Chapter Ten · Wrench
CHAPTER TEN
WRENCH
Ada Grier put the chain of title on the wall of the fire hall training room in the first week of June and it took up thirty-one feet.
Then she stood back and said, “That’s it. That’s the whole county from the courthouse steps to Tuesday.”
There were about fourteen of us in that room.
Grace, Ada, me, Cinder, Amos, Renata, Charity, Denny and Cody, Mrs. Absher on her day off, Ellis Cauthen down from Dublin, Tildon, Lily with a camera, and Wyatt Stallard, who was there because school was out and because Maya has a rule that the boy sits in on things.
Ada had done it on her own time. I want that in here.
Two weeks of nights, on butcher paper the fire department donated because it is what they wrap the tables with at the pancake breakfast, and she would not let anybody help her tape it because she said the order was the whole point and one sheet out of place would cost a month.
She had also, without being asked, put a strip of blue tape on the floor in front of it, six inches back, so nobody would lean.
Grace walked the wall from left to right with her hands behind her back and did not touch anything, and it took her nine minutes to go thirty-one feet.
When she got to the right end she turned around.
“It’s clean,” she said.
Nobody had expected that.
“Say it plainer,” Cinder said.
“Every instrument on that wall is properly executed, properly acknowledged, properly recorded, and properly indexed. Ninety-one years of conveyancing and I cannot find one defective link.” She came back down the wall a few feet.
“Deeds of trust released when they were paid. Estates probated. Widows’ dower properly waived.
Partition suits filed and concluded. Whoever has been doing the title work here since 1958 has done it better than any county I have ever practiced in, and I include Roanoke. ”
“Meridian,” Ada said.
“Meridian.”
Ellis Cauthen had his hands in his coat pockets and was looking at the far left end of the wall.
“Ms. Whitmore,” he said. “May I make an observation about the shape of the record rather than its contents?”
“Please.”
“I spent my career reading files that had been maintained by people with an interest in how they read.” He walked down toward 1937.
“A file that is merely adequate has gaps and contradictions and somebody’s coffee on it.
A file that is impeccable, sustained over seventy years, at private expense, on property nobody was arguing about.
” He stopped. “That is not diligence. That is maintenance. Somebody has been maintaining this record the way you maintain a machine you intend to sell.”
Nobody said anything for a second.
Ada said, “And you don’t maintain a machine for seventy years for the fun of it.”
“No,” Ellis said. “You maintain it because you own it, and because at some point you plan to show it to a buyer.”
Charity Teague said, from the back, “What’s the difference between that and what we’re doing?”
Everybody turned.
“We keep everything too,” she said. “Ada’s got a wall.
Mrs. Absher’s got a vault. That cabinet right there’s got my daddy’s autopsy in it and a roll of gauze with two hundred names on it.
” She had her arms folded. “So what’s the difference between a county that writes it all down and a man that’s wrote it all down for seventy years? ”
Nobody answered fast.
Ellis Cauthen said, “That’s the best question anyone has asked me since I retired.”
“Then answer it.”
“The difference is who can read it,” he said.
“Mrs. Teague, your cabinet is in an unlocked building with a sign-up sheet on it and hours posted on the door. His record has been immaculate for seventy years and has been seen by nobody. Same paper. Same care.” He put his hat back on his knee.
“A record kept where people can read it is a memory. A record kept where they cannot is an inventory.”
Ada Grier wrote that on the butcher paper too.
Grace went down to the left end of that wall then, to the first sheet.
Everybody followed her, and that noticed, because it happened without a word from anybody. Fourteen people walked thirty-one feet backward through ninety-one years because a lawyer moved, and stood in a half circle at the 1937 end of a room in a fire hall.
The first sheet said:
NOVEMBER 9, 1937. Clerk of the Circuit Court of Blackthorn County to Cardwell Land and Timber Company. Deed Book 41, page 206. 1,140 acres. Sale for delinquent taxes, tax years 1934, 1935, 1936. Lands of Isaiah Ambrose, deceased, and the heirs of his body.
Wyatt Stallard, nine years old, read it aloud the way a boy reads a sign, all the way through, including the book and page.
Then he said, “What’s above it?”
Grace said, “Nothing. That’s the first one.”
“That can’t be the first one.” Wyatt looked up at her. “Somebody had it before. The paper says it. It says whose it was.”
Thirteen adults stood in a fire hall and got taught by a nine-year-old, and Ada Grier put her hand over her mouth.
“He’s right,” Grace said. “There’s a whole chain under this one and I have not run a single link of it, because the 1937 deed is where my client’s problem starts and I have been running the case and not the county.
” She was already writing. “Ada. We run the Ambrose chain. Backward from 1937. Whatever’s there. ”
“That’s not going to be in the same books,” Mrs. Absher said.
Everybody turned around. Mrs. Absher is seventy-one and has been the records clerk since 1989 and does not volunteer things.
“The land books before about 1940 are in the vault,” she said, “and the personal property books, and the tax tickets, and the sale books. And there’s a set of ledgers from the twenties and thirties that ain’t been indexed because there ain’t been anybody to index them, and I have asked for money for it every year since 1994 and been told no every year since 1994.
” She put her coat on. “Y’all can have the vault.
But somebody has got to sit in there with them ledgers and read every page, because there is no index and there is not going to be one. ”
Ada said, “How many pages.”
“About nine thousand,” said Mrs. Absher, and went to work.
Grace stood there with her pen still up.
“Mrs. Absher.”
She stopped in the door.
“Thirty-four years,” Grace said. “You have asked for money to index those ledgers every year for thirty-four years.”
“Thirty-four years.”
“Why?”
Mrs. Absher stood in the doorway of that training room with her purse on her arm and looked at us the way a woman looks at people who have arrived very late.
