The sugar-mill lawyer in his seersucker suit took the letter out of my hand, read it, and sat down hard in the first pew of Remys chapel. Then he said, Mrs Broussard, this ends it. The mill has no case. Our own founder wrote it away in 1960.
He had come to my door with a court filing and a smile, claiming that because the mill had used the access road through our land since 1960, Louisiana law gave them the road and the land around it by acquisitive prescription. He was counting on a widow not knowing the law.
But acquisitive prescription only works when the use is adverse, taken as of right, without the owners permission. The letter folded in the back of Remys mothers prayer book, on the mills own letterhead, signed by the mills founder in 1960 and addressed to Remys father, granted the mill permission to use that road. Permission. In writing. And in exchange, the founder promised that the mill would never, ever lay claim to one inch of Broussard land, and would pay the family a yearly sum for the use of the road in perpetuity.
He told me those cane rows were theirs. His own founder had put it in ink, sixty years ago, that they never would be.
Use by permission cannot ripen into ownership. That is the whole of it. The founders letter did not just defeat the mills claim, it proved the mill had been promising for sixty years never to make it. My lawyer filed the letter with the court. The mills case collapsed, and they owed some back years of a yearly sum besides.
Remys great-grandfather cleared that land. Remy built the chapel at the end of the cane rows where we married all four of our children, and he told me the prayer book was only to be opened if the mill ever came. The mill came. I opened it. And the founders own hand sent that lawyer out of the chapel a good deal humbler than he walked in.
I keep the candles lit every Sunday, same as I have since Remy passed. The cane still grows. The land is still ours. It always was.