The Deer Lease My Cousin Signed Over

The man who handled the paperwork

I should tell you about my cousin Rick, because you will not understand any of this if you think he was always a thief.

Rick Tuttle is fifty-eight. His mother, my Aunt Verna, and my mother were sisters, and the two of us grew up eleven miles apart and ran the same creek bottoms as children. He is a round, friendly, loud man who has never met a stranger at a ball game.

He came home from Southeastern with an accounting degree and hung out a sign on the square, between the bank and Ernie’s barbershop, that says Tuttle Tax and Notary.

For thirty years Rick did our paperwork. He filed our taxes, he drove the lease papers to the co-op every fall, and he sat with Walt in the hospital in Paris, Texas, the week of Walt’s bypass in 2011.

He never sent us a bill. Walt paid him in tomatoes, a quarter of beef every other year, and a deer or two every November. Rick always said, “Family doesn’t invoice family,” and Walt always said, “Then family eats.”

That bypass is the other piece. The week before the surgery, Walt signed a letter at the co-op saying Rick could sign lease papers and take the lease money for him “while I am recovering.” He did not want the club check sitting in the mailbox with him in a hospital bed.

By the Fourth of July he was back on the tractor, and neither of us ever thought about that letter again.

The empty mailbox

Walt died on the fourteenth of February. A stroke, in the barn lot, with a bucket of feed in his hand and the cows still standing around him waiting for him to pour it.

I will not tell you about those months. The casseroles come, and then the casseroles stop, and a house gets quiet in a way you did not know a house could. My daughter Pam drove down from Tulsa every other weekend, and each time she stood a little longer in the kitchen doorway looking at me and said, “Mom, you can’t run this place by yourself.” She had said the same thing at the funeral, out by the cars, to Rick.

I did not know that yet.

On the first of October I walked down to the mailbox. The club check usually came between the second and the fifth, but I wanted to be there in case it came early, and I think I wanted to hold something Walt would have held.

The box had a feed catalog in it and a notice from the electric co-op.

I went down on the third, the fourth, and the fifth. On the sixth I called Curtis Pruitt, who has been the club treasurer for eleven years and runs a welding shop in Antlers. It went to voicemail. I said who I was and that I was only checking on the lease.

He did not call back. In thirty years Curtis had never let a call from this house go unanswered, and he had eaten more of my cornbread than my own children.

I did not call again, because I did not want to be the woman who calls three times about money a month after the funeral flowers die. Then came the trucks.