After Ruth was gone, Earl did not touch the metal boxes in the attic for almost three years. He could not bring himself to climb the stairs and open them. Her handwriting was on every label. Every box was a year of their life together, written in her hand, and he could not look at it without sitting down on the attic floor and not getting up for a long time.
He had three children, all grown, all moved away. They had all told him gently and at different times that he should sell the place and move closer to one of them. He had told all three of them, gently and at different times, that he intended to die on this ground and be buried next to Ruth under the oak.
The pipeline letter had arrived on a Tuesday in March. Capital Midstream Energy, headquartered in Houston, was constructing the Red River Gateway Pipeline, a four-point-seven-million-dollar segment of a larger interstate natural gas line, and a forty-eight-inch high-pressure steel pipe was scheduled to cross the southwest corner of Earl’s property along a route that would split his best wheat ground in half.
The letter offered him sixty-two thousand dollars for a permanent easement and stated that construction would begin in one hundred twenty days. The letter also stated that Capital Midstream had already secured financing from First Heritage Bank of Oklahoma City and that the easement had been pre-approved by the bank’s agricultural lending division.
Earl read the letter twice. Then he set it down on the kitchen table and looked at it the way a man looks at a snake he has just noticed in the grass. The bank’s name on that letter was the part that did not sit right with him. First Heritage Bank held the operating note on his farm. They had held one operating note or another on his farm for thirty-six of the forty-three years he had owned it.
He had paid them every March and every September without missing a single payment in any of those years. The current loan officer was a young man named Tyler Ashford, thirty-two years old, MBA from Oklahoma State, who had taken over the agricultural division eighteen months earlier and had introduced himself to Earl by saying he wanted to modernize the legacy accounts.
Earl drove to town the next morning. He sat across from Tyler Ashford in a glass-walled office and asked one question. “Did First Heritage approve a pipeline easement across my land without telling me?” Ashford smiled the way a man smiles when he has prepared an answer.
“Mr. Whitaker, the bank holds a first lien on your operating loan. Under the lien terms, the bank has the right to consent to easements that don’t materially impair the value of the collateral. Capital Midstream is paying market rate. We approved the consent letter on February twelfth. The pipeline route was reviewed by our engineering consultants and determined to be non-impairing.”
“You approved an easement on my land without asking me.” “We didn’t need to ask you, sir. The lien gives us consent authority. You’ll receive the easement payment directly from Capital Midstream. The bank doesn’t take a cut.” “How long did you spend looking at this?” “Excuse me?” “How long did you spend reviewing whether a forty-eight-inch gas line through my best wheat ground was non-impairing? How many minutes?”