party, with both sides invited to witness and the record to be made on the
ground. It took two days to gather the party, and on the morning of the third,
Alder Creek township turned out along the creek bottom road in the largest
number Willa had ever seen assembled in that place for anything but a
barn-raising or a funeral: wagons drawn up on the prairie grass, women with
baskets, children under strict and largely futile orders of quiet. The official
party walked ahead — the register, Whitaker, the government surveyor with
his transit and his chainmen, Marshal Reinhardt riding easy at the flank,
Delancey in a dust-colored coat he had bought in Hays and already regretted,
and Willa herself, with her father's compass in her skirt pocket and the
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notebook's figures copied fair onto a card she did not need and would not
have surrendered for money.
They went first to the company's corner, because the register wanted the
record to take the evidence in the order the claim presented it. There stood
the mound the Harrow survey swore by: a handsome mound, well-sodded
now, grass on it in its second summer, indistinguishable to any passing eye
from the work of the original government men. The spades went in at the
register's direction.
The fill came up loose and pale, without the layered darkness of ground that
has lain a decade undisturbed — Willa could see the strata lying wrong even
before the surveyor said it, the topsoil buried under subsoil in the order of a
hole dug and refilled by men in a hurry in the dark. They dug to three feet,
and then, at the register's instruction, to four, in a widening square. They
found roots. They found a mouse's winter store, tidy and offended. They
found, in the end, exactly what Willa had told the hearing room would be
found beneath a mound raised over nothing: dirt, and under the dirt, more
dirt, and nothing in all of it that any man's hand had buried on purpose.
The government surveyor stood up out of the pit, brushed his knees, and
made his entry in his own field book without comment, and Delancey,
watching him write, took off his hat against the heat and put it on again, a
man buying seconds.
Then they ran the chain.
The chainmen stretched the Gunter's chain from the first undisputed corner
south of the creek, the surveyor calling the stations and Willa — because she
could not help it, because it was the language she had been raised in —
counting with him under her breath, link by link, through the bottom grass
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and across the spring branch and up the long gentle rise, the whole
procession strung out behind the figures like a sentence following its own
grammar to the end. The second leg ran from the undisputed corner to the
west, and where the two lines of her father's figures met, the surveyor
stopped, and set his flagged pin, and looked up at the register, and the
register took the card from Willa's hand and read Josiah Cade's notation
aloud to the sky and the township: the bearing, the distance, the bottle, green
glass, two feet down at the point; the charred ends of two hickory stakes laid
crosswise with it.
"Dig there," the register said.
It was Johann Weiss who had come forward out of the crowd without
anyone's invitation and stood at the edge of the digging with his hat in his
hands, and it was his spring — his quarter-section, his entry, his three years
of breaking sod and building in stone — that hung on what the spade found
at the bottom of the hole, and no one in that official party, not Whitaker, not
the marshal, not Willa, thought to send him back. The spade struck
something at a depth a little less than two feet, in earth so dark and firm and
old in its lying that the difference between this ground and the company's
loose fill was visible to every man present before a word was said. The
surveyor went down on his knees and worked with his hands, the way a man
does near the end of a careful thing, and he brought up, first, a shard, and
then the whole of it: a bottle, green glass, thick and bubbled, stoppered with a
rotted cork and full of creek sand, lying where it had been laid a decade
before by hands the earth had since taken. And beneath it, in the black
undisturbed soil, laid crosswise as the notation promised, the charred ends of
two hickory stakes, their burned faces still black as the spring they were
burned in, the charcoal unrotted, patient, exact.
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The silence that stood around that hole was not like any silence Willa had
heard in the hearing room. It was the silence of men looking at a fact — a
plain, physical, unanswerable fact — with nothing between their eyes and it
at all. The surveyor laid the bottle and the charred stakes in a row on the
grass beside the hole, in the order of their finding, for the register's record.
Johann Weiss, beside her, took off his hat — slowly, the way a man removes
it in a church or at a graveside that has gone the right way — and held it
against his chest, and his shoulders shook once, and Marta's hand, when
Willa glanced, had found his arm and stayed there.
Behind them, at the edge of the official ground, Mr. Delancey opened his
notebook, looked at it for a moment with the expression of a man reading the
last page of a letter he has already understood, and closed it again.
The register's findings came down inside the week, fair-copied and posted at
the land office and read aloud at the township meeting by a clerk hoarse by
the third page. The fraudulent Harrow entries — those that hung off the
moved corner and the papers that had grown out of it — were cancelled. The
filings made in the names of dead men were voided from their beginnings, as
though the grave itself had objected. The contested homesteads of the