Twenty-three days after we buried my husband, his brother had a crew set fence posts fourteen feet into my yard and told me, “Virgil’s not here to whine about it, and you still owe $2,860 on his stone.” He figured a widow with an unpaid headstone would sign anything. He never asked what Virgil kept in his truck.
The posts went in on a Tuesday.
By Wednesday there was wire on them, and the wire ran on the far side of the well house.
That well is the only water my kitchen has.
Arnie and Virgil split their daddy’s forty acres outside Sedalia in 1983, the spring after Pete was born.
We got the house side. Arnie got the barn side and put up a brick ranch on it.
For forty-two years the line was a row of cedars, and nobody said one word about it.
I went out there in my house shoes.
Arnie had a yellow tape hooked on the newest post. Jolene was on their porch with her coffee, watching like it was television.
“Arnie, what is this.”
“Daddy always meant the cedars for me,” he said. “Virgil knew it. He just never got around to fixing the paper.”
“That’s my goddamn well house inside your wire.”
“And you can keep drawing off it. I’m not a monster, Loretta.”
He reeled the tape in. It snapped at the end.
“Besides,” he said, “you’ve got bigger things to worry about. Reggie Ames says you’re still short on the stone.”
Small town.
Jolene’s sister keeps the books at Ames Monument.
The stone was gray granite. Virgil picked it out himself two winters ago, after his first heart scare, and he wanted a little red tractor cut into the corner, like the one he learned on.
It came to $4,100.
I’d put $1,240 down out of what was left after the funeral home.
Reggie told me, as kind as he could, that they don’t set a stone until it’s paid.
So my husband of forty-one years was up on that hill under a metal stake with a typed card in it.
The card had already curled from the rain.
I called Pete in Kansas City that night.
“Mom, it’s fourteen feet of weeds and some cedars,” he said. “Let him have it. You do NOT need a war with Uncle Arnie right now.”
“It’s the well, Pete.”
“He said you can use it.”
“He SAID.”
“I can’t get down there till July. Please just don’t make it ugly.”
On Friday Arnie came across the yard with a manila folder.
He didn’t knock. He never has.
He laid two things on my kitchen table.
A quitclaim deed, already filled out, with a little sticky arrow where I was supposed to sign.
And a check made out to Ames Monument for $2,860.
“Sign that and the stone’s paid,” he said. “Virgil gets his name up on the hill by Memorial Day.”
“And if I don’t?”
He shrugged. “Then he lies under a paper card ALL summer. That’s your call, not mine.”
He left the pen on top of the deed like he was doing me a favor.
I didn’t sign.
I didn’t sleep either.
Saturday morning I decided to sell Virgil’s truck. A man from church had offered $3,000 for it at the funeral lunch, and I’d been too worn out to answer him.
I went out to clean it.
His cap was still on the dash. His reading glasses were in the cup holder with one arm bent.
I opened the glovebox for the registration.
Under it, under a tire gauge and a wad of napkins from the drive-in, was a sheet folded in quarters.
It was a survey.
The county stamp on it said 2011, and somebody had gone over one line in red pen, hard enough to dent the paper.
On the back, in Virgil’s square pencil printing, it said, “In case Arnie ever starts. Don’t let him rush you.”
I sat in that truck a long time.
Then I folded it back the way he had.
I didn’t sell the truck.
I called Reggie and asked him to tell Arnie I’d settle up at the monument office Monday at ten.
Arnie got there early. Jolene came too, in her church cardigan, on a Monday.
Reggie stood behind the glass counter next to a bowl of butterscotch candies I don’t believe anybody has ever eaten.
Arnie put the check down first, then the deed, then the pen.
“Let’s get this done,” he said. “Virgil’s waited long enough.”
“Don’t you say his name to me like that.”
“Loretta, I am trying to HELP you.”
“You put a fence around MY WATER three weeks after his FUNERAL.”
Jolene laughed through her nose. “Nobody’s taking your water, hon.”
Reggie looked at the floor.
“Sign it,” Arnie said. “Or you can explain to this whole county why your husband still hasn’t got a name.”
I opened my purse.
I took out the sheet from the glovebox and unfolded it on the glass, right on top of his check.
Then I turned it so Virgil’s red line faced his brother.
Arnie’s hand stopped halfway to the pen.
Ames Monument
Reggie leaned over the counter to read it upside down. Then he turned it around with one finger and put on his glasses.
The red line didn’t run down the cedars.
It ran twenty-two feet past them, on Arnie’s side, straight through the back corner of a little box the surveyor had labeled GARAGE (BRICK). Beside the box, in small surveyor’s printing, it said Encroaches 6.2 ft.
I put my finger on the box.
Arnie’s hand was still out over the pen. He took it back and put it in his pocket. Jolene had a butterscotch out of Reggie’s bowl, and she quit unwrapping it.
“That’s your garage, Arnie,” I said. “The one you poured in 2011.”
“That’s a piece of paper Virgil paid some kid for,” Arnie said. “It was never filed. It doesn’t mean a thing.”
Reggie tipped the sheet to the window light. “There’s a Pettis County recorder’s stamp on it, Arnie. Book and page.”
