Mom saw the chain before I did. I was still easing the car off the gravel onto the grass at the field gate when she put her hand flat on the dash, the way she used to when Dad took a corner too fast, and said my name.

“Dean. Why is there a lock on Daddy’s gate?”

It was Memorial Day morning, a little after nine, and the sun was already warm on the hood. Mom was 84 that spring.

Her walker was folded in the back seat, and on the floor by her feet sat a coffee can full of red geraniums she had potted herself in the kitchen of her apartment in Albany.

I got out and walked up to the gate. It was the same green pipe gate that had hung there since I was in grade school, the one Dad and I had rehung twice when the posts heaved.

Somebody had wrapped a new log chain twice around the end post and the gate tube and clicked a brass padlock through the links.

The padlock still had the price sticker on the bottom. I knew that sticker. It came off the roll at the hardware store on the square in Albany, where I have clerked for nineteen years. I had probably rung it up myself.

Up past the gate, the old cemetery lane ran a quarter mile along the fence row to the top of the hill.

At the top stood the little plot my great-grandfather fenced in 1931, with its cedar tree and its six stones. The newest stone said Bernard J. Kessler, Specialist Four, U.S. Army, Vietnam. That was Dad.

I heard a door shut across the road, and Clint Rayburn came walking over from the home place. Our home place, it had been, for four generations.

His now. He had bought it at the sale in February, all 160 acres of the home quarter, house and shop and hill and all.

He was 52, a big quiet man who farmed about nine hundred acres with his boy, and up until that morning I had never had a hard word with him.

He stopped on his side of the gate and looked at me, then past me at Mom in the car.

“Morning, Dean,” he said.

“Morning, Clint. Mom wants to take flowers up to Dad. It’s Memorial Day.”

“I know what day it is.” He put his hands in his back pockets. “I chained it Tuesday. I meant to come tell you and didn’t get to it. That’s on me.”

“Well, if you’ll open it, we’ll be up and back in half an hour.”

He shook his head slowly, like a man who had already had this argument with himself and lost it. “I can’t do that. I’m not running a park up there.”

I waited for him to laugh. He didn’t.

“That’s four-thousand-dollar-an-acre ground, Dean. I paid every dime of it. And every car that goes up that lane is a lawsuit waiting on me. Somebody turns an ankle in a rut, somebody’s grandkid falls off the fence, and I lose a farm I’m still paying for.”

“It’s my father up there,” I said.