The Picnic at the Surveyor’s Flag

He was in his shop with the door rolled up, working on a combine header. He wiped his hands on a red rag and took the check from me and looked at it a long time.

“Huh,” he said.

“There’s your two thousand,” I said. “I’m keeping my seventh. Or I’m keeping the chance at it, since Grandma’s still alive, which you seem to forget.”

“I haven’t forgotten one thing about my mother,” he said, and his voice went flat and quiet in a way I didn’t expect.

He folded the check and put it in his shirt pocket. He did not thank me and I did not say goodbye. I drove back to the post office with my hands shaking on the wheel.

I run Rural Route 3 out of the Weatherford post office. It is a hundred and twelve miles of section line roads, red dirt and gravel and a little blacktop, with about four hundred and sixty mailboxes on it. I know most of the dogs by name.

Grandma’s place is on my route. It always has been. I put her farm mail, the co-op statements and the seed catalogs, in the old box at the end of her lane, and Clyde picks it up and takes it to her in town.

Ten days after I paid, the stakes went in.

I came around the curve by the draw on a Thursday morning and saw a white pickup parked on the turn row and a man walking the stubble with a survey rod over his shoulder. Harvest was done. The wheat had come off the second week of June, early, the way it does after a dry spring.

He waved, so I stopped at the box. He walked over and introduced himself as Steve, out of Clinton, and he was polite, sunburned, maybe fifty, with a ball cap that said nothing on it at all.

“You family?” he asked, when I told him my name.

“Granddaughter,” I said. “One of seven.”

He squinted out at the field. “I’ve done a lot of estate splits,” he said. “Never done one where the owner was still alive and nobody was buying or selling. I asked your uncle twice if he was sure.”

“What did he say?”

“Said he wanted the lines on the ground so nobody could argue later.” Steve shrugged. “It’s his money. It’s legal. A plat doesn’t move a dime of ownership, I told him that too. It just draws lines.”

When I came back by that afternoon, the place was cut up like a pie. Wooden stakes with orange plastic flags stood at every corner of every tract, snapping in the south wind.

One of them was in the grass about forty feet from Grandpa’s pecan. I knew before I looked at the copy of the plat Clyde dropped in my mailbox that week that it was the corner of mine.

Clyde had given me the pecan.

I could not decide if that was a kindness or a dare.

For the next two weeks, I drove past that flag six days a week. Every time, it was flapping in the wind like it was waving at me, and every time I felt something tighten up under my ribs.

Then Nate called.

Nate is the baby of us. He’s twenty-five and works at the feed store in Thomas, and he is the kindest one of all of us, which is a problem when people want something from him.