I read the paper from the clerk on the bench by the wash rack, with my glasses sliding down my nose and the water from the hose running over my shoes, and I read the name of the owner of record three times, slowly, the way I used to read a chart at three in the morning. Anselm Guidry. Lot 37, a strip a quarter acre wide on the east side of our place. Delmas had said that name in his sleep for forty years. I had always thought he was dreaming of a boy he knew in school.
“Who is that, Mama?” Remy asked, in a small voice. I took off my glasses and rubbed my eyes. “He was the best friend of your father, cher, from the second grade on. He farmed the next road over and raised hogs when it was not easy for a man like him to get a loan. He died in 2001.” I held up the paper. “Your father wanted the best drained spot on the whole place for his barn, and this was it. But it belonged to Anselm.” Remy swallowed. “Then how did Daddy build on it?”
He set the green show box on the bench between us. The cut lock hung open. He lifted the lid with both hands, like a boy holding a bird. On top lay a lease on thin yellow paper, typed on a manual machine. For the use of Lot 37, the rent shall be one dollar a year, so long as show animals are raised upon it. Beneath the typing were two signatures, one large and one small. Delmas and Anselm. Under the lease was a stack of little folded papers tied with a shoelace.
Remy untied the shoelace and counted the papers one at a time, out loud, and his voice went thin around the thirties. Thirty seven receipts. Received of Delmas Thibodeaux, one dollar, rent of Lot 37, one year. The first ones were signed by Anselm in big round letters. After 2001 they were signed in a careful slant by Odile Guidry, his widow. Every spring for thirty seven years, my husband had driven down that road with a dollar, and he never said one word about it at supper.
The truest kind of ownership is the kind that keeps being paid for, a little at a time, long after nobody is checking.
“Mama,” Remy said, “I could not have sold it. I could not have sold what was never his, and I could not have torn out a barn that stood on a promise.” I put my hand flat on his back, between the shoulder blades, where I used to rub him when he had the croup. “You did not know, cher. You did not ask. That is the difference between a mistake and a sin, and it is a thin line, but it holds.” He nodded and wiped his nose on his wrist, and in the shavings the hog of Josie grunted in her sleep.
The next morning we drove to see Odile Guidry. She was eighty nine and lived in a yellow house on Chestnut Road, with a wheelchair ramp and a hundred ferns on the porch. She took one look at Remy and said, “You have the ears of your daddy.” I laid the receipts in her lap. She did not touch them. She told us that Delmas had come every first of March, at ten o clock, with a dollar and a sack of pralines, and that the last two springs nobody had come. She had waited on the porch both times. She had not wanted to trouble a widow.
I felt my cheeks burn. Two springs unpaid, because I had been too deep in my grief to look in his box. Before I could speak, Remy reached into my apron pocket and drew out a crumpled dollar, the same one he had tucked there on the day of the parade. He laid it on the arm of her chair. Then he took two more from his wallet. “For this year, ma am, and for the two we missed,” he said. His hands were trembling. Odile closed her fingers over the bills and laughed until she coughed.
She told us the rest of the lease over lemonade. Anselm had written it himself in 1988. As long as hogs lived in the barn, the strip belonged to the barn. If the pens ever stood empty, it would return to his family. “When I heard you refilled the pens in March,” she said to me, “I told my grandson that Delmas was not finished.” By noon she had her lawyer on the telephone. By Friday the deed was drawn. The Guidry family sold the strip to me for one dollar, which she said seemed to be the going price in our family.
Remy returned the pool table to the store and took the loss of the deposit without a murmur. He called his buddies and told them that the barn was not for sale and that the beer cooler would have to find a garage of its own. On Saturday he arrived at five in the morning in his work truck and asked where the white show stick was kept. I told him it stood in the corner by the scale, where nobody touched it. “I would like to touch it,” he said.
He learned to scratch a barrow behind the ear so it would lie down, to walk a hog in a slow circle, to read a ham with his palm. Josie, who was nine, taught him half of it, and she was a hard teacher. At the parish show in the fall, he stood at the rail in a clean white shirt and watched the little girl lead her animal into the ring. The judge gave her the Reserve Grand ribbon. Remy whooped so loudly that the whole bleacher turned around, and I covered my face with my program.
On the first of March, at ten o clock, we drove down Chestnut Road in the work truck, with a dollar on the dash and a sack of pralines on the seat. Odile was waiting on the porch in her good dress. Remy handed her the dollar with both hands, and she gave him a receipt, signed in her careful slant. He folded it and put it in the green box, number thirty eight, and closed the lid. The barn stands behind our house still, with fourteen new pens, and nobody has ever once suggested a pool table.
