Nineteen days after we buried my father, his brother moved the fence between their houses nine feet onto Dad’s side, through his tomatoes. I still owed $1,860 on the headstone. My uncle leaned on the post and said, “Your daddy’s in the ground, son. He won’t miss nine feet of dirt.” He forgot what Dad hung on the pecan tree.
Mom called me at work at 7:40 on a Tuesday.
She didn’t say hello.
“Wade, come look at the yard,” she said. “Just come look.”
I drove the eleven miles out to the house outside Neosho with my lunch still sitting on the seat.
The old fence was right where it always was. Weathered posts, chicken wire Dad patched with baling twine every spring.
But nine feet in from it, a new line of pale posts ran from the road all the way back to the shed.
Fresh wire. Fresh concrete around every foot.
Dad’s tomato cages were laying flat in the grass where somebody had yanked them out of the way.
And his pecan tree, the one he planted the year I was born, was on the wrong side of the wire.
Mom stood on the back step in her housecoat holding a cup of coffee she wasn’t drinking.
“He started at six,” she said. “He brought two boys from church to help him dig.”
Uncle Curtis had lived in the brick house next door my whole life.
He and Dad grew up on that ground, and when Grandpa died they each got a house and the line between them.
Fifty-one years and nobody touched that line.
I walked over. Curtis was tamping dirt around the last post like he was putting in a mailbox.
“What is this,” I said.
“Squaring things up,” he said. “Should’ve been done a long time ago.”
“Dad’s been dead three weeks.”
“And your daddy’s not out here complaining about it, is he?”
He had a Band-Aid on his thumb with little cartoon dinosaurs all over it.
I told him to pull it out.
He laughed at me.
“I had it surveyed, Wade,” he said. “Paid for it myself. That nine feet’s been mine since 1974. Earl just never wanted to hear it.”
He tapped his shirt pocket like the paper was in there.
He never took it out.
That night Aunt Bev called Mom instead of me.
She said Curtis would be happy to take care of what was left on Earl’s stone.
All Mom had to do was sign a little paper saying the fence was fine where it was.
Mom sat at the kitchen table with the phone in her lap for a long time after she hung up.
The pink invoice from Pearce Monument was stuck to the fridge with a magnet shaped like a bass.
Donnie Pearce had already cut Dad’s name. He was keeping the stone in his yard until we paid it off.
“I could just sign it,” Mom said. “It’s grass, Wade. It’s only grass.”
“It’s DAD’S grass,” I said.
She didn’t answer me.
Dad’s phone was still on the counter by the toaster. Mom kept it charged because she couldn’t stand to see it go dark.
Around eleven it buzzed.
I picked it up thinking it was a bill.
It was an app I’d never seen, a little green leaf. Motion detected, it said. Garden Cam.
Dad bought that camera at the farm store in March to catch whatever was eating his tomatoes. He told me about it on the phone and I barely listened.
It was still hanging on the pecan tree. Still running on the batteries he put in.
I scrolled back. Then back some more.
Then I took the phone out to my truck and watched one clip three times with the dome light off.
I didn’t tell Mom what was on it.
I didn’t tell anybody.
Thursday morning I went out with Dad’s pry bar and pulled the first new post out of the ground, concrete and all.
I had two out before Curtis came across the yard in his slippers.
“GET OFF MY LAND,” he said. His face was red up to the ears.
“It’s not your land.”
He went back inside and called the sheriff on his dead brother’s son.
Twenty minutes later a cruiser pulled in behind my truck. Young deputy, Gonzales on his nametag, a gas station coffee in his hand.
Curtis met him at the car door with the paper finally out of his pocket.
“Survey,” he said, and shook it at him. “Certified. This man’s trespassing and tearing up my property.”
The deputy read it. Then he looked over at me.
“Sir, if this is accurate, you’re standing on his side of the line right now.”
Mom was on the step again with both hands over her mouth.
“Officer, I just buried my brother,” Curtis said, and his voice cracked right on time. “I don’t want trouble. I want what’s MINE.”
That word did it.
I walked past both of them.
“Sir,” the deputy said. “Sir, I need you to stop.”
I went straight to the pecan tree.
Curtis saw where I was going before the deputy did. His mouth opened and nothing came out of it.
The camera was the color of bark, about the size of a paperback, belted to the trunk with a green nylon band at the height of Dad’s chest.
I unbuckled it.
“YOU PUT THAT DOWN,” Curtis said.
Then, quieter, “What is that, Wade?”
“Dad’s tomato camera,” I said. “Nobody ever turned it off.”
I slid the little door open on the side, thumbed the card out, and held it up for the deputy.
