Why is there a flag in my garage, Travis yelled, his beer in the grass.
The surveyor walked over with his clipboard. Sir, according to the original 1958 deed, this lot line runs forty feet further east than you thought. It means about a third of your garage is sitting on your neighbors land.
I stood there holding my grandfathers deed, his handwriting in the margin. Jake stared at his brother. Travis, you said you had a survey when you bought it. Travis did not answer, because he had not.
And there is one more thing, the surveyor said. The county records show a lien on this property. He read the name on the lien out loud.
The lien on Traviss lot was in my grandfathers name, because in 1958 my grandfather had sold that neighboring parcel and financed it himself, and the debt had never been fully cleared, which meant my family held a recorded claim on the very land Travis built his fence from.
Travis had bought the lot four years ago and never run a title search, never cleared the old lien, never checked where the line actually fell. He just knew we had so much space and decided, while we were at Myrtle Beach, to take twelve feet of it and my grandfathers oak tree with a six foot privacy fence.
Possession is nine tenths of the law, he told me, drinking a beer on his porch. It turns out possession is zero tenths of the law when the survey, the deed, and a sixty year old lien all have your neighbors family name on them.
My grandfather built our house in 1958, two acres outside Knoxville, a creek along the back, an old oak in the side yard. He also, it turned out, held paper on the lot next door that nobody had ever cleared, and he left all of it to me.
The fence came down. Travis took it down himself, board by board, the same fence he put up while we were on vacation, because a man does not keep a fence on land a surveyor has just flagged as someone elses.
The garage was the harder problem, a third of it sitting on my land, and the lien on top of that. Lawyers got involved. In the end Travis had to buy a small strip from us at fair value to keep his own garage legal, and clear the sixty year old lien to do it, which cost him a great deal more than the fence lumber.
Jake stopped telling me not to be petty about a few feet of grass somewhere around the moment the surveyor read his own grandfathers name off the lien. He helped Travis carry the boards to the dump. It was, I think, the first time in the marriage he picked my side of a property line.
My grandfathers oak is back on my side of things, where it has stood since before Travis was born. The kids have a rope swing on it now.
Travis and his wife still live next door. We are polite. He waves. He has not suggested I am not using my space again, because he knows now, down to the flag, exactly where my space is, and whose name is on the paper that says so.
You do not even use it, he used to say about my land. I use it now. There is a swing on the oak, and a clear line in the grass, and a deed in my grandfathers hand in a safe where it belongs.