The Picnic at the Surveyor’s Flag

She turned her head and looked at each of us, one by one, from Travis down to Nate. Then she looked back at her son.

“Clyde, this ground is yours to farm for as long as you live. As long as you can climb up on a tractor, it’s your lease, at whatever you can pay me and not one dollar more. And when I’m gone, it goes on being your lease. I’ll tell the banker so on Monday, and I’ll tell every one of these children right now.”

Then she turned to us.

“And you all listen to me. When this place comes to you, not one of you sells a single acre of it to anybody but family. You want out, you sell to your cousin, or you sell to your uncle, at a fair price. A fair price, Clyde. Not your ten thousand dollars. You hear me?”

Clyde nodded. He couldn’t talk.

Travis stood up from the tailgate. He’s a big man and he moves slow.

“I’ll say it,” Travis said. “If any of us ever sells, Uncle Clyde gets the first chance. At what the land’s worth. I’ll put my hand on that right now.”

He walked over and held out his hand. Clyde looked at it. Then he shook it.

Darla said it next, and then Eric. Lacey said it with her voice wobbling. Nate said it, standing up again. I said it last. I said it to Clyde’s face, and he held my eyes the whole time.

“Monica too,” Lacey said. “I’ll call her tonight. She’ll say yes.”

“She’ll say yes,” Grandma agreed. “That girl doesn’t know how to say no to anybody. That’s why she’s a nurse.”

Somebody laughed. I think it was Eric. Then Darla laughed, and then the whole table, the way a family laughs after a long quiet, a little too loud and mostly from relief.

And then Clyde did something I will remember until I die.

He put his hat back on. He walked out from the shade into the sun, forty feet across the grass, to the wooden stake with the orange flag on it. The one at the corner of my seventh.

He took hold of it with both hands and worked it back and forth in the red dirt, the way you work a fence post loose. It came up with a little crumble of dirt on the point.

He carried it back across the grass and knelt down in front of Grandma’s lawn chair. His knees popped. He held the stake out to her, flag first.

“Here, Mama,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

Grandma took it in both of her thin hands. She laid it across her lap, over the flowered blouse, and smoothed the orange plastic flag down flat with her palm, the same way he’d smoothed out that surveyor’s bill on her kitchen table.

Then she reached up and put her hand on the side of his face. He was sixty-one years old, kneeling in a pasture, and his mother was holding his face like he was four.

“Your daddy would have whipped you,” she said, “and then he’d have hugged you. I’m too old to do the first one.”

Clyde put his head down on her knees and his shoulders shook. Nobody looked away. Nobody wanted to. Darla’s youngest boy came and stood by the lawn chair and patted his great-uncle on the back like he’d seen his mama do.