Grandpa’s Ridge
To understand why I did not scream at him, you have to understand the ridge.
My grandfather bought the back hundred and sixty in 1958, mostly rock and timber, the kind of Ozark ground nobody wanted because you could not run a plow across it.
He paid for it a little at a time cutting railroad ties by hand. He used to say the ridge grew two crops, white oak and sunsets, and both of them paid in something other than money.
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The color came in the second week of October most years. The sugar maples he had let stand along the old logging grade turned a red you could not describe to a person who had not seen it.
A red with orange underneath it and the sky coming through blue on top. People drove from three counties to look at it.
Somewhere back in the seventies my grandmother started inviting the church to ride up. Then the 4-H club. Then the saddle club I grew up in, the Prairie Hollow Riders.
Forty families who kept horses on little places up and down our road.
Every October we crossed the ridge. We never asked, because you did not ask family to let you breathe.
Grandpa stood at the trailhead in his good hat and watched the horses go up, and he counted the children the way some men count money.
He died when I was twenty-nine. The ground went to the three of us who were left, me and Lane and my aunt Doreen.
My daddy and Lane’s daddy had both passed by then.
Nobody ever drew a line on it. There was a will, but it said the heirs share equal, and nobody sat down with a surveyor, because why would you.
It was the ridge. It belonged to all of us, which in a family like mine had always meant it belonged to nobody in particular and everybody at once.
That was the mistake, I guess. We trusted the word share the way you trust a handshake.
And a handshake is only good as long as everybody in the room is decent.