My Cousin Changed The Lock Before The Funeral Flowers Dried

The new chain sat above the old one, bright enough to hurt my eyes.

I had come to turn the seed tanks before the June heat rose. Inside them, eelgrass shoots were shedding seed into mesh bags. Without cool, moving water, a week's pay could sour by noon.

Russell stood behind the gate with a folded paper.

"You can leave your key," he said.

I was a white man of thirty-two, with a sunburned nose, sandy hair clipped close, and long arms that never quite fit my coat. That morning, my coat was in my truck. I wore chest waders rolled to my waist and boots full of creek mud.

My cousin looked at those boots before he looked at me.

Russell was a white man of forty-five, thick through the shoulders, with a sharp side part and pale shoes he kept away from puddles.

"I need the pumps," I said.

"You need to read this."

He pushed the paper through the gate.

Our grandfather, Warren Baines, had been dead sixteen days. His funeral flowers still stood in buckets by the nursery office. Brown water marked the white stems.

The paper was a copy of a will dated the previous November. It left Russell everything Granddad owned, including what it called his waterfront property.

"I've been appointed to handle the estate," Russell said. "Now you know where we stand."

I read the paragraph twice.

Beyond him, the nursery roof shone green with old moss. Granddad had raised marsh plugs there, then water plants for small restoration jobs around Dorchester County. I collected eelgrass seed each spring under permits held with our restoration partners. Come fall, we sent seed back into the Bay.

Some years I earned $31,000. Some years I patched crab pots in winter.

Russell called that a hobby with invoices.

"There's a deed," I said.

He gave a short laugh.

"There's a will. Newer paper wins, Eli."

"That isn't how he explained it."

Six years earlier, Granddad had taken me to a lawyer's office. I remembered his clean collar. I remembered signing for the gift of the nursery parcel. He had kept the right to run his business there under a separate agreement.

Afterward, we ate oyster stew, and I wrote the recording reference beside his biscuit recipe.

I kept tide observations in old cookbooks. Granddad had started it. Grease spots survived wet hands better than neat notebooks, he claimed.

Beside a dough recipe, he always wrote the same words.

Leave room for the rise.

I could picture the numbers near that biscuit recipe. I couldn't quote them through a locked gate with my grandfather's chair sitting empty behind it.

"My copy is in the office," I said.

"Estate records stay with me."

"I've paid the land taxes for six years."

"You paid expenses. He let you work here. You ought to be grateful."

He sounded impatient, as if grief had delayed a meeting.

I looked toward the intake pipe. Water should have been spilling from the return hose. The hose hung dry.

"You turned them off?"

"Electrician's looking at the panel."

"There are live seeds in those tanks."

"Then call someone who cares about seeds."

I called our field partner. She could save the bags if Russell let her through. He agreed only after I said there were other people's tagged batches mixed with mine.

He made me wait outside while she carried them out.

When she passed my own bags across the chain, the water smelled warm and sweet. That was wrong. Healthy tanks smelled like the tide.

I loaded them into shaded tubs in my truck.

"What's the plan?" I asked him.

"A buyer. Real money. No more sinking cash into underwater lawn."

Granddad had spent twenty-seven years planting test plots, counting shoots, and losing whole patches to storms. Some summers the restored beds were thin enough to break his heart. He went back anyway.

"He didn't want it sold."

"He wanted his family provided for. You're family. I'll see you get something."

He offered $8,000 for my trouble.

I had $2,140 in checking and a truck that needed brakes. For one ugly second, the offer found a place in me.

Then I saw Granddad's pencil hanging from its string beside the office door.

"Don't move anything," I said.

Russell folded his copy of the will.

"Go rinse your boots. Let grown people do this."

In my truck, I called Nadine Cole. She had checked titles for forty years before retiring outside Cambridge.

"Did you keep the book and page?" she asked.

"In a cookbook."

"Then bring the cookbook."

A white pickup turned into the lane before I could leave. Two men got out with survey poles and orange flags.

One asked Russell where the proposed channel began.

Russell pointed past the nursery, straight toward our seed beds.