They stared at one another.
Finally she said:
“I have lived eighty years without owning much. I know exactly what money is for.”
“This is your savings.”
“Yes.”
“You need it.”
“I have Social Security. I have the house. I have your uncle if the furnace falls through the floor.”
“That is not a financial plan.”
She smiled.
“Listen to the banker.”
Marcus did not.
“I’ll pay you back.”
“Maybe.”
“I will.”
Ruth pushed the envelope closer.
“Land is the one thing they aren’t making more of.”
He took it.
At the April auction, Dale Pruitt was the only serious competition.
Dale was fifty-three and owned nearly four hundred acres bordering the parcel to the east.
He raised cattle.
Had a newer tractor every few years.
A good house.
A wife who taught school.
Two sons already working the farm.
He was not known as a cruel man.
He was known as a man who believed neighboring ground ought eventually to belong to whoever could use it best.
Dale bid ten thousand five hundred.
Marcus bid eleven.
Dale bid eleven five.
Marcus bid twelve.
Silence followed.
Dale looked back.
Saw who had bid.
Then shook his head.
He could have gone higher.
Marcus knew that.
Dale knew it too.
He simply did not think the Stony Waste was worth thirteen thousand dollars.
The auctioneer called it.
Sold.
Marcus Hollis.
Nineteen acres.
Twelve thousand dollars.
Afterward came the courthouse-step conversation.
“Rock pile.”
“First frost.”
Marcus drove away without answering.
The first week, he understood why Dale laughed.
His pickup got stuck twice.
A brush pile concealed an old refrigerator.
One field edge held enough broken glass to fill three feed sacks.
The collapsed shed contained almost nothing useful.
A rusted hinge.
Some square nails.
Two lengths of chain.
The well marked on an old county map could not be found.
Then there were rocks.
Marcus began hauling them in the truck bed.
One load.
Five.
Twelve.
Some became repairs in the stone wall.
Others formed a rough drainage edge beside the lower lane.
By June, his back hurt constantly.
He loved it.
Not every minute.
There were evenings when he sat on the tailgate and wondered what stupidity felt like from the inside.
But then he would look over ground that was slightly more visible than the day before.
A fence line cleared.
A patch of brush gone.
A stone moved.
The work accumulated.
When Ruth asked to visit, Marcus hesitated.
“There’s nothing much to see.”
“I put three thousand dollars into it.”
“That does not make you foreman.”
“It makes me curious.”
He drove her out on a Sunday.
Ruth wore a blue dress under an old cardigan and refused to change into work clothes because she was “visiting land, not marrying it.”
She walked slowly.
Marcus stayed close.
She touched stone walls.
Looked toward the creek.
Then they reached the southern oak.
Ruth stopped.
Her cane sank slightly into the ground.
She placed one hand against the trunk.
“What?”
Marcus asked.
She did not answer.
“Grandma?”
“Your granddaddy used to talk about an oak.”
“What granddaddy?”
“My daddy.”
Marcus waited.
“He said the old family property had a tree in one corner so large three men couldn’t reach around it.”
Marcus smiled.
“Every old farm has a big oak.”
“I know.”
She kept her hand there.
“But not every memory chooses the same tree.”
Marcus did not argue.
On the drive home, Ruth looked out the window almost the whole time.