Arnie looked at Jolene, which was a mistake, because Jolene was already looking at him.
“You told me he burned that,” she said.
The cedars
Arnie was a pallbearer at my husband’s funeral. He carried the front left corner of the casket up that hill, and at the lunch in the church basement he stood up and said grace and said family looks after family. Then he held both my hands by the coffee urn and said, “Don’t you worry about one thing, Loretta. I’ll take care of it.”
Dominic Warner was standing behind him with a paper plate. That was when he offered me three thousand for the truck.
In 2011 Arnie put a two-car garage on the back of the brick ranch, toward the cedars.
Virgil watched the slab go in from our porch three evenings running and didn’t say a word. On the fourth day he paid a young man in an orange vest $600 to walk the line with a rod and a tripod. I thought it was about a septic field. Virgil let me think it.
The night the survey came in the mail, he took it across the yard. I could see the two of them from my kitchen window, standing in the cedars in the last light, Arnie with his hands on his hips and Virgil with the sheet folded in quarters.
They stood out there long enough for me to wash the supper dishes and dry them.
When Virgil came in, he washed his hands at the sink a long time.
“We’ll leave it be,” he said. “The cedars are the line. We shook on it.”
That was all I ever got. I didn’t see that sheet again until Saturday.
Virgil dug our well himself in 1984, the summer Pete was two, with a rented auger and his brother helping. When they poured the cap on the well house, Virgil scratched V.K. 84 in the wet concrete with a nail. Arnie wanted his initials in it too, and Virgil said, “Dig your own.”
Arnie told that one at every Christmas for thirty years.
Back at the counter, Arnie picked up his check, folded it once, and put it in his shirt pocket. He left the deed and the pen.
“Come on,” he said to Jolene.
The bell over Reggie’s door rang behind them.
Virgil’s fence pliers
Reggie walked me out to my car. “I’m sorry, Loretta,” he said. “I still can’t set it.”
“I know the rule, Reggie.”
Tuesday morning my pump quit.
It does that when the pressure switch sticks, and Virgil fixed it a hundred times with a tap from the handle of a screwdriver. The well house door was on the far side of Arnie’s wire.
I got Virgil’s fence pliers out of the barn, cut three strands next to the corner post, and walked through.
I tapped the switch. The pump kicked on. From the yard I could hear the pipes knock in my kitchen wall the way they do.
Arnie’s truck was in my drive in about four minutes. In about twenty there was a county car behind it.
The deputy was a young man named Brayden whose mother I had in Sunday school. He stood in my yard with his hat in his hand and looked at the cut wire, and the posts, and me.
“Mrs. Keller, it’s a civil matter,” he said. “I can’t tell you whose line it is. I can tell you nobody cuts anybody’s fence.”
“It’s my water.”
“Yes ma’am. Then you get a lawyer, and a judge says.” He wrote in his book. “Mr. Keller’s asking for a report, so I’ve got to write one.”
Arnie stood behind him with his arms crossed. He had a roll of wire in his truck bed, and he spliced my three strands back before the county car was out of the drive.
Pete called that night.
“Uncle Arnie says you were waving old papers around at the monument place,” he said. “And now you’re cutting fence and the sheriff’s out there? Mom. He says he’ll still pay for the stone.”
“Did he tell you what the paper says?”
“He says it’s nothing. He says it’s some survey Dad never filed.”
“It’s filed, Pete.”
“I can’t do this from Kansas City,” he said. “Just think about letting him have it. Please.”
The pump truck
Wednesday a white truck with a rig on the back came down Arnie’s lane and drove right through the gap in the cedars to my well house.
The man who got out was about thirty, with a clipboard. He had a key to a padlock on my well house door. I didn’t know there was a padlock.
“Morning,” he said. “I’m Cole. I’m just here for the draw-down.”
“The what?”
“Twenty-four-hour pump test. See what this well will give.” He checked his clipboard. “Mr. Keller said the house side’s been told.”
He dropped a pump down my well and laid a hose across Virgil’s garden to the ditch. It ran right over the tomato cages and flattened two.
“They tested Mr. Keller’s barn well last month,” Cole said. “Wasn’t near enough.”
I went in and filled every canning jar I had, and the stock pot, and the bathtub.
I called across to Arnie’s house. Jolene picked up.
“He’s at the bank in Sedalia, hon,” she said. “I don’t know anything about any truck.” She hung up before I could tell her what kind.
By noon water was running down that ditch like a creek. By three my kitchen tap was coughing.
I went out and stood by the hose in my house shoes.
“Who wants to know what my well will give?”
Cole looked at me and then at the clipboard, like he was deciding whether it was his business to say.
“The buyer,” he said. “Broiler outfit. Four barns, they figure. Barns like that drink a lot of water, ma’am.”
I held my hand out. He tore the yellow copy off his work order and put it in it.
Customer: Rasmussen Poultry. Site: A. Keller, well house, east line.
That night I washed the supper dishes in water I’d saved in canning jars.
The tap went to air at nine.
Thirty-six feet
I sat at the kitchen table with the manila folder Arnie had left and Virgil’s reading glasses, the ones with the bent arm.
