The next morning I got up, got dressed, pulled down the old ledger book Dewey kept on the shelf, and opened the back cover to the envelope he told me about in the hospital, and inside was the paper that kept the Supercenter out of our corner.
The Walmart real estate man in his blue vest had stood on Deweys loading dock and told me theyd bought the three lots behind me, that my store was where the parking lot was going, that my feed business would dry up anyway once they opened, that theyd get the lot one way or another.
He did not know what was in the back of that ledger.
My husband bought not just our lot but the access strip and the corner frontage back in the 1980s, and recorded a private deed restriction on the whole corner limiting it to agricultural retail use, so a big-box parking lot legally cannot cross it, and their three lots behind me are landlocked without the frontage he owned.
Dewey let every farmer in the county run a tab through the bad years, but he was sharp as a tack about land. Years ago he quietly bought the frontage strip that connects the back lots to the road, and he put a deed restriction on the corner, and he kept the papers in the back of the tab ledger, and told me where they were when his heart was giving out.
The three lots Walmart bought behind me have no legal road access without my frontage, and my frontage carries a recorded restriction that bars exactly the kind of development they planned. Their whole Supercenter depended on a corner they could not cross.
I took it to a lawyer in Stillwater, and he laughed and said, maam, your husband boxed them in twenty years before they showed up.
When the Walmart man came back, I did not argue. I handed him copies of the frontage deed and the recorded restriction and I said, is that right. My husband owned your road access and restricted this corner to feed and seed back before you had a store in this state. Your lots behind me are landlocked, and this corner cant be a parking lot. You might tell your office to check the plat next time.
They did. The Supercenter went in three miles down the highway, on land that had a road. My feed store sits right where Deweys always did.
Nobody drives to a feed store anymore, the man said. They still do. The farmers still come, and some of them still owe, and I still do not want them to stop coming. My grandson runs the counter with me now. Dewey let folks carry a tab through the hard years, and he made sure no big box could ever pave over the place where he did it. All it took was the envelope in the back of the ledger where he kept everyones name.