Officer Reyes drove me to the Potter County courthouse himself, in the front seat of his patrol car, with my arms wrapped around a borrowed blanket and the Amarillo wind rattling the doors. I am Hazel Brumley, eighty four years old, of Dumas, and I had been left on a bench outside a Walmart for four hours in December. He did not ask me to be calm. He just drove, and he told me what the deputy clerk had said on the radio. A woman claiming to be Hazel Brumley had come in with a man named Gary, carrying a deed. The clerk had refused to file it until a supervisor looked at her identification.
We found them in the hallway on the second floor, on the long wooden bench outside the clerk office, side by side like a couple at a doctor appointment. Gary sat with his arms crossed, my fifty five year old boy, in his Sunday jacket. Beside him sat a heavyset woman of sixty in a gray wig and my good navy coat, which I had not worn since 2015. She had a pair of glasses on a chain around her neck, exactly like mine. Her name, I learned, was Sheryl Boggs, and she was the girlfriend of Gary for three years.
Officer Reyes stood at my elbow. Gary looked up and saw me coming down the hall in the blanket, with a uniformed man on my arm, and he did not move a muscle. For a long moment, nothing happened. Down the corridor, the cart of a janitor rattled. A clerk behind the counter pretended to type. Sheryl Boggs whispered something, and Gary whispered back. Then my son rose slowly from the bench. “Mama,” he said. “I can explain.” The deed lay in his lap, folded in thirds, with the signature of an old woman on it.
A bench outside a Walmart gave one retired widow the length of a four hour wait to bring her son back to the truth in Amarillo.
I gave my terms in the hallway of the courthouse, in front of the deputy and the clerk, in the blanket and my church shoes. “Gary Brumley, your father worked that land for sixty years, and I will not have it traded for a girlfriend and a lie. You will hand that deed to the officer. You will tell the district attorney every bit of it. And you will go to the car lot in Dumas tomorrow, and you will tell the man that you owe, that your mother is not a bank.”
Gary sank back onto the bench and put his head in his hands, and the deed dropped to the floor. “Mama, I owe a hundred and sixty thousand dollars,” he said, in a voice I had not heard since he was nine. “Sheryl and I put money into a cattle deal in Oklahoma that was a fraud. I thought I could sell the farm, pay it off, and move you to a nice place in Amarillo with a garden. I told myself you would be happier.” He lifted his face. “I left you on that bench because I could not look at you. I am sorry.”
But Sheryl Boggs was not a woman to be caught. She suddenly bolted from the bench, snatched the deed off the marble floor and the fake identification card from the pocket of Gary, and ran for the stairwell, her gray wig sliding sideways, meaning to throw them down the shaft. She hit the stairwell door. The courthouse bailiff, a huge man named Mr. Garza, stepped out of the alcove. Two deputies came up the stairs from below. And the old janitor planted his cart across the hall.
Sheryl stopped at the head of the stairs, in the flat light of the winter afternoon, with the papers in both fists and a wall of uniforms in front of her, her wig crooked, her breath rasping. Officer Reyes spoke with great gentleness. “Madam, I have a grandmother of my own. Whatever this was, it can still get better, if you put those down.” Sheryl looked at me, standing in my blanket. Her face fell apart. She laid the papers on the top step, and she sat beside them, and she put her hands over her face.
The consequences were serious and kind. Sheryl Boggs pleaded guilty to attempted fraud and impersonation, and the judge sentenced her to four years. Gary pleaded to a lesser count because I asked the court to show him mercy, and he received probation, a restitution order, and one hundred hours of service. The cattle scam was exposed by the Oklahoma attorney general. I kept the farm. Gary moved into the old bunkhouse on the property, and he rose at five every morning to feed the stock, with his hat in his hands and a lump in his throat.
In the name of my husband Floyd, who passed in 2008, I started the Floyd Brumley Fund. It pays for legal help and deed protection for farm and ranch families and for rides and safe visits for seniors left alone by relatives, in Moore, Potter and Hartley counties. In the first year we protected the land of sixty four families and made two thousand check in visits. One was an eighty six year old widow in Dalhart who held a blanket on her lap in her kitchen, looked at the volunteer on her step, and said she had been waiting all week for a knock.
On a cold, bright morning just before Christmas, I sat on a bench outside the Walmart in Amarillo, wrapped in my good coat, with a cup of hot chocolate in my hands. Beside me sat my son Gary, a year into his work on the farm. He had come to collect me from my appointment, and he had come twenty minutes early. He reached over and took my hand. “Mama, I will never leave you on a bench again,” he said. I told him I knew that, and we sat and watched the cars until it was time to go home.
