The Rig Lights Across the Road

Mom

I went to see Mom that Saturday. I brought her a pie from the bakery in Okarche because she likes their cherry and won’t buy it for herself.

Her duplex is clean and small and smells like Jergens lotion and coffee.

I did not go in angry. I want you to know that. I went in to listen.

“Wade told me you came by about the oil paper,” she said, before I even had my coat off.

She set out two plates and two forks. Her hands shake a little now. “He said it was simpler with one name. He said when I’m gone, there won’t be any mess. Your daddy always hated a mess.”

“Did he tell you about the lease?” I asked. She looked at me. “What lease?”

And there it was. She did not know. Wade had not told her he leased it, and he had not told her there was money.

I could have told her right then. I could have laid it all out on her little kitchen table, forty-eight thousand dollars, three hundred an acre, and watched her face fall in. I didn’t. I don’t know if that was kindness or cowardice. Maybe it was both.

“I think he’s leasing it to an oil company,” I said carefully. “I think there might be a little money in it.”

“Well, good,” Mom said, and she smiled. “Wade works so hard. Your daddy always said the boy carries the land.”

I had heard that sentence my whole life. At Christmas. At harvest.

I had always taken it as a compliment to Wade. Sitting in that duplex, I heard the other half of it for the first time. The half that was not said. The half that meant: and the girl does not.

I ate my pie and talked about school and kissed her goodbye. Then I sat in my car outside her duplex, staring at nothing, the way I had at the courthouse.

Ron Petty

In May, a man knocked on our front door at suppertime.

He was about sixty, in pressed jeans and a pearl snap shirt, with a leather folder under his arm and a white pickup in our drive with dust to the door handles.

“Ma’am, my name is Ron Petty. I’m a landman. I’m working the section across the road and this one too, and the county records show you all own the minerals under these forty acres.”

Jim came up behind me, drying his hands on a dish towel. “Come in,” I said.

Ron sat at our kitchen table and laid out the lease. He was straight with us. He said it was the same formation they were leasing all over that part of Kingfisher County, the same company that had leased the home place, and the same terms.

“Three-year primary term,” he said. “Three-sixteenths royalty. Three hundred dollars an acre bonus. On forty net acres, that’s twelve thousand dollars.”

He turned the paper around so it faced us. Then he looked at Jim and held out the pen.

Jim did not take it. He folded the dish towel and laid it over the back of a chair, and then he slid the pen across the table to me with one finger.

“It’s her name on the minerals,” Jim said. “Same as mine. She signs first.”