Everybody around Dunmore knew Hollis Breck, and I would learn that most of them were a little afraid of him. He farmed the quarter just west of me, and about four thousand acres besides, spread all over the township in pieces he had bought up or rented out from under people for twenty years. Breck Farms. His name was on the big steel sheds out on the highway and on the sign at the co-op where he sat on the board. He did custom work for half the small operators around, planting and combining their ground for a cut, which meant he had a hand in the pocket of nearly everyone who farmed near Dunmore. When Hollis Breck wanted something, people found reasons not to argue.
He came by in August in a dually pickup so clean it looked rented. He did not get out. He rolled the window down and looked at my fresh paint and my beehives and my garden with an expression like a man pricing a thing he intends to buy cheap.
“You’d be the fella bought Orval’s patch,” he said. Not a question.
“Dale Merrick.” I put my hand up to the window. He looked at it and did not take it.
“Hollis Breck. I farm this whole side.” He waved a thick hand at everything, including, I noticed, a good deal of what was mine. “City?”
“Lincoln, last. Grew up in Grand Island.”
“Figured.” He let that sit like it meant something. Then he looked up at my hedge row, the big Osage orange wall his neighbor’s father had planted, and something passed over his face, quick and cold, that I did not understand until much later. “That old hedge is a mess,” he said. “Eats ground. Thorns ruin my tires on the headland. Man ought to push that out, farm fence to fence.”
“I like the trees,” I said.
He looked at me a long second. “Sure you do,” he said, and rolled up his window and drove off. I stood there feeling, for no reason I could name, like I had just been measured and found easy.
I did not think much of it. I had an orchard to plant and a grief to carry, and a strange man in a clean truck was the least of what was wrong in my life. In September my sister in Colorado took a fall and I drove out to help her get settled with a visiting nurse. I was gone nine days. I remember I almost did not go, and then I thought, what is there to watch here, it is only trees and dirt, and I went.
I came home on a Thursday evening with the sun already down behind the cedars. I pulled in the drive tired to the bone. Something looked wrong the way a room looks wrong when a picture has been taken off the wall, and it took my eyes a minute in the dusk to understand what I was seeing.
The hedge was gone.
Not all of it. The hedge ran the length of my west line, and a stretch of it, maybe three hundred feet up at the north end, had been torn out by the roots. The great old Osage orange trees Orval’s father had planted in 1951, one every ten steps, were lying on their sides in a mangled brown pile, bulldozed into a windrow and left. The ground where they had stood was scraped raw. And standing in the raw ground, straight and bright and new, was a fence. Shining galvanized pipe posts set in concrete, four strands of new woven wire stretched tight, running south from somewhere up past the corner.
It took me until the next morning, walking it in daylight with my coffee going cold in my hand, to understand what had been done to me. The new fence did not run where the hedge had run. It ran a good forty feet east of it. Into my field. Hollis Breck had bulldozed my trees, scraped my ground, and set a new fence forty feet onto my land, straight down the length of that north stretch, and he had taken with it the entire northwest corner. The deep black ground where the cattle pens had been. My orchard. And the dinner stone, the glacial boulder every kid in that township had sat on, was now on his side of the wire.
I stood at that new fence with my dead cold coffee and I shook. Not with fear, though that came later. With the pure animal disbelief of a thing so brazen you cannot at first make your mind hold it.
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