Boone’s metal detector had beeped twenty-six times that morning for twenty-six horseshoes and a hinge. Over Vivian’s heel, it made a new sound. It was a long, steady, offended whine, like a smoke alarm that had finally found a real fire.
Boone stared at the screen. “That’s not a horseshoe.”
“I told you it wasn’t,” said Vivian.
“That’s something long and upright. Iron.” He looked up at her. “Viv, don’t move.”
“I wasn’t planning to.”
He knelt in the mud beside her and dug with his hands. The soil on the north line was black and soft as pudding. Every handful he lifted, rainwater rushed in to fill the gap.
“If you lift that heel,” he said, “this hole closes up, and we’re back to nine paces from nowhere.”
“So I stay.”
“So you stay.”
Vivian looked down at him, then at the brush, then at the gray sky. She took a breath.
“Caleb,” she said. “Thermos.”
I handed her the thermos. She poured herself a cup of coffee, standing on one heel in the north line of Fenwick Farm. Then she waited, the way she waited for counteroffers: like she had all day, and they did not.
It took Boone nine minutes to dig down far enough. He used his hands, then a trowel from his backpack, then his hands again. Ida stood over him with her walking stick. Mortgage the goose stood over Ida.
Finally Boone sat back on his heels and wiped his face, which made it muddier.
“Ida,” he said. “Come look.”
Just beside the point of Vivian’s heel, six inches down, was the top of an iron pipe. It had a brass cap, green with age. Boone rubbed it with his thumb, and letters came up out of the dirt.
CORLISS CO. SURVEY. 1958.
Ida didn’t say anything for a long moment. Then she turned around, put her back to the pin and counted out loud. Nine paces west, in her husband’s boots, three sizes too big.
At the ninth pace, her stick hit something under the grass. It was the stump of an old fence post, rotted almost to the ground.
“Nine paces,” said Ida, and her voice was not quite steady. “He told me a hundred times. Nine paces from the corner post.”
She shook her head. “I thought he was just saying it.”
“He was right,” said Boone.
“He was always right about fences,” said Ida. “It was the only thing he was always right about.” She wiped her eyes with the sleeve of the barn coat. “Don’t tell anybody I said that.”
Royce Danforth came down the hill on foot. He left the ATV idling at the top, as if he might need to leave in a hurry.
He was a big man. Up close, he was bigger than I had realized. He stood over the hole and looked at the brass cap for a long time.
“That pin could have been moved,” he said.
“Royce,” said Ida.
“I’m just saying it could have been. Anybody could have moved it, kids or a tractor.” He looked at Vivian. “Hers isn’t the only shoe that’s been in this field.”
Boone opened his mouth. Vivian lifted one finger, very slightly, from the side of her coffee cup. He closed it again.
It was then that I noticed what was happening to her.
When she had stopped walking, she had broken her own third rule. And the mud had noticed.
Slowly, quietly, she had been sinking. An inch, maybe, while Boone dug, and another inch while Ida counted paces.
Vivian Ashcombe had come to Fenwick Farm in six-inch heels. By the time Royce Danforth reached the pin, she was down to about four. She was looking up at him.
For twenty-two years, nobody had looked down at Vivian. Now a sixty-six-year-old man in a bolo tie stood over her in the rain. I waited for her to ask for the stool, or for Boone’s arm, or for anything.
She didn’t. She took a sip of her coffee.
“Mr. Danforth,” she said. “How long have you been cutting hay on these six acres?”
Royce blinked. “What?”
“The grass here is short.” She pointed at the strip with her cup. “The rest of Ida’s north field is knee-high. Somebody cut this strip last fall.”
“Could’ve been anybody.”
“Ida doesn’t have a working mower,” said Vivian. “So it was you.”
There was a pause. In the pause, Vivian sank another half inch. She didn’t acknowledge it.
“Arthur let me,” Royce said finally. “Every summer for twenty years, on a handshake. My cattle needed the hay, and he didn’t.”
“And you’re worried,” said Vivian, “that whoever buys this farm won’t shake your hand.”
Royce said nothing. That was an answer.
I have watched Vivian negotiate a hundred times. Usually she does it standing at a kitchen island, from five foot seven, with a view of the whole room. This was different. The rain was coming down, and she was sinking.
And she was talking up to a man who had been angry at this field for forty years.
It didn’t matter. It turned out it had never mattered.
“Here’s what I’d propose,” she said. “The pin stays where it is. The six acres are Ida’s, and they’re sold with the farm.”
Royce’s jaw tightened.
“But the listing includes a written hay lease for those six acres,” she went on. “To you. Ten years, renewable, at whatever you paid Arthur.”
“I paid Arthur nothing.”
“Then it’s a dollar a year,” said Vivian. “Because a lease needs a number. Any buyer who wants this farm signs it with the purchase.”
Royce frowned. “Who’d buy a farm with somebody else’s hay on it?”
“Someone who wants a good neighbor,” said Vivian. “That’s worth more than six acres. I’ll put it in the listing in those words.”
Royce looked at her. Then he did something I didn’t expect. He crouched down, in the mud, in his good boots and his bolo tie, so that his face was level with hers.
“Your granddaddy,” said Ida, from behind him, “would have hated this.”
“My granddaddy,” said Royce, “never once got a hay lease in writing.” He held out his hand. “A dollar a year?”
“A dollar a year.”
They shook on it. Eye level, in the rain, on the north line of Fenwick Farm.
Boone stood up. He looked at the pin, and at Royce, and at Vivian, and he grinned so wide the rain ran into it.
“Ground doesn’t lie,” he said.
“No,” said Vivian. “But it does take its time.”
She looked down. “Boone. I can’t get out.”
She wasn’t exaggerating. Her heels had gone in to the hilt, and the north line did not intend to give them back.
Boone and I pulled. The mud made a sucking noise, and the heels didn’t move. Royce helped, and they still didn’t move.
“We need to mark the pin for the surveyor anyway,” Boone said slowly.
Vivian looked at him. Then at the swinging pair of boots on his backpack.
Then she held out her hand.
“Caleb,” she said. “Stool.”
I set the folding stool down beside her. Vivian stepped out of her black heels and up onto the stool in one motion, quick and neat, as though she did it every day. The heels stayed exactly where they were. They stood upright in the mud, side by side, marking the spot.
Boone unstrapped the size six boots from his backpack and handed them up to her without a word.
She put them on, laced them and stepped down off the stool. The boots went into the mud about an inch and stopped. She took one step, and then another.
She was five foot two, maybe. She looked down at the ground and then up at all of us, with an expression I had never seen on her face before.
“Well,” said Ida Fenwick, “come on, then. We’re not done.”
We walked the last mile of the north line and the west pasture. Vivian walked it in Boone’s boots, with short steps and her weight forward.
She didn’t say a word the whole way. Neither did anybody else. Royce rode behind us on the ATV with the engine barely ticking over, like a man escorting a parade.
At eleven-forty, we came around the corner of the west pasture, and the barn came into view. Beyond it was the gate. Beyond the gate were the lawn chairs.
Marcy saw us first. She lowered the binoculars. She raised them again. Then she said something, and the whole row of Hadley & Marsh turned to look.
Nobody cheered. It was too quiet for that. All eleven agents, two title officers, the appraiser and the gas man stood up, one by one.
Then, in the middle of the row, Nell Abbate stood up too. She set the jar down carefully on her chair.
And she pulled out her tape measure.
Up next: These Are My Flats
Continue to Part 6 →