“Keep this box away from him,” Wade had written, “and take the deed to Mr. Pruitt at the courthouse in Amarillo, not to a lawyer Travis knows.” I read the line a third time. Luis was still standing by the door with his cap in his hand. “Mrs. Harmon,” he said gently, “I have a truck outside, and I have no plans tomorrow. If you want a driver, I would be honored.” I looked at the steel box, the rusty padlock, the thick envelope of the bank, and I said that I would like that very much.
The Randall County clerk was a quiet man with a gray mustache, and he took the deed and held it up to the window the way a jeweler examines a stone. “Mrs. Harmon,” he said, “this is recorded in 2019. It has been in our books for years under the name of your husbands trust. Whoever told your son otherwise gave him a counterfeit.” He printed a certified copy and stamped it three times. The mineral rights on forty acres along Palo Duro Creek belonged to me alone, free and clear. I held the paper against my chest in the parking lot until Luis took my elbow.
Travis was waiting on my porch when we got home. He had a cigarette in his hand and a folder under his arm, and he was already talking before I had gotten out of the cab. “Mom, where have you been? The man from the oil company called me. He said there is a problem with the paperwork. He said you were in town.” I looked at the folder. “Show me what you have,” I said. He opened it. It was a handsome, forged deed, laminated and notarized, with the signature of his father traced so carefully that I almost wept.
A man who hides his last gift in the place he sat each morning knows exactly who will come looking for it.
I put my own certified copy on the porch rail beside it. “This one is real,” I said. “That one is not.” Travis stared at the two papers. His mouth moved and his face changed color three times. “Mom, I can explain,” he said, and I said, “Yes, I think you will.” He sat down on the steps. He had borrowed ninety thousand dollars against the royalties of an oil lease he believed he controlled. He had signed notes with a man in Lubbock whom he called a friend. The lender wanted his money by the end of the month.
I will say that Travis did not lie after that. He told me everything in the slanting light of the porch, with his head in his hands. He told me what he had said to his father, the thing that Wade would not write down. He had told him that a man who dies without selling is a fool. I could not breathe when he said it. Wade had gone to the hospital for his heart three weeks after that conversation and never come home. I asked my son if he knew what he had done. He said, “Every day, Mom.”
I called Mr. Pruitt, the lawyer from the courthouse, and he came to the farm in a truck of his own. He was a patient man who did not raise his voice, and he laid out the choices for my son. The false deed was a felony. The lender in Lubbock was not interested in forgiveness. But I owned the real minerals, and I could, if I chose, sign a lease with the oil company. The money would be enough to settle a debt of ninety thousand dollars and still leave me comfortable for the rest of my life.
I signed the lease in September. The royalties arrive on the fifteenth of each month. The first check paid off the man in Lubbock, directly, with a receipt that Travis had to sign in front of Mr. Pruitt. The second went into a trust for my grandchildren. A smaller amount goes to Travis every month, but only after he completes his hours at the treatment program in Amarillo for gambling and drink. He has not missed a meeting yet. He calls me from the parking lot of the church hall every Thursday, and he does not ask for a thing.
The red pickup was another matter. On a Saturday in October, Luis drove it up my gravel drive, shining like a new penny. He had patched the floor, rebuilt the brakes, and polished the cracked windshield until you could see the sky in it. “I never sold it, Mrs. Harmon,” he said. “I just fixed it for you.” I tried to pay him the fifteen hundred that Travis had taken. He would not hear of it. We compromised at a pot roast every Sunday for the rest of his natural life, and he agreed with an enthusiasm that suggested he had been hoping I would ask.
I drove the truck myself that afternoon, down the long road toward the creek, for the first time in three years. The cab smelled of coffee and old vinyl and Wade. The radio found a station playing Patsy Cline. I rolled down the window, and the Texas wind came in smelling of sage and dust, and I sang along off key until the road ran out and I had to turn around. I stopped at the edge of the forty acres and sat there with the engine running, watching the creek shine.
When I got home, I found our initials scratched into the barn door beside his: BL and WH, in a heart, from 1987. I took out the nail I keep in my apron pocket now and added a third line beneath them. Luis. He had earned it. Then I parked the red truck back in the barn where it belongs, and I went into the kitchen, where the pot roast was waiting, and where the empty chair of Wade was pulled out just a little, for company.