The Deer Lease My Cousin Signed Over

The land desk

On Monday I drove to the Farmers Co-op and walked to the back counter, where the lease cards have been kept since 1962. They have a computer now, but the cards are still in the long oak drawer, and every new lease still gets a date stamp.

The girl at the counter was maybe twenty-four, with a name tag that said Kayla. I told her I wanted the card for the Maddox timber. She found it, read it, and her face went careful.

“Ma’am, there’s a change of payee on this one,” she said. “Filed September twenty-second.”

She turned the card around. Under Walt’s name, in a clerk’s ballpoint, it said: Payee changed to Tuttle Tax and Notary, trustee for owner’s estate. A copy of Walt’s old letter was stapled to the back.

And at the bottom, in pencil, somebody had written: Owner deceased. Widow selling. Per R. Tuttle.

I read that last line four times. I could hear a feed truck backing up to the dock out front.

“I am not selling,” I said.

“No, ma’am. I only filed what he brought in. He’s been in here for years. He said you were going to your daughter’s.”

There was a man at the coffee pot behind me, on a cane, in a co-op cap from about 1988 and a snap shirt buttoned to the neck. Lavern Pickett ran that land desk for forty-one years, and he still comes in every morning at seven for coffee and a stool, though the co-op quit paying him in 2012.

He is seventy-nine. He recorded the deed to our home-place in 1983, and he held my hand at Walt’s funeral and did not say a word.

He took the card, put on his reading glasses, and read it twice. Then he unstapled the letter and held it at arm’s length.

“That letter says ‘while I am recovering,'” Lavern said, to nobody and everybody. “Walt Maddox recovered. I stamped the receipt for his first load of hay that August.” He looked at me over the glasses. “Delia, that letter died fifteen years ago, and Walt took it with him either way.

You walk this card across the street to the county attorney by noon, and Rick Tuttle will be explaining himself by Friday.”

I stood at that counter and wanted to. I will not pretend otherwise. For about a minute and a half I wanted to hand that card to the first uniform I saw.