I walked my lines every week for a month after that, sick to my stomach. I called the county about a survey and the woman laughed — not unkindly — and said the waiting list was six months and it’d cost me eleven hundred dollars I didn’t have. Dale knew that. Dale knew everything about what I could and couldn’t afford, because for thirty years he’d been the brother who “helped” — helped with the taxes, helped with the insurance, helped himself to whatever decision needed making while I was busy keeping the books at the school cafeteria.

Then in November I went into the barn for the snow shovels and found Daddy’s old seed catalog on the workbench, swollen with damp. I almost threw it in the burn barrel. Something — I don’t know what, maybe just that it was his handwriting on the cover — made me open it. Folded inside was a sheet of graph paper, yellowed at the edges. Daddy’s hand-drawn survey of the place, every fence line measured in his careful draftsman’s print, dated March 1987. And in the margin, in pencil: “N. fence — 40′ E of the big oak. Don’t let anybody tell you different.”

The big oak had been cut down in the ’98 ice storm. But I remembered where it stood. Everybody on that road remembered where it stood.

I didn’t call Dale. I called the county back and I paid the eleven hundred dollars out of the Christmas fund, and in April the surveyor came with his orange vest and his tripod, and he set his stakes exactly where Daddy’s pencil said they should be — forty feet east of Dale’s midnight fence.