That, I understood it, is the worst of it. Emmett’s grandson rented ground that Hollis custom-farmed. Lorene’s son hauled grain for Breck Farms. The cafe owner, Deb, carried a note at the bank that Hollis had co-signed years back and never let her forget. Hollis Breck had a hand in every pocket in that township, and a man who will move a fence forty feet onto a widower’s ground will also pull your custom work and call your note, and everyone knew it. The whole town knew the truth and the whole town was going to let it stand, because the truth was cheaper to swallow than the man.
I found out I was not the first, too. Deb told me, late one afternoon when the cafe was empty, about Faye Pruett. Faye’s husband had died and left her the home quarter, and Hollis had moved a fence on her, oh, fifteen years back, took a wedge of her best bottom ground, and she was old and alone and tired and she let it go, and within a year or two she sold out to him cheap and moved to her daughter’s in Kearney. “He does it to the ones who can’t push back,” Deb said, and she would not look at me when she said it. “Widows. Old folks. He waits till they’re down.”
That was the night I came the closest to leaving. I sat on my gray porch in the dark with the blue tin on the table beside me, and I thought, Carol, I cannot do this. I am one man. I do not know these people. He is right. I will be gone inside two years. I thought about calling the real estate woman in the morning. I had the number out on the counter.
What stopped me was small. It was the orchard whips. They came in the mail that week, a bundle of bare apple and cherry and plum, dormant, wrapped in damp paper, and I had no corner to plant them in because he had my corner behind his wire. I stood in my kitchen holding a bundle of dead-looking sticks that were supposed to be Carol’s orchard fifteen years from now, and I started to cry, and somewhere in the middle of it the crying turned into something harder and better. I was not going to let that man plant his fence in the one future I had left.
But I was not going to fight it his way, because I could not. I had no money for a lawyer who could outlast Hollis Breck, and even if I had, I had learned something about that town in three weeks. This was not a thing that was going to be settled by anybody in an office. The line had lived in people for seventy years. It was going to have to come back out of them.
So I went to see Orval Teare.
He had a little white house in town with a wheelchair ramp his grandson had built and a lot of potted geraniums. When I told him what Hollis had done, he set his coffee down very slowly and his old hand was shaking, but not from age. From anger. His face went a color I did not like.
“He pushed out my father’s hedge,” Orval said. Not loud. “He put a bulldozer on my father’s hedge.” He looked out the window a long time. “Dale, I’ll tell you something about Hollis Breck. His granddad Lyle was the same kind of man, and his dad after him. Three generations of Brecks who thought the line was wherever they could stand. Lyle tried to take that corner off my father in nineteen and sixty, tried to say the stone had been moved. And my dad walked half this township out to that rock on a Sunday after church and had them all put a hand on it and swear where it was. Lyle backed off. You know why? Because a Breck can face down one man. He cannot face the whole township looking at him at once. That’s the one thing they cannot stand. Being seen.”
He sat forward on his cane. The shaking had stopped. “You leave it with me,” he said. “There’s a thing coming up.”
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