Chapter 10 - The Grass in May
By the second week of May, the Oklahoma spring had turned toward summer.
The days were long, golden, and eighty degrees, the mornings cool and sweet with the scent of wild honeysuckle, honeydew melon, and damp cedar.
Darren Petway’s crew had come and gone.
They had arrived on Tuesday morning following Easter with two bobcats, three dump trucks, and a crew of four men.
They had not looked at my house. They had not spoken a word to me.
In six hours, they had loaded every ounce of the eighteen thousand pounds of red clay back into their trucks, hauled it away, backfilled the sewer trench with four feet of clean river sand and compacted topsoil, and hand-raked the ground until it was smooth as a pool table.
On the final invoice, stamped PAID IN FULL BY ARLIN G. EUBANKS, Darren had written a single handwritten note at the bottom: Repairs completed to owner’s specifications. No further work authorized.
On a warm Saturday afternoon, six weeks after the feast of pretense, I sat on my back porch in a cedar rocking chair, drinking iced tea from a mason jar.
Beside me on the porch rail sat Callie’s stuffed rabbit, Barnaby.
He had been through the washing machine three times with gentle detergent and lavender oil; his ears were slightly faded, but his cotton fur was clean, white, and soft.
Down in the backyard, Aaron was pushing our vintage red lawnmower along the path between the house and the shop.
The engine hummed with that rhythmic, healthy purr that Aaron always coaxed out of machinery, the scent of fresh-cut bermuda grass rising in the warm afternoon air like incense.
Where the red mound had sat—where the trench had gouged through my lawn like a jagged scar—there was no red clay left.
Aaron and I had spent two weekends raking the black loam, spreading eighty pounds of certified Scott’s buffalo grass seed, and covering the soil with clean wheat straw.
Now, brilliant, vibrant, two-inch-high green shoots were pushing up through the straw in thick, emerald carpets, knitting the earth back together, erasing every trace of my father’s tires, every footprint of the twins’ boots, every shadow of the Eubanks family empire.
The shop door was rolled up six feet.
Inside, Aaron’s workbenches were clean, organized, his tools hanging on the pegboard in precise, gleaming rows. On the top shelf, beside the holiday boxes, sat twelve mason jars of strawberry jam I had canned the previous Tuesday.
Callie was running through the new grass.
She wore a pair of blue denim overalls, a yellow t-shirt, and red rubber boots that were three sizes too big for her feet—Aaron’s old childhood boots that he had saved in an attic trunk.
She was chasing an orange monarch butterfly through the pecan trees, her laughter ringing out across the three acres like a silver chime, clean and free of fear.
"Mommy! Look!" Callie shouted, stopping beside the shop foundation, pointing up into the branches of the largest post oak. "The bluebirds made a nest!"
I set my iced tea down on the cedar table.
I walked down the wooden steps, feeling the warm, spring earth through the soles of my canvas shoes.
I walked over to where my daughter was standing, knelt down in the fresh green grass, and wrapped my arm around her small, sturdy shoulders.
Together, we looked up through the new green leaves at the blue sky above Oklahoma.
The land was quiet.
The permit was void.
May you like
The line was drawn in stone and law.
And the ground beneath our feet was finally, completely, and permanently our own.
