The Oaks on My Side of the Creek

Henry

I didn’t say anything for a minute. I was thinking about the pencil on Grandpa’s survey. Henry & I found it 1952.

“We don’t need a surveyor to find it,” I said. “Not to start. We need Henry Bauer.”

Wade frowned. “Henry’s eighty-eight.”

“He walked that line with my grandfather for fifty years,” I said. “He’ll know it better than any surveyor. Floyd, will you wait an hour?”

Floyd looked at his watch. Then he looked at his log truck, which was parked out on the county road burning diesel, and at his nephew, who had pulled in behind it.

“I’ll wait two,” he said. “I’ll go get a biscuit.”

I left the chair against the tree. I want to be honest about that. I left it there on purpose. Then Belle and I waded back across the ford and I drove the eleven miles to town with my boots still wet.

Henry Bauer was in his recliner with the television on the morning farm report. He had on a flannel shirt buttoned all the way to the top, and his cane was hooked over the arm of the chair. When he saw it was me at his door, he smiled so wide his teeth moved.

“Laura Hensley,” he said. He has never once called me Stoltz. “You bring my mail?”

“Not today, Henry. Today I need you to come out to the farm and show me where the stone is.”

He stopped smiling. I told him the whole thing standing in his little kitchen, the paint and the flood and Wade and the three oaks lying in the sand. He listened with his head down. When I got to the part about the three oaks, he closed his eyes.

“Help me with my coat,” he said.

The Ride Out

“Your grandpa and I found that stone in the spring of ’52,” he said finally. “Snow was hardly off. We’d been arguing about the line for two years. Friendly arguing. He thought I was in his woods and I thought he was in mine.”

“Who was right?”

“Neither of us,” Henry said, and he laughed. “That’s how we found out. We dug around for most of a day with a spud bar until we hit it. Limestone. Somebody chiseled a cross on top of it before either of us was born. And it was right square between where he thought and where I thought.”

“So you split the difference.”

“No, honey. We just believed the stone.” He turned his hat around in his hands. “Then in ’58 we strung a fence on it. Him on one end, me on the other, stretching wire. Four strand of barb. Took us all of August.”

He was quiet a while after that. Then he said, “That fence has been down for thirty years. But I expect some of the wire’s still out there. Wire stays.”