Part 3 — The Second Name
The second page of Hettys letter was shorter than the first, written in the careful hand she used for Christmas cards.
“Alvah, the second landowner on the easement is on page three. You will see the signature next to ours.”
The zoning board secretary handed me the recorded copy that Tobias himself had attached to his own filing. I turned to page three while forty people watched.
The signature beside Hettys was in blue ink, round and steady. “Doris Ashby.”
My sister Doris, who had told me to let the boy have his plan, sat in the third row with her pocketbook in her lap. She went white as a sheet.
Hettys letter explained it plainly. The back ten acres of the property were Dorises by inheritance, and she had joined the easement in 2004 for the same payment and the same promise.
“Doris, you hold the right to enforce it alongside the land trust. If anyone cuts that land into lots, you can stop them. I knew you would, if it ever came to it.”
Doris stood up. Her voice shook, but she said every word. “I forgot. God help me, I forgot I signed it. I let a boy talk me out of what I had already promised.”
She walked to the front of the room and told the board that she, as an easement holder, objected in writing to every one of the six lots.
The board did not need to take a vote, but Mort called one anyway, and the vote was unanimous.
The land trust sent its stewardship director the following week. She walked the property with a clipboard, photographed the pile of birdhouses, and recorded the damage to the stone wall. Under the easement terms, the owner of the land is responsible for restoring what was removed.
Tobias read the letter she sent him and called me that night. He did not make excuses. He asked what it would take to put the wall back.
I told him it would take stone and patience. The landscaper had bought only half of what he had hauled off, and he could pay to buy it back at the pallet price. The rest was in the pile by the road, and Hetty grandfather had laid it without mortar.
On the last Saturday in May, Tobias showed up in work boots with a flatbed truck and eleven strangers from the land trust. Doris brought lemonade. By dusk the first forty feet of wall stood again, rock by rock.
The birdhouses came last. I had rebuilt twenty-six of the broken ones over the winter in the barn, and neighbors had donated sixty more.
I set the little one with the drawer on the first post of the wall, where Hetty used to stop with her coffee.
“Morning, neighbors,” I said to the empty air. “Everybody home?”