Chapter 9 - The Anatomy of an Inheritance
In Oklahoma, an inheritance is usually settled with a single sheet of paper and an estate sale in a dusty yard behind a barn.
Arlin Eubanks lived for four more years after the Easter Callie’s dress was ruined.
He didn't die of a broken heart; men like Arlin have hearts made of three-quarter-inch boiler plate that survive seven minor strokes and four bouts of pneumonia out of sheer spite. He died on a hot Tuesday afternoon in August when his tractor rolled into a ditch on the section line road while he was trying to pull an unauthorized culvert out of a county right-of-way.
The county commissioner told Aaron at the funeral home that Arlin was still holding the hydraulic lever when the wrecker crew lifted the rear axle off his chest.
I did not go to the service at the First Baptist Church in Guthrie.
I stayed on Lot 4 with Callie, who was ten then and had two long, brown legs covered in mosquito bites and a blue ribbon from the county fair for her clover honey. We spent that morning in the garden, picking the last of the purple hull peas and laying them out on screen doors in the shade of the workshop to dry.
Sarah called me from her car after the burial at the Summit View Cemetery.
"Danielle had a scene at the grave," Sarah said. She sounded tired, the kind of tired that comes from three days of potato salad and listening to people say he’s in a better place when everybody knows the place he was in before was plenty good enough for him.
"What happened?"
"She wanted Arlin’s gold pocket watch. The one his grandfather brought from Missouri. She told the preacher that Dad had promised it to Bryce so the boy would have something of his grandfather’s character."
"Did she get it?"
"Martha gave it to the gravedigger," Sarah said, and for the first time in four years, I heard my cousin laugh until her voice cracked.
"She what?"
"She walked up to old man Garris while they were waiting with the shovels, took the watch out of her purse, and dropped it right into his overall pocket. Told him it was for twenty years of keeping the weeds off Roy Eubanks’s stone. Danielle screamed so hard she lost her earring in the gravel."
Two weeks later, Bob Bannister’s office mailed me a copy of the will.
It had been drafted in nineteen-ninety-two, right after my divorce, and had never been updated. Arlin had meant to change it—he had told the teller at the bank three times that he was going to cut me off with a dollar—but like many men who believe they are immortal, he had never quite found an afternoon when the weather was too bad to work on his fences.
The home place in Guthrie went to Martha for the term of her natural life, with the remainder interest split three ways between Danielle, me, and my brother Roy Wayne, who was living in a trailer park in Wyoming and hadn't been seen in the county since nineteen-ninety-eight.
There was a specific bequest at the end of the second page:
“To my daughter, Crystal Ann, I leave the four-inch post-hole auger and the three-point hitch grader blade currently stored in the lean-to behind the barn, provided she hauls them off the premises within thirty days of my death, as they are taking up space that belongs to the farm.”
Aaron read it while we were eating supper on the porch.
He looked at the legal paper, then at the tractor parked by the cedar break, then across the table at me.
"Do you want that grader blade, Crys?" he asked.
"What would I do with it, Aaron?"
"It’s an old Dearborn," he said, chewing slowly on a piece of sourdough bread. "Heavy steel. They don't make them like that anymore. The modern ones are made of stamped plate from overseas that bends the first time you catch an oak root."
"Go get it then," I said.
He went up to Guthrie the following Saturday with the flatbed trailer.
He was gone for three hours.
When he came back, he didn't just have the grader blade and the auger. He had Martha.
She was sitting in the passenger seat of the Ford, wearing her good navy skirt, her small hands holding a brown cardboard box on her lap as if it contained china. Her hair was completely white now, thin as milkweed down, but her eyes were clear behind her glasses—clean and steady as a pond after the cattle have moved off.
Aaron backed the truck up to the garden gate, killed the engine, and came around to open her door.
He didn't say anything. He just reached up, lifted her down from the high cab with both hands under her elbows, and set her house slippers on the crushed limestone lane.
Callie came running from the workshop, her yellow pigtails flying, her overalls dusted with sawdust from the hive frames.
"Grandma!" she yelled.
Martha didn't look at the workshop. She didn't look at the spot where the ditch had been four years ago.
She looked at Callie.
She opened the cardboard box she had carried from Guthrie. Inside were twelve jars of peach preserves, sealed with paraffin that had been poured forty years ago, and a small, folded bundle of yellow cloth with three pearl buttons pinned to the collar.
"I found the rest of the batiste in the cedar chest, Crystal," Martha said, her voice shaking slightly in the afternoon wind. "There was enough for a pillow sham. To go with the dress."
She looked down the lane toward the pasture, where the crimson clover had gone to seed, leaving the earth covered in a thick, brown mantle of rich thatch that would feed the soil through the coming winter.
"It's good dirt here," the old woman said, her small slipper scuffing the crushed stone. "It’s good dirt if you don't let people plow it too deep."
"Come on inside, Mom," I said, taking her arm. "The tea’s already made, and Aaron’s got two jars of clover honey with your name on the lid."
She took my hand.
Her fingers were crooked, the knuckles large and knotty with the years she had spent holding onto things that weren't hers to keep, but her palm was warm.
May you like
We walked up the steps together, through the screen door that didn't have a latch on it anymore, into the kitchen that smelled of cloves, pine shavings, and clean air.
Behind us, out in the yard, Aaron dropped the tailgate of the trailer with a heavy, ringing clang that told the whole county the work was done.