The clip
Gonzales didn’t take it. He looked at the card between my fingers like a coin somebody had tried to pay him with.
“What’s on that?” he said.
“My uncle,” I said. “Four in the morning, August nineteenth.”
Dad’s phone was in my jacket. It hadn’t been out of my pocket since Tuesday night. I opened the green leaf, found the clip and turned the screen out of the flat gray light so the deputy could see.
Night vision, everything the color of a pickle jar. Numbers in the corner said 3:52. A flashlight came in from the left, held in somebody’s teeth, and then the man under it. Plaid flannel. Hair standing up on one side.
Curtis got down on one knee at the foot of the pecan and dug with his hands. He worked a piece of rebar out of the ground, a stub with a cap on it, and carried it away from the old fence. You can hear him on the clip. He counts. “Seven. Eight. Nine.”
Then a sledge, three taps. He kicked dirt over the old hole and stamped it flat like he was putting out a cigarette.
He never once looked at the tree.
Gonzales watched it to the end. Then he asked me to start it over, and he watched it again with his coffee going cold in his other hand.
Nobody in the yard said a word. Somewhere down the road a dog was going at it.
“That’s a man checking his own line,” Curtis said. His voice had gone up a step. “At his own corner. I’m entitled.”
“With a sledge,” Gonzales said. “At four in the morning.”
Curtis’s hand with the survey in it came down against his leg. His thumb, the one with the dinosaurs, slid over the corner of the page.
“Mr. Mathis,” Gonzales said. “What’s the date on your survey?”
The iron pin
When I was nine, Dad walked me out to where the pecan is now, which was just grass then, and made me stand on a piece of rebar sticking up out of the ground. Orange plastic cap on it, sun-faded to the color of a creamsicle.
“Feel that?” he said.
I felt a lump under my sneaker.
“County man drove that the week they buried Grandpa,” Dad said. “That’s the ground split in two. Curtis gets that side, we get this side. Now you know where you live.”
He planted the pecan the next spring, four feet inside the line, because he said a man ought to be able to sit under his own tree and still be on his own ground. I was already nine. He said it was for the year I was born anyway, and he’d just been slow.
Dad was the quiet one. He worked the lumberyard for thirty-one years, grew forty tomato plants every summer and gave most of them to the church. Curtis was the one who showed up. He fixed Mom’s gutters without being asked. He drove Mom to the pharmacy when her knee went. He sat at every holiday table and told the story about the time Dad drove the tractor into the pond, and Dad let him tell it.
When Dad went into the hospital in Joplin on the sixteenth of August, Curtis was in the waiting room before I was.
At the funeral he carried the front left corner of the casket in his good suit and cried so hard Bev had to hold on to his sleeve. At the cemetery he put his hand on the back of my neck.
“Anything you need, son,” he said. “Anything.”
That was the only thing anybody said that day that I believed.
Dad never came home from that hospital. Mom brought his phone back in a plastic bag with his watch and his reading glasses. She plugged it in by the toaster.
In March, before any of it, Dad had shown the whole Easter table a video of a raccoon from that camera. A raccoon eating a tomato, holding it in both hands like a man with a sandwich. Curtis laughed hardest. He asked where Dad got it.
Farm store, Dad said. Forty-nine dollars. Runs all year.
Now I stood in the yard with that same camera in my hand and the deputy holding out his palm for the paper.
Curtis gave it up like it was hot.
“What was on it, Wade?” Mom said from the step.
She had been standing there the whole time. I’d never told her.
Pearce Monument, Wednesday
I should say what I did the day before, because it didn’t work.
Wednesday after work I drove to Pearce Monument, which sits between a tire shop and a feed store with granite stones lined up out front like teeth. Donnie Pearce came out wiping his hands on his apron. Reading glasses on a cord. He’d done my grandmother’s stone, and my grandfather’s before that.
The stone was around back under a blue tarp. He pulled it up so I could see.
EARL D. MATHIS. Mom picked the verse.
I had $212 in checking that wasn’t spoken for. I put my debit card on his counter.
“I’ll get you the rest by the first,” I said. “Payday. Just let me take it today.”
Donnie looked at the card and didn’t pick it up.
“Wade, I’d do it for the two-twelve,” he said. “That’s not the problem.”
“What’s the problem.”
“Your uncle called me Friday. Said he’d take care of the balance. Said the family might want it moved to another cemetery depending on how the property settles, and I should hold it in the yard till he called me back.” He took his glasses off. “I gave him my word. I’ve known Curtis forty years.”
“What property settles?”
“I figured you knew.”
I didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say that Donnie could do anything about.
