Then Sonny Wills lifted the microphone, and his voice was not quite steady, and he said, “Well. Supper’s not over. Who’ll give me three and a quarter on this beef.” And the hall laughed, a shaky, relieved, almost tearful laugh, and the auction went on, and it was the biggest take that supper ever had, because people were bidding with their hearts cracked open.
Orval reached over and took my hand with his old shaking one. “There,” he said. “Now it’s out of them. Now it’s real.”
I did not fight Hollis Breck in a courtroom. I never saw a lawyer. I never filed a thing. I want to be clear about that, because people always ask me how it ended legally and the answer is, it didn’t, it ended human.
It ended the next Saturday morning. I woke to the sound of trucks. I came out on my gray porch in my sock feet with my coffee and there was a line of pickups and two tractors coming up my road, and they turned into my drive, and they kept coming. Emmett Dvorak. Lorene’s son. Deb from the cafe. The red-faced younger man from the back table, whose name was Kurt. Men I did not know and men I was starting to. Thirty people, forty. They had post pullers and a skid loader and chains and fencing pliers and a flatbed stacked with new woven wire, and somebody had a trailer full of Osage orange whips he had grubbed up off his own place.
Nobody made a speech. Emmett just climbed down off his truck and looked up at me on the porch and said, “Dale, we come to put the line back where it belongs. That alright with you?” And I could not say a single word, so I just nodded, and set my coffee down on the rail, and went to get my gloves.
We pulled Hollis Breck’s bright new fence that morning. We pulled every pipe post out of its concrete and we stacked them neat by the road for him to come get, which he did, later, in the dark, when nobody was around to see. We found the old line. We did not need a surveyor to find it. Orval came out in his grandson’s truck and sat in a lawn chair at the dinner stone and pointed, and the old men nodded, because the hedge had left a track in the ground seventy-four years deep, a low green line of old stumps and roots you could follow with your eye once you knew to look, dead straight from the stone. The town knew the line because the town was the record. It had lived in them the whole time. It just needed a room full of them to say it out loud at once before any one of them was brave enough to act on it.
We set the new fence on the real line, back forty feet west, out at the hedge track where it belonged. And then, because fencing them in had been the easy part, we planted the hedge back. Osage orange whips, one every ten steps, the whole three hundred feet, Virgil Teare’s spacing, Orval calling the count from his lawn chair. “Ten steps,” he kept saying. “One every ten steps. That’s how my dad done it.” The women came up from the house around noon with sandwiches and a cake and three pies, and we ate dinner. We ate it on the dinner stone. Back on my side of the line, where it had sat since the ice. Lorene Ackerman, eighty-eight years old, let a man help her up onto that rock and she sat there in the October sun with a paper plate on her knees and she cried, and she was not the only one.
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