The Country Court

A title company will not insure a $1,455,000 sale until somebody says out loud who owns six and a half acres of creek bottom. The fence has run the Blackfork since 1974. The deed line runs three hundred feet north of it, up in the timber. Closing is set for the thirtieth of May.

Amos Teague does not think it is close. Adverse possession asks for ten years, and Aubrey Colter hayed that bottom twice a year, ran cows on it, and put a well down there for fifty-one. His widow agrees with every word of it. Then she says it isn't the hay money, and will not say what it is.

Bernice Ames died at eighty-one, at home, and left $10,000 to each of her three children and everything else — the house, 240 acres on the Blackfork, the bank certificates, the Buick — to the woman who had looked after her every day for four years on a wage that quit after eight months.

Notice ran in the *Clarion* on September twenty-fourth, and from that Wednesday the children have six months to contest it and not a day more. Amos Teague drew that will in March and is the only living person who was in the room. That makes him evidence, and evidence does not get to be counsel.

Eleven families have driven three-quarters of a mile up Cutler Lane for ninety years to bury and tend their people on Ewing Knob. Two hundred eleven graves, no church, no charter, no bank account — a coffee can that holds nine thousand dollars of gravel money every spring, and not one scrap of paper in the courthouse about any of it.

On the tenth of March the new owner hangs a fourteen-foot gate with a solar keypad on it. He is not a villain. He did not know the graves were there, and his insurance carrier told him in writing to control access. Decoration Day is the first Sunday in June.

In 1966 the state moved Route V through the middle of the Lusk farm, and a clerk doing her job exactly right opened a second tax number for the four and six-tenths acres left on the east side — the house, the well, the barn lot, the yard. The tax on it is $97.10 a year.

It has been offered at the courthouse door two Augusts running, at $318 and then at $441.20. Nobody bid. The certified letters went out, were signed for, and went in a drawer. This August it comes a third time, and the ground goes to the highest hand in the yard, whatever that hand says. Elmer Lusk has six weeks.

Thurl Wommack lost three fingers off his right hand at five on the fourteenth of May, rain making up in the west, putting up hay for his first cousin the way he had every June of his life. His wife slides two typed pages across a café table and asks a lawyer to read them out loud.

The letter is courteous and correct. A farm policy does not cover a man who works for the farm, and Missouri's compensation law has never reached farm labor: no form, no check, nothing. There is $61,615 of hospital paper with one name on every page, and four bright rings on a green machine where bolts went.