”
“Dad used to say it’d grow corn on a rock.”
“Dad said a lot of things.” He laughed. “Look, I’m not selling the farm. I’m restructuring. It’s business.”
“Of course,” I said.
I hung up and sat on my little porch with the phone in my lap, in the first warm week of April, with the crabapple coming into bloom. I took the survey out of my purse, unfolded it on my knee, and read it again slowly, the way I’d read a ledger.
I still didn’t understand it.
Over those three weeks, I kept thinking about something. Not the fence. The mornings.
The spring before Dad died, he’d gone out walking every morning at six with his cane and a five-gallon bucket, along the north fence line, in his cap and canvas coat. I watched him from the kitchen window: a stooped figure against a pale sky, moving very slowly, stopping every hundred feet or so to bend down with a grunt and set something in the dirt.
Orange flags. The little wire kind with plastic streamers.
At breakfast one morning, I asked him what he was doing out there.
“Walking.”
“With flags?”
“Keeps me honest.”
He went out every morning for eleven days. Then an older man with white hair came in a pickup with a tripod, and the two of them walked the fence together for most of a week with a long steel tape and a measuring rod. I was at work at the co-op. When I came home, the flags were gone, and Dad was in his chair with a cup of coffee and an expression I’d have called satisfied in anybody else.
I assumed he was putting his affairs in order. I thought, a man who knows he’s dying wants to know where his fences are.
I never once thought: he’s building something.
Four days after the land company started surveying the back eighty for the sale, a white Ford pickup pulled into my driveway. The magnetic sign on the door read OKAFOR LAND SURVEYING — KEARNEY, NEB.
I was on the porch shelling peas into a bowl. A young man climbed out. He was about thirty, tall, thin, and freckled, with sandy hair flattened by a hat. He wore khaki work pants and a safety-orange vest, and he held the hat in both hands as he came up the walk. He looked like a boy about to confess to breaking a window.
“Ma’am? Are you Annie Dekker?”
“I am.”
“I’m Gil Okafor. My father was Gilbert Okafor. He passed last fall. I run the practice now.” He turned the hat in his hands. “I’ve been surveying your brother’s ground for the sale. And I found some pins. From last spring. Your father’s pins, ma’am. My dad set them.”
“I have the survey.”
His relief was visible. “Then you’ve seen it.”
“I’ve seen it. I don’t understand it.”
He glanced back at his truck, where a rolled-up map stuck out of a tube on the dashboard.
“Ma’am,” he said, “I think you’d better come see where he set them.”
We drove out with the windows down. It was seven in the evening, in the long gold light of an April dusk. The river bottoms lay flat and dark to the south, freshly disked, with the river marked by a line of cottonwoods beyond. A meadowlark sang on a fence post.
He parked where the north fence meets the township road.
I’d driven past that fence ten thousand times. Four strands of barbed wire on cedar posts, running east and west along the edge of the farm between our field and the gravel road. Dad and I had restrung it together in 2011.
Gil walked me south into the corn stubble, ten paces, twenty, forty. I followed in my sensible shoes. The ground was soft and cold.
At about sixty feet, he stopped.
At his feet, flush with the dirt, was a short iron rod with an orange plastic cap stamped LS 211.
“That’s a pin,” he said. “The first of thirty-one. My dad set it last April, with your father standing right here leaning on his cane.”
“It’s not on the fence.”
“No, ma’am.” He pulled a steel tape off his belt and walked it back to the wire. The tape rang softly as it ran out.
“Sixty-six feet,” Gil said. “One full chain.”
I stood there. The wind came across the stubble smelling of dirt and cold river water. A killdeer ran across the field, crying.
“The deed your father recorded,” Gil said carefully, “describes the north fence line as a strip sixty-six feet wide, measured south from the north boundary of the farm, running the entire length of the property, east to west.”
“That’s three-quarters of a mile.”
“Just under four thousand feet. I did the math on the way over. About six acres. Six point one.”
I almost laughed. A dry, small, startled sound.
“Dale got over four hundred seventy acres. Why would six acres matter?”
Gil looked at me for a long moment, like a man who’d found something in a house and felt sorry for the people living in it.
“Ma’am,” he said, “walk with me to the west end.”
It took twenty minutes, following the line of orange caps, thirty-one of them, spaced a hundred and twenty feet apart, each stamped LS 211. The sun went down behind us and turned the stubble to copper. A pheasant clattered up out of the ditch and sailed away over the field.
At the west end, the strip met a gravel lane.
I’d known that lane my whole life. A wide gravel apron cut through the fence, with a swing gate on cedar posts and two concrete culverts underneath. The field entrance. The only one. It led along a long dirt track to the back eighty, the middle quarter, and the home place. Every truck, combine, grain wagon, and manure spreader on the Dekker farm had gone through that gate since 1961.
I stood at the gate with my hand on the post.
“That’s inside the strip,” Gil said. “The gate. The culverts. The lane, for the first three hundred feet, until it forks.”
I turned slowly and looked south over all that flat, dark ground with the light going out of it.
“Mr. Okafor. Is there another way in?”
“No, ma’am. The river’s on the south. The Pruitts’ fence is on the east. The railroad right-of-way runs along the west side, fenced, with no crossing. I walked every foot of it.” He swallowed. “The only legal access to your brother’s land from a public road is through this gate.”
“Which I own.”
“Which you own, ma’am. Outright.”
It was nearly dark by the time we reached the east end. The sky had turned the clear, deep green of a Nebraska dusk, with Venus hanging low over the river. Under a huge old cottonwood stood a squat white pump house with a tin roof and a padlock.
“That’s the well,” I said. “It’s the only one.”
“Yes, ma’am. The stock well. It feeds the house, the barn, and the tank in the north pasture.”
“Dad dug it in 1967.”
“It’s inside the strip. Eleven feet in. Your father had my dad set a pin right at the corner.”
I put my hand on the cool tin of the pump house.
“So Dale can’t water a steer without crossing my ground,” I said slowly. “Or get a truck into his field.”
“No, ma’am.”
I thought of my brother in Dad’s chair with his boots up, laughing.
“There’s one more thing,” Gil said quietly. “It’s under us.”
He took a small, battered notebook from his vest and held it open in the last gray light. It was a pencil sketch with arrows.
“Your dad’s drainage tile. The main line. Twelve-inch clay pipe, laid in 1962. It runs the whole length of this strip, east to west, about four feet down. Every lateral line on the farm ties into it.” His voice was gentle. “Every acre your brother owns drains through this ground.”
