Sunday morning, and the sheriff who knew my father
The first thing I did, before the sun was even properly up, was drive to the little all-night gas station out on the highway and make copies of my deed, my survey, and the most recent tax bill, three sets of each. I am old enough to trust paper over anything you can say out loud. Then I came home and I waited, and I watched the hill.
They started arriving around eight. A florist van. A catering truck. A trailer full of round tables. And then the cars, the family cars, aunts and uncles and cousins in their good clothes, and finally a long white car that could only carry a bride. Music started up under the tent, a string quartet warming up, real violins, and I will tell you the honest truth, it sounded beautiful floating down the valley on a cool September morning. For one weak minute I almost let it go. Almost. Let them have their day, I thought, and sort it out after. But I knew that if I did, the lie would only harden. Next year it would be somebody’s graduation party. The year after, a Fourth of July for the whole subdivision. Give a lie one good day in the sun and it puts down roots deeper than any oak.
So I made two phone calls.
The first was to the county sheriff’s office. I did not call to report a crime, exactly, and I was careful how I put it, because I did not want deputies rolling up with lights and turning it into a scene. I told the dispatcher, calm as I could, that I had a large group of trespassers on my private property who I believed had been misinformed, that no one was in danger, and that I would sure appreciate a deputy coming out to help me sort a civil boundary matter before it turned into anything worse. The dispatcher took my name. There was a pause, and then she said, “Are you kin to the man who used to bring the pumpkins to the church every October?” And I said that was my father, and she said her whole childhood was those pumpkins, and that she would get somebody out to me directly. That is how it works out here, still. The paper matters, and so does whose son you are.