“Because they’re the county’s,” she said, “and a thing the county owns that nobody can find ain’t the county’s.”
Then she went to work, and Ada Grier wrote that sentence on the butcher paper at the right-hand end of thirty-one feet of chain of title, where there was blank space for this year, and it is still there.
The county read them.
I am going to set that down flat because it is the plainest fact in this book and I have watched people not believe it.
Ada made a schedule. Two shifts a day in the vault, four people a shift, Tuesday through Saturday, starting the ninth of June. She wrote it on the board at the fire hall next to the class schedule and the sign-up sheet, and by the end of the first week the schedule was full through July.
Charlene took a shift. Renata took two. Charity took the Saturday morning because her boy goes to her aunt’s.
Rae Tillman took Thursdays. Tildon drove down from Eagle Rock every Tuesday for nine weeks and he had already sold his store and had no stake in any of it and he came anyway.
Denny and Cody worked doubles. Lorna Farrow sat in that vault three hours a day, twice a week, at eighty-two, in a folding chair with a cushion Dorene brought, with a magnifying glass, and when her eyes gave out she had Wyatt read to her and she listened.
Two hundred and thirty-one people took at least one shift between June and September. Ada has the sheet. I have seen it.
What they were doing, and I do not think a single one of them would have put it this way, is that a county which had been told in May that everything under it came out of a family that got run off it had decided to go look, in person, at nine thousand pages, in a concrete room with bad light, without being asked twice.
Sienna Reeves came down from the substation on her days off and brought the coffee urn from the fire hall, and it lived in that vault all summer, and that’s against about four county policies, and Mrs. Absher looked directly at it every day for three months and never once saw it.
Cutter Reeves built a rack for the ledgers so they would not sit on the concrete.
Ellis Cauthen came from Dublin every Friday, eighty miles each way, and taught a two-hour session in the fire hall on how to read a nineteenth-century clerk’s hand, and about sixty people took it, and Charity Teague put it on the program calendar between the bleeding class and the car seat class as though that were a normal thing for a county to offer.
Nobody was paid. There was no money. The county supervisors had a closed session about it in June and produced a memorandum stating that the courthouse vault would remain accessible during ordinary business hours in accordance with existing policy, meaning the most a board of supervisors has ever done for anybody, and Grace framed it.
I did not take a shift for the first two weeks.
Grace noticed and did not say anything for nine days, and then on a Thursday night at the office she said, “You haven’t been in the vault.”
“No, ma’am.”
“Everybody in Blackthorn County has been in the vault. Amos has been in the vault. Amos does not read.”
“He can read.”
“Marcus.”
I put the parts invoice down.
“There’s nine thousand pages of a man’s handwriting in that vault,” I said, “and about four hundred people going through it, and every one of them can do it faster than me.”
She waited.
“I’m slow,” I said. “Always have been. It ain’t the words, it’s that they don’t hold still in a row. I do about a page in the time Ada does nine, and if I sit in that room I’m taking a chair from somebody that’d get four times the work out of it.”
Grace Whitmore did not say any of the things people say.
She said, “How do you read a plat book, then?”
“That ain’t reading. That’s a picture.”
“How do you read an invoice?”
“That’s a picture too.”
“How did you read the 1949 metes and bounds where it could be heard to me in a scale house for six minutes without one mistake?”
I did not have an answer to that.
“Because it was a description of a place you can see,” she said.
“Wrench, I have been practicing for fourteen years and I have never in my life heard a better description of what a survey call actually is.” She turned her chair around.
“You are not slow. You are the fastest reader here at exactly one thing, and it happens to be the only kind of document that will decide this.”
“There ain’t any surveys in them ledgers.”
“There will be,” Grace said. “There is no such thing as ninety-one years of land records without a survey in it. And when it comes out of that vault, somebody has to walk it on the ground.”
I told Wyatt Stallard about the night shifts, because he caught me.
He came into the vault with Lorna on a Tuesday in July when I was there in the daytime for once, and he watched me for about ten minutes over the top of a ledger, and then he came around the table and stood at my elbow.
“You go slow,” he said.
“I do.”
“So do I.” He said it the way he says the number of blue things in a room, with no weight on it whatsoever. “Mom says I read like I’m checking every one for a mistake. She says that’s why I get things right that fast people miss.”
Lorna Farrow looked up from her magnifying glass and did not say anything and went back to her page.
“Your mama’s correct,” I said.
“I know it.” Wyatt pulled a chair over. “I’ll do it with you. Two of us slow is faster than one.”
He sat with me a dozen times that summer, and he read out loud, and I followed with a finger, and it turned out that hearing it in a boy’s voice while I looked at it is about twice as fast for me as either one on its own.
I have not told anybody that either, until now.
She was right in August and I have never told her how much that Thursday mattered, and I am telling it here because she is going to read this.
But that is not the thing I meant to set down about June.
The thing about June is that I went to the vault anyway.
Not on the schedule. At night, after the shop, twice a week, with Mrs. Absher’s blessing and a key she is not supposed to lend, and I sat in a concrete room with nine thousand pages and read them at my own speed with nobody watching me do it.
I got through four hundred and six pages between the ninth of June and the first of August.
That is a bad number. Ada did four hundred in three shifts.
On page three hundred and ninety-one of the 1936 land book, at half past ten at night on the twenty-fourth of July, in a column of tax tickets in a clerk’s hand, I found a line that said the taxes on the Ambrose tract for 1935 had been paid.
Paid. In full. Receipt number written in the margin.
For a year the 1937 deed says they were delinquent.
I sat in that vault by myself with my hand flat on a page and I did not go get anybody, because there was nobody to go get at half past ten at night, and because I wanted to look at it a while longer by myself.