What was up on the old Clark homeplace was water. A spring, cold and clear as glass, that came out of a crack in the rock at the head of the ridge and ran down through my back field into the Elk River. Opal and I called it the Clark Spring, and we had carried buckets from it in the summer of 1973 before we ever had a well. Carl Hollifield told me what a hydrologist in Boone had measured last summer for a bottled water company: three hundred and ten gallons a minute, every minute of the year. That company had quietly agreed to pay the owner of the forty acres nine million dollars for the right to it.
I drove down the mountain to Charlotte that same afternoon with Carl riding beside me, holding a manila envelope on his knees. We did not talk much. At a gas station in Marion, I bought a coffee and a bag of peanuts, the way Opal and I used to, and I ate them slowly, thinking about the trees. Carl said the deed in Rock Hill had been notarized by a woman who worked at a title office that Hunter had once represented, and that she had signed it from a photograph of my signature on the sale of the farm. A single pen stroke, copied from a photocopy, and a man whole life could be taken.
When we reached Myers Park, it was nearly dusk. A string of white lights was already hung over the front door of the house of Brittany, and her Range Rover stood in the drive like a polished beetle. Through the window I could see the Thanksgiving leftovers still on the counter and my granddaughter laughing at a screen. I sat in the truck a moment. Then I got out, in my work boots, straightened my cap, and walked up the long brick path to the front door. Carl came behind me, carrying the envelope. I rang the bell.
A forgotten spring on a mountain ridge gave one retired tree farmer the length of a single afternoon to bring his granddaughter back to the truth in Charlotte.
I gave my terms to Hunter in his own den, with the fireplace going, Brittany next to me on the sofa and Carl in the corner with the envelope. The LLC would be dissolved in the morning and the false deed withdrawn at the Register of Deeds. Hunter would pay the costs of the lawyers and give me a signed statement of everything he had done. And the forty acres, including the spring, would be placed in a land trust, with me as keeper for the rest of my life. I told him he could take it or take his chances with a judge in Avery County. I did not raise my voice. A tree does not need to.
Hunter laughed, and then he stopped laughing, because Carl set a photograph of the deed on the coffee table next to the photograph of my signature. He said it was only a business opportunity. He said that old men on mountain farms never knew what they owned. He said that the whole thing was legal, in a way. Brittany stood up from the sofa. Her face was white. She said, in a voice I had not heard since she was a little girl, “Grandpa Wade, I did not know.” She turned to her husband. “Tell him the truth, Hunter. Tell him all of it.”
Hunter snatched the photograph and the deed from the table, meaning to run to the garage and burn them in the barrel behind the Range Rover, and he bolted from the den through the kitchen and out the side door in his socks, with Carl rising slowly from the corner chair. Brittany did not follow. She only sat down again, put her face in her hands, and said that she had always known he would run. I sat beside her, and I put my hand on her back.
The side door opened onto the street just as the Myers Park Christmas parade was passing, and the last float was a fire truck, bright red, with Santa Claus in the back waving at the neighbors and a dozen elves throwing candy canes into the crowd. The truck stopped square in front of the driveway while a small boy gave the driver a letter. Hunter, in his socks, ran right into the arms of Santa. “Ho ho ho,” said Santa, who was the president of the neighborhood association, and who knew Hunter well. “Have you been good this year?”
Hunter did not say a word. A police officer who had been walking the parade route took the papers from his hand, and Carl handed over his own copies. The false deed was withdrawn on Monday. The state revoked the notary, and a judge in Mecklenburg County gave Hunter a long list of conditions that would take him years to meet. Brittany moved into the guest room of my farmhouse with her two children for the winter, and she rose with me every morning at five to walk the rows. She said she had forgotten how quiet the mountain could be.
In the name of Opal, who passed in 2021, I started the Opal Pruitt Evergreen Fund. It pays for boundary surveys, property tax help and free seedlings for mountain farm families in Avery, Watauga and Mitchell counties who are being pressured to sell. In the first year we surveyed thirty seven properties and planted nine thousand Fraser firs on land that had gone fallow. A woman in Spruce Pine told me she had not cried since her husband passed. She cried on the day her trees arrived. She called them her children.
The Clark Spring is in the trust now, and a plain wooden sign beside it says that the water belongs to the mountain. Every December I take Brittany and her children up to the ridge to cut the first tree of the season, the one for the front window. They carry the glass ornaments of Opal in a basket with a quilt over them, and I hang them one by one with hands that shake. The smallest child holds the hooks. The spring runs cold in the snow, and nobody says a word.
