Castaneda read it once, then he read it again, slower. Then he leaned back in his chair and looked at Earl over his reading glasses. “Earl, you understand what this is?” “I think I do.” “This clause didn’t come standard. Somebody negotiated this in. Was that you or Ruth?” “Ruth. She insisted on it. She said any bank that wants to lend on our land has to recognize our rights come first. Howard Linley laughed about it at the time. He signed it because he liked her.”
Castaneda took off his glasses. “Earl, I have to be honest with you. This is a thirty-eight-year-old loan modification. First Heritage will argue it was superseded by later operating loan renewals. They’ll argue waiver, integration, every doctrine in the book. I’m not promising you anything.” “I’m not asking you to promise me anything. I’m asking you to file.” Castaneda looked at the document for a long moment. “All right. We’ll file.”
Capital Midstream sent a second representative the following week. A woman in a charcoal pantsuit who introduced herself as senior counsel for the project. She arrived with a bound binder and a tone of patient condescension and explained that any clause from a 1987 loan agreement would be deemed superseded by subsequent loan renewals, and that any attempt to delay the project would result in Capital Midstream seeking damages estimated at one-point-two million dollars.
Earl listened to all of it without interrupting. When she was finished, he said, “My lawyer’s name is Jim Castaneda. He’s in Anadarko. Send him whatever you’d like to send him.”
The hearing was set for the third week of June in the federal courthouse in Oklahoma City. Capital Midstream had filed for a declaratory judgment that their easement was valid. Castaneda had filed a counterclaim seeking to void the bank’s consent under the 1987 reservation clause and to enjoin the project pending Earl’s written authorization, which Earl had no intention of providing.
The bank sent its own outside counsel, a corporate attorney from a Tulsa firm named Preston Harlow, who arrived in a charcoal suit with two younger attorneys behind him carrying matching black leather folders. Capital Midstream sent four lawyers and Marcus Brennan. The hearing room was small, wood-paneled, with an American flag in the corner and an old radiator that ticked in the silence between sentences.
Earl arrived alone with Castaneda. He wore a clean white shirt Ruth had ironed for him in October of 2019, the last shirt she had ever ironed, which he had kept hanging in the closet wrapped in plastic for nearly seven years. He had taken it down that morning and put it on without saying anything to anyone.
Judge Eleanor Marsh took the bench at nine o’clock exactly. She had been on the federal bench for twenty-six years. She had read every filing the night before and the binder of exhibits sat open on her desk to a page she had marked with a yellow tab.
Preston Harlow rose first and spoke for twenty-three minutes. He cited eleven cases on lien priority, four cases on integration clauses, and three cases on the doctrine of waiver. He used the phrase “legacy artifact” twice when referring to the 1987 modification. He concluded by asking the court to find that the bank’s consent was valid as a matter of law.