Chapter Twenty-Seven · Grace
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
GRACE
The claim came back on the eleventh of November and it came back wrong, and it was nobody’s fault, and it is the single worst professional day of my life.
Odessa Ambrose Pratt’s suit named Cardinal Ridge Holdings, LLC, Meridian Abstract Services, LLC, and the unknown successors of Cardwell Land and Timber Company.
It named nobody else. That was term two, drafted by Alma, reviewed by Priya, filed by a Bluefield lawyer, and it is exactly what everybody intended.
Cardinal Ridge answered on the eleventh of November.
And its answer did the only thing available to it, and I should have seen it coming in September, and Priya did not see it either, and Alma did not, and I have stopped saying that as an excuse.
They filed a third-party complaint joining every other record owner in the Gap tract as necessary parties.
Four hundred and eleven of them. By name. Book and page.
Here is why, and I have now explained this at four kitchen tables, two church basements, and a fire hall.
Odessa’s suit says: the 1937 sale was void, therefore Cardinal Ridge owns nothing.
If that is true of Cardinal Ridge’s parcels, it is true of everybody’s, because every parcel descends from the same deed. A court cannot rule that a single tax sale was void as to eleven acres of salvage yard and valid as to the house next door. It is one sale. It is one deed. It is one question.
So Cardinal Ridge’s lawyers did what any competent lawyer does, meaning to say: if the court is going to decide whether that deed is good, then every person whose title depends on it has to be in the room.
They are right. That is the law and it is correct and it exists to protect people, and it means that on the eleventh of November four hundred and eleven households in Blackthorn County were served with a pleading that put the validity of their own deeds directly at issue in a lawsuit.
Odessa’s quitclaim does not stop it. Her release means she personally will never assert a claim against them, and she will not, and it is recorded and permanent and it holds.
But a court asked was this deed void has to answer the question, and the answer applies to the ground, and the ground does not care who promised what to whom.
The sheriff’s office served the first eighty on the twelfth. The rest went out by publication and certified mail over nine days.
I need to put in what I did in the four days before that, because I did know it was coming, for four days, and I could not stop it.
Cardinal Ridge’s answer was due on the eleventh.
On the seventh I read their notice of appearance and saw the name of the firm and made three telephone calls and understood by four in the afternoon what was going to be filed, because there is only one thing to file and any competent lawyer files it.
So I had four days.
I spent them writing a one-page letter in plain English explaining what a necessary party is, and I had four hundred and eleven of them printed at the bureau, and Ada and Charity and Evelyn Barnes and nine volunteers hand-delivered every single one on the ninth and tenth of November, in advance, to every household on that exhibit, with my telephone number on it and the sentence you are going to receive court papers this week and here is what they are in bold type at the top.
Four hundred and eleven letters, delivered by hand, forty-eight hours ahead of the sheriff.
It did not work.
I want that in the record, because everybody here has told me since that it helped and I do not believe them.
A person who receives a letter from a lawyer on Monday saying do not be frightened on Wednesday is frightened on Monday, and then on Wednesday a deputy hands them a document with their own name on it and every word of the letter goes out of their head.
The letter was correct, it was early, it was in plain language, and it was hand-delivered, and it is the best work I did all year, and it did not work.
That is a thing about my profession I did not understand until I was thirty-nine.
I want to record what it looked like, because the numbers are not the story.
Bud Tackett came to my office at seven in the morning on the thirteenth with the papers in a grocery sack and put them on my desk and said, “I sold in March. Why am I in this.”
He is not in it. He sold. His parcel is Cardinal Ridge’s now and he is a stranger to it. The service was an error of over-inclusion by a paralegal in Charlotte working from the exhibit to Odessa’s quitclaim.
It took me forty minutes to explain that to a sixty-four-year-old man and he did not believe me and I do not blame him.
Renata Sowder’s mother, who is eighty-one and lives in town and whose house is not in the Gap tract at all, got one, because the paralegal’s list was the quitclaim exhibit and Charity had put her Fincastle house on it in October out of solidarity, and once one non-tract parcel was on that exhibit the error propagated.
Charity Teague sat in my office on the fourteenth and cried for the first time since her father died, and it was not about her house.
“I put myself on that paper to stand with everybody,” she said. “And I’m the reason Miz Sowder got served.”
That is not true, and it is closer to true than I would like, and I have told her so both ways and neither one helped.
Lorna Farrow was served in her own driveway.
