By two in the afternoon, I was standing in the shadow of the orchard barn, the cold steel loop of the measuring tape hooked over a rusted nail on the pump house wall.
The dry leaves of the pear trees rustled in the October wind, falling onto the gravel path.
I walked backward toward the ancient boundary oak, letting the yellow steel tape spill out onto the damp grass.
The pump house had supplied water to the entire lower orchard for forty years, its concrete foundation cracked but solid.
I stopped at sixty feet, then eighty, then eighty-four, my boots sinking into the soft mud near the spring.
According to the neat nine-square grid Arthur had presented at Clara’s office, the boundary line should have cut directly through the center of the pump house itself.
If Arthur’s grid was right, our father had built the main water system on land he intended to partition and sell off separately.
