I looked at it. I looked at the gazebo Maggie had unwrapped a birthday ribbon on six years before. She’d still had her hair then, her color. The rest of us had still believed it was going to be all right. I rolled the window back up. I drove the pickup the half mile to my farmhouse. I parked. I went inside. I took my father’s enamel mug down from the shelf above the sink.
I filled it with bourbon. I drank it slowly at the kitchen table while the sun went down over the tents going up on my wife’s field. Then I called Hollis Mortenson, my attorney, at home. He picked up on the second ring. “Wyatt.” “Hollis, there are wedding tents going up on my west field. They have a county permit with my name on it. I never signed any such thing.”
There was a long silence on the line. “Stay where you are. Don’t touch a thing. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.” Hollis Mortenson is a sixty-eight-year-old country lawyer who keeps three sharpened pencils and a yellow legal pad in his jacket pocket. He has been my father’s attorney and now mine since 1979.
He grew up two miles from my farmhouse on a tobacco farm his grandmother walked away from in 1962 because the IRS made her. He has tried more agricultural-law cases in Kentucky than any man living. He arrived at 6:58 in his 2014 Buick. He walked the field perimeter with me without speaking. He photographed every tent stake, every trailer, every laminated sign. He read the permit from the foreman three times. He did not ask the foreman his name.
We walked back to the farmhouse. “Wyatt, they have forged a county permit on your land. That is not a civil matter anymore. That is a felony.” I made him a cup of coffee. “Here is what we do, son. Tomorrow morning you and I drive to the HOA office. You hand Bridget Halloran a notice of trespass. I serve it personally. You do not raise your voice. You do not threaten.” “And then?” “And then I drive to Frankfort and I sit down with a friend at the Kentucky State Police Public Integrity Unit. By Thursday, this woman will not know what kind of weather is coming for her.”
Then I said the thing I had been turning over since I’d seen the auger go into my pasture. “Hollis, I’m scheduled to spread liquid manure on that field on Saturday.” Hollis put his coffee cup down. “It’s filed with the county fourteen days in advance. Right to Farm Act Section 3 Subsection B. It’s the routine spread. I do it every fall after the second cutting.”
Hollis looked at me for a long time over the rim of his cup. “Son, you understand what you’re suggesting?” “I’m asking if I have to cancel a properly filed agricultural operation because a stranger put a wedding tent on my land without my consent.” The corners of Hollis Mortenson’s mouth moved a quarter of an inch. He took out a yellow legal pad. He clicked one of his pencils. He wrote a single sentence at the top. Operation Regina, KRS 413.072.
“Regina?” “My grandmother, the one the IRS chased off. She fed Bridget Halloran’s grandfather a sandwich once at the back door of her kitchen in 1939, and he never thanked her. I have been waiting for this case my entire life.”