The Picnic at the Surveyor’s Flag

Grandma set her tea glass down in the grass beside her chair.

“Clyde,” she said. “Come over here where I can see you.”

He came. He walked around the end of the table, past the flag, into the shade, and stood in front of her chair with his hat in his hands. I hadn’t seen him take it off.

“I’ve got something to say to you, son,” Grandma said. “And I want every one of these grandbabies to hear it. But first you’re going to tell me why.”

Clyde stood there turning his hat around in his hands. The wind moved the pecan leaves over him. Somewhere down the draw, one of Darla’s boys was laughing at a frog.

“Mama,” he said. “You know what you charge me for this ground?”

“Twenty dollars an acre,” Grandma said. “Same as your daddy and I agreed in 1986.”

“Going rate out here is forty-some for good wheat ground,” Clyde said. He wasn’t talking loud. We all leaned in. “I’ve never paid you more than twenty, because you never asked, and because I put the rest back into it.”

He turned and pointed east with his hat.

“I built every terrace on that hill. I put in the pond in ’91 when the old one silted up. I fenced the whole north side twice. I’ve sprayed it, I’ve cut it, I’ve hauled it, I’ve lost sleep over it every single spring for forty years.”

He turned back to her. His eyes were wet. Clyde Brannan’s eyes, wet, in front of all of us.

“And when you’re gone, Mama, it goes to seven kids who live in Enid and Oklahoma City and Dallas. Good kids. But they don’t farm.

And some company or some man from Texas is going to come along and offer them two thousand an acre and they’re going to take it, because who wouldn’t, and I’m going to be sixty-five years old with eighty acres and a combine and nothing to put it on.”

Nobody said a word. Lacey had her hand over her mouth.

“I thought if I got the lines drawn,” Clyde said, “and I got them nervous about money, maybe they’d sell to me now. Cheap. On paper. While I could still afford it. And then nobody could take it out from under me.”

He looked over at Nate.

“I’m sorry, son,” he said. “I knew about your truck. I shouldn’t have used it.”

Nate didn’t answer. He nodded once and sat back down.

Clyde looked at me last.

“You paid me,” he said. “You drove out to my shop and handed it to me. I didn’t know what to do with that. I’ve had that check in my shirt pocket for a month. I haven’t cashed it.”

He pulled it out. It was soft and folded in four and it had sweat stains on it. He held it out to me and I didn’t take it.

Grandma reached up and took it from his hand. She looked at it, folded it once more, and tucked it into her purse.

“Now you listen,” she said.

She didn’t raise her voice. She has never raised her voice in my hearing in thirty-four years. She didn’t have to. The whole pasture got quiet.

“You have farmed this ground for forty years and never once asked me for a thing,” she said. “Your daddy would be ashamed of what you did with these flags. And he would be ashamed of me, for letting you go forty years without telling you what I’m about to tell you.”