The Picnic at the Surveyor’s Flag

Uncle Clyde laid the surveyor’s bill on Grandma’s kitchen table and smoothed it flat with the side of his hand, the way he used to smooth a wheat ticket at the elevator.

“Fourteen thousand dollars,” he said. “Split seven ways, that’s two thousand apiece. You pay your share by the end of the month, Bethany, or you sign this and I’ll cover it for you.”

He slid a second paper across the oilcloth. It was one page, typed, with a line at the bottom for my name and a line under it for a date.

I read it standing up. It said that I, Bethany Coyle, agreed to sell my future seventh of the Brannan place to Clyde Brannan for ten thousand dollars, payable when the land came to me.

Ten thousand dollars for forty-some acres of western Oklahoma wheat ground and pasture. Even I knew that was a joke, and I deliver the mail. I don’t farm it.

“Nobody asked for a survey,” I said.

“Somebody had to,” Clyde said. “When Mama goes, you kids are going to need to know where your lines are. I did you a favor. Now I need paying for it.”

Grandma wasn’t in her kitchen to hear any of this. She was in the rehab center on the east side of Weatherford, three weeks out from a broken hip, learning to walk again behind an aluminum walker with tennis balls on the feet.

Clyde had a key to her little house in town. So did I. We had both been coming by to water her tomatoes and bring in the paper. That was how he caught me there that Tuesday evening, the first week of June.

“Does Grandma know about this?” I asked.

“Mama doesn’t need to be bothered with paperwork while she’s laid up,” he said. “You want to be the one to upset her, you go right ahead.”

He put his straw hat back on, went out the screen door, and let it slap behind him. I stood in her kitchen with the two papers and the smell of her dish soap and felt about twelve years old.

I should tell you who we are, so you understand why I didn’t just tear both papers in half.

My grandmother is Mavis Brannan. She is eighty-seven years old. She and my grandpa, Harlan, bought three hundred acres west of Weatherford in 1959, and they raised four kids on wheat, a few cows, and a garden the size of a church parking lot.

Grandpa planted a pecan tree down by the draw the spring after they bought it. He said a farm without a shade tree was just a job. That tree is enormous now, and I have eaten more picnics under it than I can count.

Clyde is their oldest. He is sixty-one. He has farmed Grandma’s ground since he was twenty, first beside Grandpa and then alone after Grandpa died in 2004. He has his own eighty acres a mile down the section line road and a house he built himself.

He never married. He never had children. He has the farm, and the farm has him.

The other three kids are gone. My mother, Ellen, died of cancer in 2019, when I was twenty-seven. My Uncle Raymond died in a wreck on I-40 years before that. Aunt Lorraine lives in Enid and has her own troubles with her heart.

So there are seven grandchildren. Me, who was Ellen’s only. Lorraine’s three, Travis, Darla and Nate. Raymond’s three, Eric, Lacey and Monica. We range from Nate, who is twenty-five, up to Travis, who is forty-five.