The Rig Lights Across the Road

What I found at the courthouse

After that kitchen table, I did something I had never done in forty-one years. I took a personal day, drove into Kingfisher, and went to the county clerk’s office in the courthouse.

A nice woman about my mother’s age showed me how to look up the land records on the computer at the counter.

There it was. A mineral deed, recorded in January. Arlene Brenner, a widow, to Wade Brenner, all of her interest in the minerals under the home place, for ten dollars and other good and valuable consideration.

Ten dollars. That is what deeds say. I knew that. It still felt like somebody had slapped me.

Two weeks after the deed, there was a memorandum of oil and gas lease. Wade Brenner, lessor, to an oil company out of Oklahoma City. Three-year term. The memorandum did not show the bonus, but Wade had already told me. Three hundred dollars an acre.

I sat in my car in the courthouse lot for a long time with my hands on the wheel.

I want to be fair to my brother, because I was not fair to him in my head that afternoon. Mom owned those minerals after Dad died. She could give them to anybody she wanted. She gave them to Wade, with her own hand, at a bank, in front of a notary.

But Mom lives on her Social Security and the little bit Dad left in savings. Her rent on that duplex is six hundred and fifty dollars a month.

Forty-eight thousand dollars would have paid her rent for six years.

Jim

That night Jim came in late from a pole change out by Hennessey. I had his supper in the oven and the deed copy on the table.

He read it standing up, still in his boots. Then he sat down and read it again.

“Do you want a lawyer?” he asked. It was the obvious question. I had asked it of myself all afternoon. “No,” I said.

“You sure? There’s a guy in Enid who does this kind of thing. Undue influence, whatever they call it.”

“Jim, Mom signed it. She wasn’t confused. She did it because Wade asked her to and she trusts him. If I fight it, I have to put my seventy-six-year-old mother on a witness stand and make her say her son tricked her.”

“And she would never say it,” I said. “She’d stand up there and defend him. And I’d lose, and I’d lose her too.”

Jim turned his coffee cup around on the table. He does that when he is thinking. “Then what do you want to do?” I told him I did not know yet.

He reached over and put his hand on the back of my neck, the way he does. His hands are rough as fence posts.

“Whatever it is,” he said, “I’m standing next to you. I’m not going to talk for you. But I’m standing right there.”

That is Jim. He does not say things twice, so when he says them once, you can build a house on them.