I read the deed for the third time in the cab of my truck at the buying station, with my finger under each line and the engine of the scale roaring behind me, and the name of the buyer did not change. Trustees of Mount Pisgah African Methodist Episcopal Church, and their successors in office. Six acres of creek bottom, bounded on the north by the line of Hoyt Crumley. Consideration, six hundred dollars. Signed by my husband in the slanting hand I would know anywhere. Recorded in 1994.
Darrell sat beside me, rigid, staring out the windshield at the hulls blowing across the lot. “Mama, I found the ledger in the tractor shed yesterday,” he said. “The last pages were torn out. But the carbon of the deed was in the back of the cover, flat as paper. I went to the courthouse this morning and the clerk pulled the record.” He swallowed. “Daddy sold the back six to a church for six hundred dollars. The land on that quitclaim, the part the solar company wants, includes it.”
I closed my eyes, and in the dark behind my lids I saw the creek. It ran along the back of the grove in a shallow gravel bed, shaded by sweetgum and water oak, and for as long as I could remember, on the second Sunday in June, the congregation of Mount Pisgah had gathered there in white. I had stood on the bank of that creek the first year of my marriage and watched my husband take off his hat as a young man went under. “Oh, Hoyt,” I said. “You old fox.”
“Did you know?” Darrell asked. I shook my head. In forty seven years, Hoyt had not mentioned it, not even in his sleep. But now it made sense of a hundred small things, the way he always cut the grass along that low fence line himself, the way he went quiet when anyone spoke of selling. “He did not want to be thanked,” I said. “He wanted the creek to stay a creek.” Darrell put his face in his hands and sat for a long time, and I let him.
The land we think we own is often only borrowed from the ones who love it, and a quiet gift can outlast every document that follows.
“I was going to sign it away,” he said at last, thickly. “I was going to clear it. They would have bulldozed the baptism place.” I told him he had not signed anything yet, and neither had I. “And I thank God for that,” I said. “Now sit up, son, and listen. We are going to do this properly.” We drove to the courthouse together with the deed. We found the lawyer who had drawn up the quitclaim. By the end of the afternoon, the solar company had been notified in writing that the parcel was not for sale.
The following Sunday, Darrell and I drove to Mount Pisgah. It was a small white church at a crossroads, with a gravel lot and a cemetery under the pines. The pastor, a tall woman named Reverend Alma Burke, met us on the steps in her choir robe. I put the deed in her hand. She read it, and the color rose in her face, and she turned and called the trustees out of the sanctuary one at a time. An old deacon of eighty eight read it last, and said, quietly, “Brother Hoyt.”
They told us the story after the service, over iced tea and pound cake in the fellowship hall. In 1994 the creek on the public road was fenced off by a new owner, and the congregation had nowhere to baptize. Hoyt had heard about it at the feed store. He drove to the church the next day without a word of warning and offered them the bottom of his grove for what they could pay. The trustees had collected six hundred dollars in coins from the children, and Hoyt had accepted every dime and signed it over.
Darrell stood in the corner of the hall for most of the afternoon, with a paper plate untouched in his hand. When the deacon came to shake his hand, my son turned crimson. “Sir, I came close to doing a terrible thing,” he said. The deacon looked at him for a moment and said, “But you did not. Your mother walked in the door with the truth, and you were standing beside her.” He patted Darrell on the arm. “That is all a man can do. Sit with the ones who are doing right.”
We celebrated the baptisms in June, as we have every year since 1994. I stood on the bank in my good blue dress, with a straw hat on my head, and Darrell stood beside me in his church slacks. Reverend Burke waded into the creek in a white robe. One by one, the young people went under and came up shining, while the choir sang on the bank. A little girl in the third row looked at me and waved, and I waved back. I wept, and Darrell gave me his handkerchief.
We kept the grove. Darrell took leave from the bank and drove out on weekends in September to help with the harvest. He learned to run the shaker. His wife and children came with buckets, and the church ladies brought pound cake, and the whole thing turned into a feast. We sold eight thousand pounds that fall, and the check had two names on it, mine and his, and I framed the stub. On the bottom line, beside the weight, he had written in pencil: the trees of Daddy.
The solar company did eventually find ground elsewhere, across the county, in a field nobody was fond of. I hear it makes a good deal of power. Every evening at sunset I walk to the back of the grove, down the third row where Hoyt lies, and sit on the bank of the creek with my feet bare in the water. The straw hat of my husband still sits on the seat of the tractor. I have decided I will leave it there, and let the church children find it.
