Then he reached into his jacket and put a legal envelope down on the picnic table in front of his neighbor, and he said, “Happy retirement, Harold. Have your lawyer record that Monday.”
It was an easement. Signed, notarized, ready to file at the county.
Here’s the part that everybody at that barbecue had somehow never thought about, including, I am fairly sure, Harold himself.
The well that waters the north half of Harold’s ranch is not on Harold’s ranch. It sits about ninety feet inside our fence line, and the pipeline from it runs four hundred yards across our ground before it ever crosses onto his.
It has been that way since 1974, when Jack’s father and Harold’s father shook hands over it and neither one of them wrote down a word.
A handshake dies with the men who shook it. Anybody who has ever sat through a water fight in this county knows that. The day Jack’s father passed, that arrangement became something Jack could have shut off with a wrench, and about four different people over the years told him exactly what it was worth if he ever wanted to be paid for it.
One of them was a lawyer out of Amarillo who put a number on it in 2011 that would have covered our note on this place twice over.
My husband never once brought it up. Not when the fence bill came. Not when Harold sold forty acres to a developer and did well out of it. Not one time in twenty-three years, and not that afternoon either, at least not the way anybody would have expected.
What he did was give it away permanently, in writing, appurtenant to the land, so that it runs with Harold’s deed forever and can never be taken back by us or by our kids.
Inside the envelope with it was something else. A note card in a woman’s handwriting, which Jack has kept in his shop drawer since 2019, from Harold’s wife Deanne, who passed that November:
“You have never once let him know what he’d be without your water and I know exactly what that has cost you. He thinks he built this place. Let him keep thinking it.”
Harold read that at his own retirement barbecue with about sixty people around him and his hat in his hand.
He didn’t say anything for a long time. Then he said, out loud, to the whole crowd, “I have introduced this man as my handyman for twenty-three years.” And then he could not go on.
He drove over the following morning at six-thirty. They sat on our tailgate for two hours and I stayed inside.
He calls him Jack now, to everybody, and last month at the co-op I heard him tell two men that his neighbor is the reason he ever had a ranch to retire from.
My husband says the easement was the easy part. He says the hard part was twenty-three years of not saying it.