I read the city clerk the name signed on the deed from Orvilles fiddle case, and she gasped, and said, Mrs Hightower, that is the name on our city hall. If your husband owns that strip, the developer cannot get into his own subdivision. He has no entrance without you.
The paper under the rosin, in the velvet compartment Orville told me held something for when the city comes, was a deed. Not to our farm. To a strip of land forty feet wide, running right across the only spot where the developer wants to put his entrance road. It was signed over to Orville in 1974 by one of the old founding men of Warren County, the one whose name is carved on city hall, in thanks for something, the way these things used to be done between men who trusted each other.
The developers whole subdivision depends on crossing that forty-foot strip to reach the main road. And that strip is mine. His land is landlocked without it.
His wife sat at my table and told me it was going to happen one way or another. There is only one way, and it runs straight across forty feet of ground my Orville has owned since 1974.
The clerk confirmed the deed was genuine, recorded, and clear. No rezoning, no tripled taxes, no amount of pressure changes the fact that a man cannot build a subdivision he cannot drive into.
The developer came himself the next time, not his wife, and his tone was considerably different. I told him I was not selling my barn and I was not selling my strip, and that if he ever wanted to talk like neighbors instead of threaten like a bulldozer, the coffee was on. We will see.
In the meantime, the Saturday dances go on. Orville built that dance floor out of red oak with his own hands, and half the county still comes. His old band still plays. I let the developers two little boys hold Orvilles fiddle the day their mother came, and you know, I would let them come to a dance, too. It is the grown-ups who need to learn some manners, not the children.