I picked my card back up. It had a coffee ring on it from his counter.
“He was in here once before that,” Donnie said. “I didn’t think anything of it then.”
“When?”
“August. Asked me what a stone runs.”
He put his glasses back on.
“Earl was still talking in August,” he said.
Bev’s pen
Gonzales read the survey standing by his cruiser with the door open.
“Yoder Land Surveying, Neosho,” he said. “Stamp, signature.” Then he looked at the corner Curtis’s thumb had been covering. “August twenty-second.”
“So?” Curtis said. “A man ought to look before he pays for a survey.”
“That’s three days after the video, sir.”
“Nobody said it’s against the law to look.”
“No, sir. A corner pin might be something.” Gonzales took the camera card out of my hand at last and slid it into an envelope from his glove box. He wrote on the envelope. “I can put this in the report. I can’t tell you where the line is. That’s a surveyor and a lawyer and a judge, and that’s six months. Until then you both stay on your own sides of the wire.”
“Which side’s mine?” I said.
He looked at me like I was joking.
Curtis said nobody had ever put a hand on his brother’s boy, and that if I kept it up he’d see I paid for every post. Gonzales told him that was enough. The cruiser backed out around my truck.
Harvey Yoder’s name was in blue ink at the bottom of that paper. Mom knew him. Harvey Yoder did our pond.
By two that afternoon Bev was at the kitchen table.
She’d brought the little paper typed on one sheet, and she’d brought a check. She laid the check face up next to the bass magnet. Pearce Monument, $1,860.00.
“It’s a kindness, Joyce,” she said. “That’s all Curtis means by it. Family doesn’t need to fight over a strip of grass at a time like this.”
Mom had the pen in her hand. I hadn’t seen her pick it up.
“Mom,” I said. “Not today. Give me till tomorrow.”
“Why?”
I wanted to tell her. I had Dad’s phone against my leg with a clip on it that would’ve turned her face to stone. I looked at Bev, who had called my mother on a Tuesday night with the offer already in her purse, and I kept my mouth shut.
“Because I’m asking,” I said.
Mom looked at the paper. She looked at the pink invoice.
“Your father said it himself, Wade,” she said. “At the hospital. The week before. I was holding his hand and he said, Joyce, let Curtis have whatever he wants.”
Bev didn’t say a word. She looked at the check like it belonged to somebody else.
“He knew something was coming,” Mom said. “I thought he meant after. I thought he meant this.”
Dad’s thread
Mom went to bed at ten. She left the pen on the paper.
Dad never put a lock on his phone. He said there was nothing on it but the weather and the church group. I had only ever opened that one app.
I opened his messages.
Curtis was the third name down. Between the church group and a number for the lumberyard, a thread that ran back to the winter. Football scores. A picture of a truck bumper. A thumbs-up.
Then August nineteenth, 6:14 in the morning, from a hospital bed.
Saw the camera. You moved the pin.
Curtis, 6:31: Earl you’re on morphine. Get some rest.
I know what I saw. Put it back before I’m home.
Don’t tell Joyce. She’s got enough.
Nothing from Curtis after that.
August twenty-fourth: Curtis.
September second, a Tuesday: Curtis.
September ninth: Pin.
That was all. One word at a time, to a man who had answered the first message in seventeen minutes and never answered another.
I sat there at the counter by the toaster until the phone went dark by itself, and I touched it to wake it up again.
Dad hadn’t forgotten. Dad hadn’t let it go.
Dad was in a hospital bed in Joplin with a tube in his arm, looking at a green night-vision picture of his brother digging up the pin Grandpa’s county man drove, and he picked up his phone and typed with one finger. Then he told Mom let Curtis have whatever he wants, because he wasn’t going to hand her a fight to carry in with him. He’d planned to fix it quietly when he got home.
He won’t miss nine feet of dirt.
He’d missed it every day for two months.
I took the card number off the back of the survey. Under the stamp was a number for Harvey Yoder’s after-hours line. I called it at ten to midnight and left a message with my name and the words Mathis pin and the date of the clip.
Friday, 7:30
Harvey Yoder called back at ten past six in the morning. By half past seven his white truck was in my mother’s driveway and he was standing at the foot of the pecan tree with a steel tape and a pair of reading glasses pushed up in what was left of his hair.
I held Dad’s phone out over the tailgate.
He watched it once and said nothing. He watched it again with the sound up. On “Nine,” he took his glasses off.
“I ran from that pin,” he said. “I want you to know that. Your uncle met me out here and walked me right to it. Said the family always knew the line was off. Said Earl wouldn’t hear it.” He looked at the old hole and the new one. “Dirt was soft around that cap. I figured it was rain.”
