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By Root 1076 0

here. The tab that’s been left running is entirely because your grandfather was liked by a great number of people. Liked a great deal. If he owned one acre, we’d all be acting about the same. But now he’s dead, and you’re the one with his name attached to this pile of deeds. You’re nearly unknown. Nobody feels any responsibility toward you. The people in the courthouse are working themselves up to take as much as they can. And they might succeed in getting everything. So, my point is, we need to sell something to pay the taxes. Soon. Three or four months, outside. The Roadhouse might entirely cover it, and we’d be better off shut of it. It’s a mess waiting to fall on us.

—It’s the only thing bringing in any money.

—Selling the Lodge won’t nearly cover the taxes. But it might buy us some time. Go look. Your grandfather has a hermit spinster he liked an awful lot living there as caretaker. But the place is getting in bad shape. About all she can do is call me when something is nearly coming apart, and I send a man up. Out of my own pocket, lately, which we can talk about later. And go look at the Roadhouse too. Then we’ll sell something and get the taxes off our backs. After that, we line up five-year ag leases on the big bottomland tracts along the river.

—Ag?

—Corn, soybeans, tomatoes. Doesn’t matter to us what they try to grow as long as the checks clear. This goes like I think it will, there’ll be a drop of our tomatoes in the ketchup we pour on our hot dogs two or three years from now.

—You put ketchup on hot dogs? Stubblefield asked.

—I more assumed you might. The point is, I tried to get your grandfather to do this for the past five years, but he was tired of thinking about his land. He let it lie fallow. There’s jack pine growing on some of it. Goddamn Chinese trees of heaven twenty feet tall. It hurts my sense of management every time I drive down the valley. For better or worse, it’s all yours now. Decide on something. There’s not but about two ways to go right now.

—What’s this going to cost me?

—Maybe I should have been more clear, the lawyer said. You’ll be making money.

—Your part, I’m talking about.

—It’s your land, but you don’t know what to do with it. So, probably I’m a fool not to say fifty-fifty. I’ll go twenty-five, and don’t insult me by coming back with fifteen.

—What do you do for your part? Stubblefield said.

—Nearly everything but own the land. All major decisions to pass through for your agreement, of course.

—Well, Stubblefield said. I’ll have to think about it. I might just sell out and be done with it. Move on down the line.

—You’ll get low dollar if you want to do it fast.

—Goes without saying.

Stubblefield stood and was at the door on his way out when the lawyer said, You don’t even remember me, do you?

Stubblefield turned and looked more closely, but nothing registered.

The lawyer said, Go way back. Fishing in your grandfather’s boat. You were a snotty kid. The bass were biting and we were going to have a fisherman’s dinner of Vienna sausage and saltines and RC Cola and then keep casting. But you wouldn’t eat that food and got fussy. Nothing would do but your grandfather had to go in to the dock and get hot dogs and french fries and shit from the cafe to suit you. And when we got back out on the water, the fish were gone. So, standing here looking at you, all grown up, the question I ask is simple. In the long run, how different is a goddamn hot dog from a Vienna sausage?

Stubblefield pondered his younger self. Sorry? he said.

REACQUAINTING HIMSELF WITH the landscape after years of absence. That’s how Stubblefield justified spending a stretch of afternoons driving and thinking and being confused every time he cast his thoughts more than a day into the future. Checking out the two properties would have to wait. Summer lay heavy, every cove and ridgeline claiming its own particular green world for only a few weeks before the first frost burned everything up.

September was low season, but Stubblefield tried not to get sucked into that kind of thinking. Low, high. Though it