The next morning I got up, took a pry bar out of the shop, walked out to the old cedar corner post Lindas father set in 1952, and worked open the rusted tin can nailed to the top, the one nobody in fifty years ever thought to open, and inside, rolled up dry in wax paper, was the paper that ran the railroad off my land.
The railroad man had sprayed an orange X on Lindas third cherry tree and told me the north fence sat on their historic right-of-way from 1908, that Id just been using it, that theyd clear it by spring. He was counting on an old widower not knowing any better.
He did not know what Lindas father put in that post.
Lindas father bought the old railroad right-of-way outright in 1952 when the line was first abandoned, and he sealed the quitclaim deed in a tin can on the corner post, so the strip the railroad now claimed had already belonged to this family, on paper, for over seventy years.
When the spur line was abandoned back in 1952, the railroad sold off the right-of-way to the neighboring farmers, and Lindas father bought our stretch and recorded it, and then, being a careful man who did not trust the railroad to remember its own deals, he put a copy where it would keep, in a tin can on the post he set with his own hands.
The railroad had no right-of-way to reactivate across my north line. They sold it in 1952. The X on Lindas cherry tree meant nothing.
I took the deed to a lawyer in Wenatchee, and he checked it against the county records, and it held, clean as spring water. When the railroad man came back, I did not argue. I handed him a copy of his own companys 1952 quitclaim deed and I said, your outfit sold this strip to my wifes daddy seventy-three years ago. Its ours, recorded, done. You want to reactivate a spur, youll route it somewhere you didnt already sell. And youll be buying me a new cherry tree for the one you painted.
They did reroute. They also, after their lawyers stopped arguing, paid for the tree, though nothing replaces the one Linda planted the spring our daughter was born, and I told them so.
An old man doesnt need forty acres, he had said. This old man needed the one tin can his father-in-law nailed up in 1952, and it was enough to send a railroad packing. I keep Lindas cherry row going still, even the years it does not pay, because some things you do not grow for money. You grow them because she planted them, and now, because a careful old man protected the ground they stand in, they will keep on standing.