The young farmers wife read Bufords 1969 agreement twice under my kitchen light, put both hands over her mouth, and said, Miss Ruby, this amendment kills their claim stone dead. And one of the men who initialed it is the man who sat in your driveway today.
The co-op had come at me waving Bufords forty-year membership and its first right of refusal on member land. What they did not expect was that Buford kept his original agreement nailed in a Prince Albert can above the drying-shed door, and that in the margin, in 1969, he and three board members had written and initialed an amendment.
The amendment said plainly that the right of refusal applied only while the member himself farmed the land, and ended the day he stopped. Buford stopped when he died. I lease the fields now. The co-op had no right of refusal over my land at all, and the man in the F-250 knew it, because his own initials were in that margin.
He told me the shed was coming down one way or another. He forgot he had signed away that one way, fifty-four years ago, in pencil.
The paralegal and a real-estate lawyer sent the co-op a copy. The board had a very short meeting after that. The first right of refusal was dead, exactly as written in 1969, and there would be no processing plant on Bufords ground and no spring demolition of his barn-red drying shed.
The young farmer from church still leases my fields, and this October the whole county smelled like our peanuts again, the way it has since 1969.
Buford tapped that tobacco can every morning on his way into the shed, for luck, and told me he never once opened it. He did not need to. He knew what he put in there. He was saving the luck for a day he would not be around to use it himself. That day came, and his luck held.