The Rig Lights Across the Road

“Women in this family don’t sign oil leases, Carrie.”

My brother said it to his coffee cup, not to me. He said it the way Dad used to say the weather was turning, like it was a fact and there was nothing to discuss.

We were sitting at the kitchen table in the home place, the same oak table where I did my spelling words and Wade did his 4-H record books.

There was a manila envelope between us. Wade had his big farmer’s hand flat on top of it, the way you hold down a paper on a windy day.

“I asked you what Mom gets,” I said. “That’s all I asked.”

“And I told you. It’s handled.”

He finally looked up. He is forty-eight, seven years older than me, and he has Dad’s eyes, pale blue and squinted from forty harvests of Oklahoma sun. He did not look mean. He looked tired, and done with me.

“Three hundred an acre,” he said. “A hundred and sixty acres. Forty-eight thousand. It’s signed, it’s paid, and it’s done.”

“Mom gets a son who takes care of things,” he said, when I asked again. He pushed his chair back. “Same as Dad did. Same as Grandpa did. That’s how it’s always worked out here, and you know it.”

Then he stood up and rinsed his cup in the sink, with his back to me, and I understood that the conversation was over because he had decided it was over.

I sat there a minute longer. That was March, and the co-op calendar by the back door still said February.

Then I got up and drove home. It is not a long drive. I live across the road.

The home place

I should tell you how we got there, because it did not start with an oil lease. It started with a phone call from Mom in January.

“Wade came by with some papers from the bank,” she said. “For the minerals. He says it keeps things simple for probate, so you kids don’t have to go to court someday.”

I was at my desk at the elementary school when she called. I am the school secretary in our little district north of Kingfisher, and I had a line of second graders waiting on lice checks. I said that was fine, Mom, and I meant it.

That is the part I am least proud of. I did not ask a single question in January.

Here is what you need to know about our family. My dad, Roy Brenner, farmed the 160-acre home place his father bought in 1951. Wheat mostly, some years a few cows on the creek pasture. He died nine years ago of a heart attack in the shop, and Wade found him.

After Dad died, Mom stayed on the place two more winters. Then the stairs got to be too much, and the quiet got to be too much, and she moved into a duplex in Kingfisher, a block from the Methodist church and two blocks from the grocery store.

Wade moved back into the home place. He was already farming the ground with Dad, and somebody needed to be in the house.

I did not mind. I want to say that clearly. I never wanted the house. I never wanted to farm. What I wanted was for Mom to be all right.

Jim and I live directly across the county road on forty acres we bought in 2015 from an older couple named Miller who were moving to Enid to be near their daughter. We built a small house on the back of it and leave the rest in wheat that Wade drills for us on shares.

Mr. Miller sold it to us with the minerals, which almost nobody does anymore. He said his father had always told him the mineral rights go with the dirt, and he was too old to start arguing with his father now.

Jim is a lineman for the electric co-op. He has been climbing poles for twenty years.