What nobody read, because nobody had ever written it down, was the lane. In 1931 my great-grandfather did not think a Kessler would ever need permission to walk up his own hill.

Clint bid it up to four thousand an acre against two other men and got it. Six hundred and forty thousand dollars.

People at the sale said he paid too much for rolling ground with a draw through the middle, and I think he heard them say it.

He shook my hand afterward and said, “Your dad kept it nice.” I believed him. I still do.

For the first few months, nothing changed. Clint told us at the sale to come up anytime.

Mom had last been up the lane the Veterans Day before, and she was not up to the cold or the April mud, so we figured on Memorial Day like always.

Then in May, planting, Clint dropped a planter wheel into one of the old ruts in that lane and snapped the hub clean off, and it cost him a day and a half and a part he had to drive to St. Joseph for.

That was one reason. The other one I heard at the store.

A man from over by Stanberry had been sued that spring by a stranger who walked onto his ground to hunt mushrooms and broke her leg in a ditch.

It never went anywhere in the end, but it cost him a lawyer and two years of sleep. Every farmer in Gentry County heard that story at the coffee counter, and Clint heard it more than once.

“He owes the bank more than you’ll make in your whole life,” my wife, Vonda, said that night over supper, after I told her about the gate. “He’s scared, Dean. Scared men buy chains.”

“That’s a reason,” I said. “It isn’t an excuse.”

“I didn’t say it was.” She put down her fork. “I said it was the reason.”

People ask me now why I did not just sue him. One of the men at the store asked me that the very next morning, leaning on the counter with a box of deck screws.

I had already looked it up on the library computer. Missouri law gives family a right to reasonable access to a burial ground on private land. I could have made him open that gate.

But I farm the eighty acres right across the road from Clint Rayburn, and I will farm it for thirty more years if the Lord lets me.

Our cattle will get out on each other. Our kids will need help with a stuck truck. Some January night one of us will need the other one’s tractor.

You don’t sue a man you will farm beside until one of you dies. You go around him. I just did not know yet where around was.

I tried once more, in June. I drove over to his shop on a Saturday while he was greasing the combine, and I stood in the doorway with my cap in my hand.

I said I would fix the ruts myself, with my own gravel and my own blade. I said I would sign anything he wanted saying we would not hold him to account for a turned ankle.