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For a moment, the old solidarity of playing together worked its magic and put us all back on equal footing again. Haywood’s callused, work-stained fingers chorded his fiddle strings and maneuvered his bow just as nimbly as Adam’s soft, well-kept hands. Herman’s deep bass hit every note as true as Adam’s light tenor.

Sitting amid my family, awash in the music we were making together, was like being ten years old again. It was fine—so fine that, even though most of us had to work next day, we didn’t break up till nearly midnight.

Out in the parking lot, Haywood helped Herman’s son Reese maneuver Herman’s wheelchair into the van.

“Won’t the fellowshipping good tonight?” Haywood said, giving his twin a quick bear hug.

As the rest of us called goodnights to each other across the chilly parking lot, the men drifted over to look at the newest addition to Reese’s pickup and one of my female cousins shook her head. “They come out of the womb going Voodn-voodn-vroom and they never get over it, do they?”

Reese had moved back home temporarily to lick his wounds after breaking up with his trashy girlfriend (Nadine’s term, not mine). Angry and hurt that she’d kicked him out for someone else, Reese was now lavishing all his love and most of his money on a brand-new truck. Big wheels with a fancy diamond tread, bed liner, mud flaps, customized head- and taillights—these were only the beginning. God knows how many new extras were under the hood, and as for the outside? I didn’t know they even made that much optional chrome.

“A woman may do you dirt,” he told Adam sagely, “but a Ford pickup won’t never let you down.”

The gospel according to Saint Reese. He was preaching to the choir and it looked like Adam was sitting in the amen corner.

6

« ^ » The whole expence of taking up such a run of land as I have mentioned, I mean 640 acres for a plantation to a new settler, will not exceed 10 guineas, between patent, surveyor, and the different offices...“Scotus Americanus,” 1773

Next day I learned why Adam had come home just now: Dick Sutterly had made him a hefty offer for the three acres that had been sitting idle since he and Karen moved to California.

Twenty-five years ago, Adam and Zach were seniors in high school when Karen transferred into the junior class.

It was hand-held calculators all over again.

Adam came home from their second date and told Daddy and Mother that he wanted to marry her immediately after graduation. The standard arguments against a youthful marriage were advanced, but they would have had better luck arguing him out of computers.

As usual, Adam had already worked out most of the details beforehand. He would take the money he’d saved for a new car and buy a used mobile home instead. If Daddy would give him a place to put it and if Haywood, who had a backhoe, would help them dig a well and septic tank, he and Karen would live there as frugally as field mice and both would commute to their schools. It would be cheaper than paying room and board in a dorm.

“I’ll work out our living expenses in the summers, she’ll go to college full-time, and we’ll both have our undergrad degrees in four years.”

“And what if she has a baby?” Daddy asked.

Adam couldn’t help grinning at that question because the younger boys always used to wonder if the reason he’d fathered eleven sons was because 1) he really wanted that many, 2) he wanted a daughter so bad he didn’t care how many boys it took, or 3) he simply didn’t understand the mechanics of reproduction.

“News flash, Daddy—science has discovered how babies are made.”

“You getting smart with me, boy?” Daddy asked gruffly.

But by then, Mother was laughing, too, so Adam knew he’d won.

And because he himself would never have lived on land he didn’t hold clear title to, Daddy had deeded Adam a three-acre site on the far edge of his holdings, big enough for a trailer and a good-sized vegetable garden.

Back then, raw farmland was going for about six to eight hundred an acre. Nowadays, such land runs three to six thousand, and a single-acre building lot can bring as much as ten or twelve if it has good road frontage.

Adam’s three acres (2.9 acres, to be precise) shared an easement lane with Gray Talbert’s nursery. There was barely thirty feet of road frontage and the lot was so awkwardly shaped that you really couldn’t put three houses on it and meet county building regulations. So why was Dick Sutterly offering him forty-five thousand dollars? That was way more than it was worth.

“For that matter,” said Seth, “how’s a low-end developer like Sutterly pay that kind of money?”

“Lower your voice,” said Adam. “I promised him we’d keep this quiet.”

It was noon recess and Adam, Seth, and I were in the courthouse basement, in the deed book section of the Register of Deeds office, looking for the plat of Adam’s land.

Not counting that first baby boy that was stillborn more than thirty-five years before my birth, Seth is Daddy’s seventh son. Daddy still makes his own decisions, but being in his eighties now, he doesn’t have the same zest he used to have for snaking out all the details that inform those decisions. Seth is levelheaded and intelligent, and his and Minnie’s farm is right next door to the homeplace, so more and more these days, Daddy relies on him to look into things like this and bring home the facts.

The last time I’d been down here to check on a deed, the place was as quiet as a library and nearly empty except for genealogists diligently sticking twigs back on their family trees by tracing land divisions from one generation to the next.

Now the room buzzed with muted questions and conversations. Almost all the counter space was taken up by paralegals doing title searches and real estate people looking for greener pastures to develop. Adam wasn’t the first to get a tempting offer and Sutterly doesn’t have a monopoly on bulldozers. Ever since I-40 opened, we’ve all had bids for bits and pieces of our land, and we’ve all said no thank you.

“Why are we even wasting our time here?” I asked, checking the deed book by the number on Adam’s deed. “It’s not like you’re going to sell.”

Adam lifted up the big heavy leather-bound book I’d pointed to, carried it over to a counter that had one end clear, and began turning the pages. “Page one-oh-eight, was it?”

I looked at Seth, who shrugged.

“Are you?” I asked in a sharper voice.

Adam gave an impatient twist of his shoulder. “I just want to see what’s happening, okay?”

The three of us put our heads together over page 108 and got ourselves oriented.

“Possum Creek,” said Seth, pointing to a wavy line that ran from northeast to southwest and is a major boundary between Knott land to the north and the Stancil farm to the south.

A hundred and thirty years ago, everything south of Possum Creek to a dirt road running roughly east to west had belonged to the Pleasant family. Leo Pleasant still owns a big chunk along the road to the west, but when the original holding was broken up, Jap Stancil’s grandfather got the eastern part bounded by the creek, Old Forty-Eight and the dirt road. G. Hooks Talbert’s great-grandmother got a piece back off the road, along the creek. Another Pleasant son, Merrilee Yadkin Grimes’s great-grandfather, also got land along the creek, and I believe it was Merrilee’s grandmother who sold it to Daddy sometime in the late forties.