The next morning I called the power companys head office in Atlanta and asked for the name on the second page stapled to Bucks lease, and the operator said, oh, hes on our board of directors, let me put you through to his office directly.
The power authority man had roared up to our dock, shouted over his motor that the shoreline lease lines were being redrawn, that my dock and half my porch were on company land now, that a widows permits do not transfer, that Id tear it out in ninety days or theyd tear it out and bill me.
He did not know whose signature was on the back of Bucks lease.
Stapled behind the 1974 lease was a second page signed by a power company official Buck once pulled out of the lake half-drowned back in the sixties, a man who went on to sit on the companys board, and who granted Buck and his heirs a permanent, transferable shoreline easement in gratitude, in his own hand, for saving his life.
Buck never told me that story, the way he never told a lot of his good deeds. But long before the power company was anybody, Buck fished a drowning young man out of Lake Sinclair, and that young man never forgot it, and when he rose in the company he made sure Buck could keep his dock forever, heirs and all, and signed it himself with a line that said, for the man who gave me the rest of my life.
A permanent, transferable easement signed by a company officer does not evaporate when a woman becomes a widow. The mans whole speech about permits not transferring was exactly wrong.
The board member was elderly now, but he took my call himself, and when I said Bucks name his voice broke, and he said, that man is the reason I have grandchildren. Your dock is not going anywhere. Let me make a call.
When the power authority man roared back up in ninety days to tear out the dock, I did not argue. I handed him a copy of the easement and the board members name and I said, you might idle that motor and read this. The gentleman who signed it is on your board, and he says my dock stays, because my husband pulled him out of this very lake sixty years ago. Call his office. He is expecting to hear how this went.
The mans face changed. He cut the engine, finally. The dock stayed. Half my porch stayed. The lease lines got redrawn around Bucks pilings.
That dock is gone one way or another, he had said. It is not gone. I sit on the end of it every weekend with Bucks rod, catching crappie the way he did every Saturday for forty-nine years, on a dock a grateful man made sure no company could ever take from the wife of the man who saved him.