Chapter 6 - The Anatomy of a Town
If you live in Logan County long enough, you realize that the towns aren't held together by the county commissioners or the school board or the five churches that sit on the four corners of the square.
They are held together by three women who have worked the title desk at the courthouse since the Carter administration.
On Wednesday morning, I had to walk three sets of certified plats down to the county clerk’s office in Guthrie. It was part of my job for the city—standard jurisdictional review for a two-mile buffer zone along the southern boundary where the new water lines were being laid.
The courthouse is a massive, three-story block of red sandstone built in 1907, with high, drafty ceilings that smell of floor wax, eighty years of cigar smoke that has seeped into the wainscoting, and the damp, acidic tang of thousands of leather-bound deed books stored in the basement vaults.
Verna Mae Teague sat behind the counter at the land records desk.
She was seventy-six years old, wore her silver hair in a beehive that had survived three decades of high-humidity summers, and had two pairs of glasses hanging from a beaded chain around her neck. She had been a sophomore at Guthrie High School when my father was a senior, and she was the only person in the county who still called him "that noisy Eubanks boy."
When I set the plats on the counter, Verna Mae didn't look at the blueprints.
She took off her reading glasses, let them drop against her polyester vest with a soft click, and looked at me through her bifocals.
"Your father was in here on Monday, Crystal," she said.
My stomach gave that small, familiar twitch—the old instinct that told me to look for an exit before the plaster started falling.
"Was he?"
"Brought that boy of Danielle’s with him. The little one with the squint."
"Braden," I said.
"Wanted to look at the original plat for the Eubanks Addition," Verna Mae said, her voice dropping down into that dry, rhythmic drawl that court clerks use when they are discussing something scandalous that happened in 1954. "Nineteen-ninety-one. When your grandfather split the eighty acres into five-acre tracts for the children."
"Why?"
Verna Mae reached under the counter and pulled out a heavy, canvas-bound ledger with brass corners. She laid it flat on the oak counter and opened it to a page marked with a yellowed piece of blotter paper.
"He thought there was an access easement," she said, her index finger—crooked with gout—tapping a pencil line drawn across the northern thirty feet of my parcel. "He told the clerk he had reserved an agricultural right-of-way across your pasture to get to the back ten acres where the creek runs."
I looked at the line.
The pencil was old—faded purple indelible ink from thirty years ago.
"Is there an easement?" I asked.
Verna Mae looked at me over her glasses, her mouth puckering like she had just bitten into a green persimmon.
"Your grandfather, Roy Eubanks, was a lot of things, Crystal," she said. "He was stubborn, he was loud, and he had three wives before he was fifty. But he wasn't an idiot. When he deeded those tracts to your father and your uncles, he knew exactly what Arlin would do if he had an inch of paper to stand on."
She turned the ledger around so I could read the small, hand-lettered text in the margins, written in the black drafting ink that never fades:
“Tract 4 is conveyed in fee simple absolute, without reservation of road, lane, or pasture easement to the northern parcels, the grantor specifically directing that any access to the creek shall be via the section line road to the west.”
Underneath the text, signed with the massive, flourishing signature of Roy Eubanks, was a single handwritten line:
“So Arlin can’t build a spite road through his sister’s garden.”
A short, sharp laugh came out of me before I could stop it—a laugh that bounced off the high tin ceiling of the records room.
"Grandpa Roy wrote that?"
"Wrote it with his own fountain pen right at this counter," Verna Mae said, shutting the ledger with a heavy, dusty whump that sent a small puff of paper lint into the air. "I was twenty-two years old. Arlin was standing right where you're standing now, wearing his army jacket, turning purple because his daddy had cut him off from the water gap."
She leaned her elbows on the counter, her rings clicking against the brass ruler.
"Your father has spent forty years trying to undo that sentence, Crystal," she whispered. "He thought if he put Danielle on that shop lot, he’d finally have the road his daddy wouldn't give him. He wasn't trying to help that girl. He was trying to beat Roy Eubanks from the grave."
I stood there in the drafty hall, looking down at the canvas ledger.
The whole thing opened up before me like an old road map you find in the glove box of a car you bought from an estate sale: the anger, the family dinners where everyone walked on eggshells, the fifteen-thousand-dollar "gift" that had come with three dozen invisible strings attached. It had never been about Callie. It had never been about the ruined dress, or the bunk beds, or Danielle’s sixty-day notice.
It was just an old man fighting a dead man over forty rods of red dirt and a creek that ran dry every August anyway.
"What did you tell him, Verna Mae?" I asked.
"I told him that if he didn't get that boy off my counter and stop spitting his tobacco into my wastebasket, I’d have the bailiff walk him down the steps," she said. She picked up my plats and pulled a rubber date stamp toward her. "The law is the law, Crystal. It’s the only thing in this county that doesn't care who your daddy was."
She brought the stamp down on my blueprint with a sharp, heavy thwack.
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FILED — LOGAN COUNTY CLERK — APR 26.
"Go on home, girl," Verna Mae said, not looking up as she reached for her red pencil. "And tell that husband of yours to set his fence posts in concrete. The red dirt don't hold a cedar post through a wet winter unless you give it some ballast."
