The man on the phone said, “You told my receptionist that Dottie kept her promise. Mr. Callahan, I have been hoping somebody would say those words to me for a very long time. My grandfather was Eugene.”
I told him about the assessor, and the highway, and the thirty days, and the fifty-two trees my wife named after her family.
“Let me tell you what that envelope is,” he said. “When my grandfather sold you that land in 1966, he loved that hillside. He made Dottie promise she would plant it and keep it green. And in return, he did something a lot of folks did not bother with back then. He paid for a proper survey, a real one, filed with the state, and he recorded a conservation covenant on the orchard parcel. That land was surveyed, Mr. Callahan. The county is simply hoping you do not have the paper.”
I pulled the brown envelope out of Dotties sewing drawer, and inside was the 1966 survey with the state stamp, clear as the day it was filed.
The assessor told me the land was never surveyed. My wife had been holding the survey in her sewing table for fifty-two years.
Eugenes grandson drove out to the holler and walked the orchard with me, counting the trees, reading their little name tags. Then he filed the survey and the covenant with the court, and he showed that the highway right-of-way had been drawn across land the county never actually owned a claim to.
They moved the right-of-way. The surveyors came back and did it properly this time, and the new line runs along the far fence, well clear of the apple trees.
In October the whole holler came up to pick apples, same as always. They still call it Dotties Orchard. And now there is a young lawyer from Waynesville who comes every fall with his kids, to pick from the tree my wife named after his grandfather.