The Rig Lights Across the Road

Ron did not blink. “Yes ma’am,” he said, and turned the paper a quarter turn toward me.

I read every word of it. It took me twenty minutes, and Ron waited and drank the coffee I poured him and did not rush me once.

“Where would they drill?” I asked. Ron said he couldn’t tell me yet. “The engineers pick the pad. Could be your side, could be across the road, could be a mile north. Depends on the geology and the access.”

I signed my whole name. Carrie Ann Brenner Holtz. Slow, so it was neat.

It was twelve thousand dollars. That is not much to an oil company. But my great-grandmother homesteaded in that county, and my grandmother drove a wheat truck through the war, and my mother kept the books for the farm for forty-six years. And none of them, not one, ever signed their own name to an oil lease on that dirt.

I was the first one. I am not ashamed to say that it felt like something. Jim signed under me. Ron shook both our hands and put the lease in his folder.

At the door, he paused and looked across the road at the home place.

“Your brother know you’re leasing?” he asked. I told him he would.

August

The bonus came in June, a bank draft, and we put it in savings. I did not tell Wade. I did not hide it either. It was recorded at the courthouse like everything else.

Then, in August, Ron called. “Wanted you to hear it from me before the survey crew shows up,” he said. “They want the pad on your forty. The high ground on the north end, with a lease road in off the county road. It’s the best access for the trucks, and it sets up the laterals where they want them.”

I was standing at my kitchen window when he said it. From my window I can see our pipe gate, and the dry field, and across the road, the front porch of the house I grew up in.

“Right across from the home place,” I said. Ron said yes ma’am, straight across, as near to Wade’s as they could get it.

He told me about the surface damages, which the company pays separately, for the ground they tear up and the road they build. He said we would have a say in where the road went in and how they left the gate.

I could have asked them to move it. I want to be honest about that, because I have told this story to a few women since and some of them say I couldn’t help it, and that is not quite true.

I could have asked. Ron would have taken it back to the company. They might have said no, and they might not have. I did not ask.

I told Jim that night. He listened, and then he said, “Are you sure about this, Carrie?” “No,” I said. “But I’m not asking them to move it.” He was quiet a while. “That’s fair,” he said. “It’s your ground and your lease. Just make sure you can live with it.”