Chapter Seven C: Land Patent

Dinner with Janice was a pleasant experience. Aaron hadn’t actually been out on a date in several months, unless you could call weekly tea and sherry with a 90+-year-old a date. He couldn’t tell exactly where this relationship might take him. They talked about everything. He found discovered more about Janice’s past and how hard life was with her mother. She really hadn’t had many boyfriends because there just didn’t seem to be time for them with her mother. Aaron told her in turn about how life had been as a bachelor since his wife died.

The one thing they did not discuss was politics. Janice summed up her opinion of politics and politicians as “people with the power to screw you, using it.” Aaron didn’t talk much about his upcoming job. Nor did they discuss Mike and his relationship with Janice. She said he seemed like a nice enough guy if you could get past the fact that he was a car salesman. But she really appreciated his giving her a chance to work in his company. She had to admit that she liked it better than clerking in a drugstore.

With Aaron’s condition there was never any question of the date going further than a rather chaste good-night kiss on the cheek.

Aaron spent the better part of the next week researching Hattie’s family tree. Sadly, he found record that both her brothers had been killed in World War II. Her parents lived on the homestead until they were in their 70s and another, much younger daughter inherited the farm. Hattie had made quite a career on the dying Vaudeville circuit, and did a number of small parts in musicals both on Broadway and abroad. She had just enough success to lend an air of glamour to her life, but in the end had retired to Fort Wayne.

The most significant discovery he made occurred while he and Jack were in the County Records office looking up the original parceling out of the land in Wells County. Indeed, Hattie’s great-grandfather had been the original settler on the property. He had acquired the land patent to 160 acres for the sum of one dollar in 1838. The land was technically on the Miami Indian reservation and was listed as acquired from “X” of the Miami tribe. The description resulting from survey was “the south half of the southwest quarter of Section 13 and the south half of the southeast quarter of Section 14 of Union Township in the County of Wells, State of Indiana.”

“Look at this,” Jack said as he was reading the maps. “Did you get that description copied down right?”

“Of course, why?”

“Because Twelve Oaks lies on Old man Strongman’s property. Out toward the edge, but definitely on the property,” Jack said.

“Well, that means that he must have ceded the land to some church or other,” Aaron said. “Hattie talks about he church as though it had been there for a long time when she was a little girl.”

“Yes,” Jack said. “But for the moment you really can’t just believe whatever she says without backing it up.”

“Well, that’s always the case with oral histories,” Aaron said. “You know that they are always tossing in little anecdotes that you just have to check out. I’ve gotten that cake from scratch story how many times? Three?”

“But you always let them tell it, and it always shows up in your books.”

“Call it cultural mythology,” Aaron said. “Certain themes show up in certain times. We find a repeated element someplace has a grain of truth in it.”

“And you think there’s a grain of truth in the old lady’s aliens?”

“I didn’t say that,” Aaron, said. “And I can’t find any land transfers between Hattie’s great grandfather and her father. They all seemed to inherit the land in tact.”

“So that means that the family loaned or leased the property to the church at some point and there may not have been a deed filed for it,” Aaron says. “We’re back at square one. What bugs me is that Hattie said she didn’t know anyone who went to church there, but that Harper’s funeral was held there.”

“Well, the cemetery is across the road,” Jack said. “That’s not on the Strongman property and people may have used the Twelve Oaks church as a kind of funeral chapel without actually going to church there.”

“Do you think that’s all it is?” Aaron asked. “Is it just a funeral chapel for the cemetery? I’ve got to go out sometime and see if there are services on Sundays.”

“Well, here’s the address of the homestead,” Jack said. “We’ll do a title search next week and gather the whole history of the property. There must be a mention of improvements someplace.”

“Well, you know the kind of records that have been kept in some of these instances. We’re just going to have to see where it leads,” Aaron said. “But I think I’ll drive out there Friday afternoon and look on my way to see Hattie.”

“Just be careful. I don’t believe places can actually be haunted, but it sure isn’t a place that’s been friendly to you.”

When Friday came, Aaron tossed his briefcase in the backseat of his Forester and headed out at about noon. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but thought that at least he would get a better feel for the surrounding land. He wanted to visualize the place the way Hattie saw it. It hadn’t apparently changed all that much over the years. Development had just begun to move out this far from Fort Wayne. In another ten years, it would probably be covered with developments. This time when he drove down, he went through Ossian and out to the west. It was a different approach, but Aaron had printed both maps and satellite images from Google. He used the GPS tracker on his cell phone to plot points of interest on the maps.

