The Picnic at the Surveyor’s Flag

Nate came last. He had borrowed his roommate’s car. He parked down the turn row, farther away than anybody, and walked up slow with a bag of chips in one hand. He hugged Grandma and wouldn’t look at me.

We ate. That was the plan, and we did it. We filled our plates and sat in lawn chairs and on the tailgate of Travis’s pickup, and the boys came back muddy and ate drumsticks with both hands.

Grandma ate a wing and some of Darla’s potato salad and told the boys about the summer of 1966, when the creek ran so high Grandpa had to swim a cow across it. They had never heard it. Neither had I.

For about an hour, it was just a family picnic, and I let myself believe it might stay that way.

I was setting a fresh platter of fried chicken on the table, the second half of what I’d made, when I saw Clyde walking up from the road.

He had parked at his own gate a quarter mile down and walked the fence line, the way he checks cattle. He had on his straw cowboy hat and a blue work shirt buttoned at the cuffs. He stopped at the edge of our table and didn’t sit down.

He looked at his mother in her lawn chair. He looked at the flag. He looked at me.

“This is a picnic on my survey,” he said.

“It’s a picnic on Grandma’s land,” I said. I kept my voice as level as I could. “You’re welcome to a plate.”

Nobody moved. Nobody passed the potato salad. Darla’s youngest boy stopped with a deviled egg halfway to his mouth, and his mother put a hand on his knee.

Clyde didn’t take a plate. He stood there with his arms crossed over his chest, and I watched his eyes go around the table, counting us the way he would count heifers through a gate.

“Where’s Monica?” he said.

“Working a double in Dallas,” Lacey said. “She’s a nurse, Uncle Clyde. They don’t get the Fourth off.”

He nodded like that was something he could understand.

Then Nate stood up. He set his paper plate down on his chair very carefully, like it might spill, and wiped his hands on his jeans.

“I almost signed, Uncle Clyde,” he said. “I want you to know that. I almost took your three thousand dollars. I had the pen out. I’d have signed away my part of Grandma’s place for a transmission.”

His voice cracked on the word transmission. He was twenty-five years old, and in that moment he looked about nine.

“I’m not going to,” Nate said. “Bethany asked me to wait, and I waited, and I’m glad. But I want you to know I almost did. Because that’s what you were counting on.”

Clyde’s jaw worked. He looked at Nate a long time. I thought he was going to say something hard, the way he can. He didn’t. He looked down at his boots.

When he looked up again, he wasn’t looking at Nate or at me. He was looking at the pecan tree. And for the first time in my life, my uncle looked old to me.

Sixty-one years old. Forty summers on that ground. His hands were cracked and brown and there was a white scar across the back of one of them from a power take-off shaft when he was thirty.