“…someone you know very well, from Dodge City,” Daniel Archer had said, and I stared at paragraph six until the words swam. I did not want to ask the question. I asked it anyway. “Who?” He pressed a button on the conference phone and said, “Get me Phil Haskett.” I felt the floor drop out of my chest. Phil Haskett had been my lawyer for twenty six years. He had drawn my will. He had sat in my kitchen eating my wife peach pie. It was Phil, three weeks ago, who had called the offer a very fair one.
The line rang twice. “Phil here,” said the familiar easy voice, from a speakerphone somewhere in Dodge City. Daniel did not waste a second. “Mr. Haskett, this is Daniel Archer. I have Earl Whitfield in the room with me. I would like to ask you about paragraph six of the contract you recommended to him.” The silence was long enough to hear the hum of the phone line. Then Phil said, in a voice I had never heard before, small and flat, “Earl, I can explain.” I said, “I would like that very much, Phil.”
It came out in pieces. A land agent for the development company had approached Phil in the spring, after their geologists found the helium. He had been offered a finder fee of one hundred eighty thousand dollars if he could persuade his client to sign the land over with the mineral rights included. He said he had convinced himself the price was fair. He said he had not known it was thirty million dollars under my north section. “I swear on my wife, Earl, I did not know the number until last week,” he said. Daniel looked at me and shook his head, very slowly.
A little wooden bird on a conference table, two carved initials, and a clause hidden on page fourteen.
I hung up the phone myself. My hand was steady. I am seventy seven years old and I have been cheated by the weather, the bank and the government, but I had never been betrayed by a friend. It was a new feeling. Daniel put a glass of water in front of me and sat down beside me, without his suit coat, like an ordinary man. “Earl,” he said, “I will not buy your farm on these terms. I will not buy it at all, if you do not want to sell. But I would like to offer you something better.”
He laid it out with a pencil on the back of a legal pad. I would keep every acre. The company would lease the mineral rights under the north section, for a fixed term, and pay me a royalty of fifteen percent of everything pulled out of the earth. There would be a signing bonus of two million dollars, in cash, for the inconvenience. The wheat fields would stay wheat. Two or three well pads, small ones, hidden in the draw. “It is not charity,” Daniel said. “It is what the minerals are worth. It is what I should have offered in the first place.”
I told him I wanted to think about it. He nodded. He said that was exactly what he would have done. I drove home across the Kansas plains that evening, with the meadowlark on the passenger seat where he had pressed it into my hand, and the sun going down over the milo stubble in great red bars. Somewhere past Pratt a real meadowlark flew up out of the ditch and crossed the road in front of me, yellow breast flashing. I pulled over and sat there with my engine running and wept like a boy.
I hired a lawyer from Wichita, a hard eyed woman named Ms. Okafor who read the new contract line by line and found nothing to fault. I signed in January. Phil Haskett lost his license in March, and returned the finder fee, and moved to his daughter place in Arizona. I did not testify against him. I wrote one letter to the bar, saying only what had been done to me. I do not know whether I was right to be gentle. I know that the Lord sent me a hitchhiker once, and I did not ask who deserved my help.
The first royalty check came in August. It was larger than anything I had ever seen with my name on it. I called my kids in Denver and Phoenix, and both of them cried. My daughter said, “Dad, you can finally rest.” I told her I did not intend to. A young couple from Garden City, Luis and Marisol Vega, had been renting acres from me for three years, farming them well. I offered to lease them the rest of the farm, at a rate they could afford, and to teach them what my granddaddy taught me. They are in the kitchen as I write this, arguing happily about seed corn.
I put some of the money into a fund at Dodge City Community College, for farm kids, named the Meadowlark Scholarship. Daniel came out for the first award ceremony in his cowboy boots and sat at the back. Afterward we stood in the parking lot while the sun set behind the grain elevator. He took out the little bird from his coat pocket, the one I carved in 1981, and held it up to the light. “I never once thought I would meet the man who made it,” he said. “I think you did me more good than you ever knew.”
I carved him a new one that winter, in the evenings by the woodstove, from a piece of cottonwood I had saved from the old windbreak. I painted it yellow and black. On the bottom, small and crooked, I cut two sets of initials: E.W., and under it, D.A. I mailed it to Wichita in a shoebox full of wheat straw. Three weeks later a postcard arrived, with a photograph of a glass conference table. Between a water pitcher and a pile of contracts sat two small wooden birds, side by side, facing the window.