Curtis came across the yard in his slippers.
He’d seen the truck from his kitchen. He came across like he was already in the middle of a sentence.
“Harvey,” he said. “What’s he got on you? I paid for that survey. That’s mine. That’s got your stamp on it.”
“Curtis,” Yoder said. “Watch this.”
Curtis looked at the screen for about four seconds.
“That’s nothing,” he said. “That’s a man looking at a pin. You can’t see anything. It’s dark. It could be anybody.”
“It says your name in the clip, Curtis. It says it once.”
“Well, I’m not going to stand here and be ambushed by my own brother’s boy and a camera nobody asked my permission for.” He was looking at me now, though I hadn’t said anything yet. “Earl never once wanted to talk about that line. Fifty years. You know what it is to have a man not want to talk about a thing for fifty years? He had the better house. He got Mama’s clock. He got the pond, and the tomato ground, and the pecan, and every time I said a word it was Curtis, don’t start. Don’t start. I was done starting.”
Yoder said, “I’m pulling my stamp off that survey.”
“You’ll do no such thing.”
“I’ll do it this morning, and I’ll refile from the section corner. Two hundred dollars a day, and you’ll be the one paying it.”
“He texted me,” Curtis said. He said it to me, and he said it louder. “You’ve seen it. I know you have, you’ve got that look. A man that wants a thing fixed says so twice. He said it once and let it go. Earl let everything go. That’s what he was. He let me have the nine feet, Wade. He let me have it, and then he died.”
Bev had come down off her porch in her house shoes.
She walked up behind him without any hurry. I don’t know how long she had been out there.
“You told me September,” she said.
Curtis turned his head.
“You told me you had it surveyed in September. After. You said Earl wasn’t even in the ground yet and you wanted it on paper before the family got ideas. I called Joyce on that.” She had the folded check in her hand, the one that had sat by the bass magnet. She must have gone back for it. “August.”
“Beverly, go in the house.”
“What did you think Earl was going to do from that bed? What did you think he’d say?”
“It’s nine feet,” Curtis said.
Bev put the check in my hand.
“Give that to Donnie,” she said. “I’m not asking you to take it for him.”
I looked at the check for a while. Curtis’s name was in the corner, and his bank. It was a good check. It would have fixed Wednesday.
I gave it back to her.
“Put it in the church plate,” I said. “I’m paying Donnie myself.”
Then I turned to my uncle.
“The posts are out by Sunday,” I said. “All of them, and the concrete. And Harvey sets the pin where it was, and I watch him do it.”
“Or what?”
“Or Harvey files his, and the deputy gets the rest of that video, and the county gets the same one.”
Curtis said I was my father’s boy and he meant it for an insult, which was the only thing he said that morning that was true, and he walked back across the yard with Bev not following him.
The stone
It cost me $1,860 for the stone and $650 to have Harvey Yoder run the line right, and the whole thing came out of what I’d been setting aside to put a new transmission in my truck. I drove to work on a slipping second gear until the end of November.
Curtis pulled his own posts. He started Saturday at six and finished Sunday around dark. No church boys. Six holes in the first hour, then slower, then a long stretch with the pry bar leaned against the shed. I stood in the kitchen with a cup of coffee and watched and didn’t go out to help, and Mom stood next to me and didn’t ask me to.
Bev’s casserole didn’t come with the Sunday paper. We’d had one every week since I was a child.
Donnie and I set the stone the Saturday after Thanksgiving, in the cold, the two of us and a hand truck. He wouldn’t take the sixty extra dollars I put in his apron. He said Dad had given him a bag of tomatoes every August for eleven years.
Harvey came out the next week with a new cap, bright orange, and drove it in with a short sledge at the foot of the pecan. Three taps. He stood back with his hands on his hips and checked it against his tape twice.
I stood on it.
It felt like a lump under my sneaker.
Mom was already out by the old fence in her housecoat with a coffee can of baling twine. Dad’s tomato cages were stacked back by the shed where I’d put them. There was a gap in the chicken wire where Curtis’s posts had pulled the staples.
She held out the end of the twine.
“Hold the wire, Wade,” she said.
I held the wire.
If this one got to you, send it to somebody who still has a fence line to walk with their mother.
For more family stories full of buried truths and hard questions, read “I Gave Her My Real Name Holding Jeans I Had No Reason to Buy” and “My Mother’s Estate Funded The Agency, And Joel Never Let Me Touch The Binder”. For a quieter kind of heartbreak, there’s also “The Birthday Reservation at Booth Six”.
