The complaint against the father of Grant was filed three years ago by forty one ranchers in Parker, Wise and Palo Pinto counties, and Judge Mabry told it to me sitting on the tailgate of my truck. Lloyd Stratton ran a land fund that sold small shares of pasture to retired cattlemen. The pasture did not exist. He collected nineteen million dollars before a brave county auditor looked at the survey maps. The case landed in the court of Judge Mabry, and then it was moved, quietly, in an irregular way, and the appeal is set for the 352nd, which is the court that my daughter now sits on.
“Calvin, a judge cannot sit on a case when a party gave her a gift,” Judge Mabry said. “That is why I read her disclosure. The gift on her form says forty eight thousand dollars from Lloyd Stratton. If that is true, she has to step aside. If it is false, someone wrote it false on purpose. I do not believe Rebecca wrote it.” I took the folded note of Juanita from my shirt pocket and held it. I said my daughter never lied about a thing in her life, and that she once argued with a nun over a comma.
Judge Mabry nodded. “Then ask the one who typed the form,” she said. “Her husband prepared it, I am told. At the kitchen table. The night before the filing.” I got down out of the truck, and my back reminded me of thirty eight years on the pipeline, and I buttoned my good gray jacket. The ceremony was over. The family row had gone to the reception at the Fort Worth Club. I put my hat on, straightened the bolo tie of Juanita and told the judge I was going to a party where I had not been invited. She said, “Mr. Rhodes, I would not miss it.”
A signed disclosure gave one husband the length of a reception line to bring his wife father back to the truth in Fort Worth.
I gave my terms to Grant and his father on the terrace of the Fort Worth Club, with a glass of sweet tea in my hand, a hundred guests behind the glass and the chief of staff of the governor in the middle of a toast. I laid the disclosure on a cocktail table and told Grant that the false gift would be corrected by Monday morning, that Rebecca would step aside from every case involving his father, and that Lloyd Stratton would either answer the old complaint or answer me. I said that I did not raise my voice on a terrace. I said it very pleasantly.
Grant had gone gray. He admitted it before his father could stop him. He said he had prepared the form himself, that he put the name of his father because Lloyd had asked him to, to bind the 352nd to the family, and that Rebecca signed without reading it because she trusted him and was tired. “Calvin, I did not think anyone in your family read disclosures,” he said. I told him that Juanita read every one of them, with a pencil, at the kitchen table, and that the pencil was in my truck.
Lloyd Stratton, who had said nothing, picked up the disclosure from the cocktail table, snatched it clean, meaning to run it into the kitchen and put it in the first open flame, and he bolted for the terrace stairs in his expensive alligator boots. Grant shouted, “Dad, stop.” The chief of staff turned around with her champagne. A courthouse officer who was a guest started to rise. I did not. I told Lloyd, quietly, that the stairs were slick, and that I had once seen a man run on a terrace like that and break a hip.
The terrace stairs led down to the plaza on Main Street, and that afternoon the Stockyards cattle drive had been rerouted for the swearing in celebration. Twenty longhorns, with cowboys on horseback, were moving slowly up the street, with children on the curb waving. Lloyd ran into the plaza and straight into a wall of horns. A steer the size of a Buick turned and licked his boots. Lloyd froze like a man in a photograph. The paper floated out of his hand and landed in the open palm of a nine year old girl in a pink Stetson, who gave it to me.
Rebecca filed the corrected disclosure on Monday, stepped aside from the Stratton appeal and sent the whole file to a visiting judge from Abilene. Lloyd Stratton answered the old complaint in the end, because forty one ranchers wanted to hear it. He paid back eleven million dollars, which is not all of it but more than anyone expected. Grant moved out of the house on Throckmorton Street. Rebecca did not cry in front of me. She called on Sunday from the porch of the house in Weatherford, and said, “Daddy, the swing still creaks.” I said, “Come sit on it.”
In the name of Juanita, who passed in 2018, I started the Juanita Rhodes Shoebox Fund. It pays the last dollars of law school tuition for first generation students from welding, ranching and pipeline families in Parker, Tarrant and Wise counties. In the first year we closed the gap for eight students, and the first was a roughneck daughter from Mineral Wells named Alma, who had a stack of rejection letters and a very good brain. Every recipient receives a shoebox with a rubber band around it, and a single sheet that says, “Keep every receipt. Someday someone will want to say thank you.”
Last month, Rebecca asked me to come to the courthouse for a quiet ceremony in her chambers, only the two of us and the court reporter. She took the black robe off its hook and held it out, and I put my old bolo tie around her collar, the silver and turquoise made in Santa Fe. She turned to the mirror. Then she opened the shoebox of Juanita, which I had brought in my arms, and read the note on top. “For Rebecca, the day she puts on the robe.” She read it aloud, and the court reporter wept into her sleeve, and I admit I did too.