From the east, the church and trees on the hilltop could be more clearly seen. Most of the terrain on that side had been cultivated, so aside from the fence rows there were few trees. Zoning laws had held firm in this part of the county, establishing the minimum building lot for new construction as five acres. On each of these long narrow plots, houses sprang up from the fertile soil with acres of lawn to mow and driveways that must be a bear to plow in the winter. What do they do? He thought. Just hibernate from the time the first snow falls until spring thaw? It was a strange lifestyle.

This time Aaron brought boots and a walking stick to help stabilize his footing. He pulled up to the church and looked at it warily as though it were a strange animal around which he must be cautious. Once bitten, twice shy, the thought wryly. Nonetheless, when he finally got out of the car, he crossed the road to explore the old cemetery. It was still in use for new burials as Aaron spotted several stones with dates less than ten years old, but the oldest sections boasted dates as far back as the 1830s. There were names that he recognized from his studies of the area—Bachman, Rhodes, Strongman, Dietz—and a large number that had not yet crossed his path. But where is Harper MacKenzie?

Aaron kept searching until he found a section of the graveyard that seemed to be non-family based. In many of the areas a single family occupied a large plot where generations had been buried stretching back into the 1800s. Then there were sections that people who seemed to have no connection to the community at all were buried. In these areas, each gravestone carried a different surname, or when duplicate surnames were found, the stones were far apart. Aaron went down a row of graves that seemed to have all been from the 1920s. The dates progressed in chronological order. From the direction that Aaron was walking, they were going down. 1929, 1928, 1927. It should be here in this area, he thought, but past 1926 and 1925 he was about to give up. Hattie stated her age as 95, which meant she was born in 1910. At sixteen when Harper died, it should have been 1926. He nearly turned to search elsewhere when he noticed a curious stone. Most were well-cut, if heavily weathered stones. Crosses, sometimes with celtic designs, arch-topped tombstones engraved on one side only, obelisks. In this section, mostly plain rectangular tombstones, probably the cheapest kind judging by the amount of wear on them. Aaron was doing a lot bending over and scrubbing at the stones with his glove to make out the names and dates.

But just ahead of him was a different kind of stone set off a bit from the others. Aaron almost passed it up thinking it was just a rock, in fact that is exactly what it was—a rock with one polished surface on which were inscribed the simple words: Harper MacKenzie, b.? d. 1923, My Guardian Angel. She’d actually set the stone with her own inscription. But this date was all wrong wasn’t it? It would seem to mean that Aunt Hattie was at least 98 years old! Well, stranger things had happened than having an interviewee mix up her birth date or age. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and snapped a picture of the stone and sent it to his e-mail address. He’d want to include this in the book if he used the story.

Satisfied in the cemetery, Aaron headed back for the church. This time he avoided the front door altogether. He wasn’t even going to bother checking the lock. Instead he walked, leaning heavily on his stick, through the snow to the back of the church. There had been some warm weather and then a freeze meaning that there was a thin layer of ice over the remaining snow that crunched each time Aaron stepped through it.

In back of the church were a semi-circle of trees: majestic old oaks. They must be two or three hundred years old, he thought. He counted. There were seven standing. He could see one gap and an opening on the east where several trees seemed to have fallen. Well, there were supposed to have been twelve at one time or another. There was really nothing he could do from out here in the snow he thought, but he glanced up at the back of the church to see if he could see the stained glass window from here.

It was there, but it had been covered with a kind of pebbled glass on the outside so he couldn’t actually see the window. Well, that wasn’t uncommon either. A lot of churches had installed this kind of outer shell over their stained glass as vandalism became more common. Some had gone so far as to install lights between the stained glass and the pebbled glass so that even at night the stained glass was illuminated inside the building. He’d just have to bide his time until he could get inside again. He returned to the car and started down the hill.

He drove slowly past where is accident was, but there was still no sign of anything untoward having happened there. At the bottom of the hill, the terrain changed and on the west side of Co Rd N100W everything was flat and open, apparently under cultivation in the summer months. As he turned right he could clearly see the farmhouse and group of outbuildings that must comprise the Strongman homestead. He slowed as he approached imagining Hattie careening down the hill and into the driveway to crash into a trellis that was no longer there. The house looked dark and cold, but it had signs of habitation. Aaron pulled just far enough into the unplowed drive to turn around and head south. He angled the car back out onto the road slipping nearly into the mailbox. As he turned his head to look back he was suddenly brought short by the one word on the box.

“Stamos.”

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