“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.”
He took the big TV down. In the second summer, he hung Mother’s wedding portrait back over the fireplace. I’d left it for him in a box in the garage with a note: It belongs there. He never mentioned it. But the next time I came for dinner, it was on the wall.
I stood in the living room in the lamplight, looking up at her. A young woman in a high-necked white dress, squinting slightly, one hand on my father’s arm.
“She looks like you,” Dale said.
“She looks like you.”
“I think she looks like both of us.”
He cleared his throat. He wasn’t looking at me. “Annie, would you like to move back? Into the house. The back bedroom. You wouldn’t pay rent. I’d like it.” He was studying his boots. “It’s too big for one person. And I’m no good at it. I don’t even know where the good dishes are.”
“They’re in the cabinet over the refrigerator.”
“See? I didn’t know that.”
I laughed, warm and sudden and surprised. “Dale.”
“I mean it.”
“I know you do.” I took off my glasses and wiped them on my cardigan. “Let me think about it. I’d like to keep the bungalow for now. I like my crabapple tree.”
“Sure.”
“But I’ll come for Sunday dinner. Every week. On one condition.”
“Anything.”
“You cook.”
He groaned. I grinned. And we stood together in the lamplight of the house where we grew up, under a portrait of our parents, laughing.
I think about the north fence line most mornings.
I walk it at first light with my coffee, the way Dad did. In spring, the orange pin caps show up bright against the new green. In fall, they disappear into the stubble, and I find them by feel with the toe of my boot. Thirty-one of them, a hundred and twenty feet apart, under the wide, pale, unbroken Nebraska sky.
Some mornings I stop at the gate, put my hand on the cedar post, and think a few words. Not out loud.
I found them, Dad. I found every one.
Last October, I was out there at dawn with a bucket of my own. The plastic streamers on the marker flags along the strip had faded, and Dale had asked me to replace them. I’d bought a fresh box of orange flags, the little wire kind, at the hardware store in Alma for $11.
I was kneeling at pin nineteen with a flag in my fist when I heard a truck.
It was Dale’s. Not a rental anymore, but Dad’s old blue Ford pickup, which he’d had rebuilt that summer at a shop in Holdrege for $3,400. He parked at the gate and climbed down in a canvas coat and Dad’s old seed cap, which I’d given him for his birthday. He came slowly across the stubble carrying a thermos and knelt down beside me.
For a while, neither of us said anything. The sun was coming up red over the cottonwoods. A pair of Canada geese flew low overhead, calling.
“Dad used to say a chain is sixty-six feet,” Dale said at last.
“Four rods. Eighty to the mile.”
“Easy to count.”
“Easy to divide.”
He poured coffee into the thermos lid and handed it to me. It was hot and black and tasted like metal.
“He said it to me once,” Dale said. “In 1983. In the yard, the morning I left. I thought he was just talking.”
I looked at him.
“He said, ‘Son, everything out here is built on a chain. Sixty-six feet. And a man’s a lot like a road. He’s got to have a right-of-way to get home.’”
My throat closed.
“I didn’t know what he meant,” Dale said. “I was eighteen.” He turned the cup in his hands. “I think I know now.”
I pushed the flag into the ground at pin nineteen. It was orange and bright, bobbing in the cold wind.
“What does it mean?” I asked.
He looked down the long line of caps running east toward the sun, all thirty-one of them, glowing like small coals in the dew.
“That he left it open,” my brother said.
We stayed there a long time, kneeling in the stubble and passing the cup back and forth, while the light came up gold across four hundred acres of Dekker ground and a meadowlark sang on the fence. Nobody said a word.
Nobody had to. The gate was open.
It had been all along.
THE END..!
