The Picnic at the Surveyor’s Flag

I stood by the table with a dish towel in my hands and cried until I couldn’t see.

After a while, Clyde got up and wiped his face on his sleeve and said, “Well, is there any of that chicken left, or did Travis eat it all?”

There was. I made him a plate. He sat down at the end of the folding table, right where the flag had been, and ate two pieces of fried chicken and a mountain of Darla’s potato salad, and asked Nate what was wrong with his transmission.

By the time the sun went down, Clyde had a plan to pull the bad transmission himself in his shop the next Saturday and put in a used one out of a pickup a neighbor was parting out. Nate was grinning like a kid at Christmas.

“You’ll pay me back by helping me haul hay in August,” Clyde told him. “Every bale.”

“Yes sir,” Nate said.

Clyde turned to the rest of us then.

“I’ll pay back every one of you that paid me for that survey,” he said. “All of it. Some of it’ll take till after harvest next year. But you’ll get it.”

“Mail it,” I said. “I’ll deliver it.”

That got the first real grin I’d seen on his face all summer.

Quinn pulled in a little after eight, still in his co-op shirt with the sleeves soaked through, dusty to the knees. The storm damage south of Cordell had taken all day. He came down the turn row slow with the window down.

He got out and looked at the empty spot in the grass where the flag had been, and then at the flag in Grandma’s lap, and then at Clyde sitting at the folding table with a plate of chicken.

“Huh,” Quinn said. He sat down beside me and I gave him the plate I’d saved. He leaned over and said, low, “What was he scared of?”

“Losing it,” I said. “Same as all of us.”

Quinn had brought the water tank in the back of his pickup, the one he uses for spraying weeds around the house. Before the fireworks, he and Clyde wet down the stubble all along the turn row without anybody asking them to. It hadn’t rained in nine days, and both of them knew what a spark does in July in western Oklahoma.

Travis set up the fireworks on the bare red dirt of the turn row, well back from the stubble, with a bucket of water beside him. Darla’s boys sat on the tailgate with their hands over their ears before anything had even gone off.

I sent Monica a video of the first one. She sent back a row of hearts and the words, save me a pecan this fall.

Then the sky over the place broke open in red and white and blue, one after another, booming off the hills and coming back again from somewhere far off by the draw.

I sat in the grass next to Grandma’s lawn chair with my head against her knee. Quinn had his arm around me. Clyde sat on the other side of her in a folding chair Darla had brought, and every time a big one went off, he looked at his mother instead of the sky.

Grandma didn’t look at the sky much either. She kept both hands on the stake across her lap.

Fireworks over the wheat stubble, and an orange flag in Grandma’s lap.