I’d read the top of that quitclaim. I’d never read the bottom. It was typed small, and Arnie’s sticky arrow covered most of it.
I peeled the arrow off.
A strip of land thirty-six feet in width, it said, lying along the east line of the Grantor’s tract, together with the well, pump, pressure tank, well house and all water rights appurtenant thereto.
Thirty-six feet.
I unfolded the survey next to it. Twenty-two feet from Virgil’s red line to the cedars, where Arnie’s garage sat. Fourteen feet from the cedars to Arnie’s new posts, where my well sat.
Twenty-two and fourteen.
I turned the survey over. In case Arnie ever starts. Don’t let him rush you.
I called Pete at ten-thirty. He picked up on the fifth ring and said Mom like he thought somebody else had died.
I said I was sorry to call so late. He said it didn’t matter.
I read it to him. All of it, slow, the way it was typed. Then I read him Cole’s work order.
I could hear his television in the back for a while.
“Read me the part about the water again,” he said.
I read it again.
“He told me it was weeds,” Pete said. “He called me Sunday and told me it was fourteen feet of weeds and you were getting confused.”
“Sunday,” I said. “The day before the monument.”
“Mom.” His voice went thin. “Don’t you sign one single thing.”
The receipt
Thursday I drove to the courthouse in Sedalia and paid eight dollars for a certified copy of the survey.
I mailed it to Rasmussen Poultry with Cole’s work order number on a sticky note. Under that I wrote: The well is mine. So is the ground under Arnie Keller’s garage. I am not signing anything. Loretta Keller.
Friday morning I called Dominic Warner.
He came out at eight with his boy and a cashier’s check for three thousand dollars. I took Virgil’s cap off the dash and his glasses out of the cup holder before I handed over the keys. I left the tire gauge in the glovebox.
They drove it down my lane, and I stood there till I couldn’t hear it.
Then I drove my Buick to Ames Monument and paid Reggie $2,860. He wrote PAID IN FULL across the bottom of my receipt and said they’d set it the Thursday before Memorial Day.
I had a hundred and forty dollars left out of the truck.
At four o’clock Arnie came across the yard. He didn’t knock.
“Where’s the truck?”
“Sold.”
He put both hands flat on my kitchen table, right where he’d laid the deed.
“A man from Rasmussen called me this morning,” he said. “Their title people got a letter. From you. They’ve put the whole thing on hold, Loretta. On hold. Do you understand what you did? I’ve had Farm Credit on that ground since the drought year. I’m seventy-one. My knees are shot. That sale was the only way Jolene and me ever get off that place, and you went and mailed it to strangers. Over a well. A well I told you you could use.”
I laid Reggie’s receipt on the table between his hands.
He looked at it a long time.
“You sold Virgil’s truck,” he said. “To spite me.”
“To pay for his stone.”
“I offered to pay for his stone.” His face had gone red up into his hair. “I put a check in your hand. Virgil would be sick, Loretta. Sick. His own wife, mailing his brother’s business to some chicken outfit in…”
The screen door banged. Jolene was standing in it in her house slippers. She’d come across the yard after him.
“Tell her what you told the man from Rasmussen,” she said.
“Jo, go home.”
“He told them the house side would come up by fall,” Jolene said to me. “He said you’d be in a home in Sedalia by fall and your place would go cheap, and then they’d have that well for good. He said it in my kitchen, on the speaker.” She was holding her own elbows. “And he told me Virgil burned that survey in 2011. Fifteen years he told me that.”
Arnie had nothing to say to that.
He took his hands off my table.
“Pull your posts, Arnie,” I said. “When they’re out, I’ll sign a paper that says the cedars. That’s what Virgil gave you.”
“And the water?”
“Dig your own.”
He went out the screen door. He didn’t shut it.
Memorial Day
They set the stone the Thursday before, and I went up on Monday.
Gray granite. VIRGIL L. KELLER. Forty-one years of marriage in between the dates, if you know where to look. The little red tractor in the corner, as red as he wanted it.
The metal stake was still in the ground beside it where somebody had forgotten it, with the typed card curled up like a leaf.
Arnie pulled his posts by hand over two evenings. Jolene sat on their porch both nights and didn’t drink any coffee. The holes are still there along the cedars. I haven’t filled them.
I signed the cedars paper at a lawyer’s office in Sedalia in June. Arnie paid the lawyer and didn’t look at me.
Rasmussen Poultry never called me back. Cole came and got his pump.
My kitchen tap runs fine.
Dominic Warner drives Virgil’s truck to church. He parks it in the same spot Virgil did, under the hackberry, because that’s where the shade is.
Virgil’s cap is on the hook by my back door.
I pulled the stake out of the ground and wiped the dirt off it on the grass.
Then I put the card in my purse with the survey, folded in quarters, the way he kept it.
If this one got to you, send it to somebody who has a brother on the other side of the cedars.
Grief and family tensions take unexpected turns in the stepson who walked in with his laundry and the sister whose mittens appeared on the evening news. For another story about a stranger stepping in when it matters most, read the biker who helped a little girl find her voice.