Eighty-two years old, by a deputy she has known since he was nine, who apologized twice and had to do it anyway and who sat in his cruiser at the end of her lane for about four minutes afterward before he drove off. Farrow saw him do it.
And that’s the thing Ruben Kell told me in June would happen. Not this pleading. The other one. But it is the same sentence: she is going to be told she does not own her own home place by a process server in her own driveway.
He was five months early and he had the wrong lawsuit and he was right.
The county meeting was the sixteenth of November and there were five hundred and ninety people at that fire hall and they did not all fit and the ones who did not fit stood in the lot in thirty-eight degrees with the bay doors up.
I have been asked whether it was angry.
It was not angry. It was worse. It was quiet and it was polite and about a third of that room would not look at me, and I would have taken shouting over that any day of my life.
I stood up and said the four things.
One, this is not Mrs. Pratt’s doing and here is the recorded release.
Two, this is a procedural joinder and being a party is not the same as being a defendant and nobody’s house is being taken this month or next.
Three, the county has thirty days to respond and nobody signs anything or answers anything alone, and here are eleven lawyers from four counties who have agreed to represent people at no charge, and Priya Venkataraman is coordinating them.
And four.
“I told this county in May that I would tell you things before I had them finished. I did that. And what I did not tell you in August, because I did not know it, is that a truthful claim, filed by a person who has given you everything she has, still drags four hundred families into a courtroom, because that is what courts are for and there was no version of this where it did not.” I had my hands on the lectern.
“I have thought for two months about whether I would do it again and I want to give you my honest answer, and that’s that I do not know. ”
A man near the back said, “Ma’am, ain’t nobody in here blaming that woman in Bluefield.”
“I know.”
“We’re blaming the fella that filed the paper on us.” He was not raising his voice. “And I’d like to know, in plain talk, whether there’s anything at all we can do to him, because it’s been ten months now and every time we ask you that, the answer’s been no.”
And I had to say it again.
“There is nothing we can do to him.”
And the man said, “Then what have we been doing?”
I have answered that question badly in front of six hundred people and I am going to answer it properly here, a year late, because he deserved better than what I gave him at that lectern.
We had been doing the only thing available.
We found out what was true. We told the person it belonged to.
She gave us back everything she could and kept the one thing she wanted.
And a man in Charlotte who has never broken a law in his life is going to have to stand in a courtroom in two years while a judge reads out what happened to Isaiah Ambrose in 1937.
That is not nothing. It is just not a remedy, and I had spent ten months in that fire hall using the word nothing when I meant no remedy, and by November this county had learned my vocabulary and believed me.
There is one more entry from that week.
On the seventeenth, Odessa Ambrose Pratt called me at seven in the morning, and she had been told by her own lawyer, correctly, that the joinder was standard practice and not her doing.
She did not want to talk about that.
“How many of them,” she said.
“Four hundred and a dozen households.”
“And the old woman with the farm. The one you told me about that first day.”
“Lorna Farrow. In her own driveway, by a deputy she has known since he was a boy.”
Odessa Pratt was quiet on that line for a good while.
“Ms. Whitmore,” she said, “You need to tell me the truth about a thing and I will know if you dress it.”
“All right.”
“If I dismiss it. All of it. Today. Do them people get left alone?”
And that’s the moment, and I have not told four people about it, and I am putting it in this account because she gave me permission in writing in April and because it belongs in the record more than anything else in this book.
“Yes,” I said. “If you dismiss, the joinder falls with it, and every household in Blackthorn County goes back to exactly where they were in January, and the man who took your family’s land keeps eleven hundred and forty acres and finishes his assemblage in about four years.”
“And if I don’t dismiss?”
“Then four hundred families are in a lawsuit for two years and at the end of it a court says out loud, on the record, in a published opinion that will exist forever, what was done to Isaiah Ambrose in 1937.”
I could hear her breathing.
“I ain’t dismissing,” she said. “But I wanted to be asked.”
“You were not asked. You asked me.”
“I know it,” Odessa said. “That’s the part I wanted.”
Meade Cardwell’s letter arrived at my office on the eighteenth of November by certified mail, addressed to me by name, and it was three paragraphs long and I read it standing up.
It said that he had been made aware of the litigation and of its effect on the residents of Blackthorn County.
It said that he wished to resolve the matter in a manner that removed all uncertainty from every household in the county, at no cost to any of them.
It said that he would come to Blackthorn County in person, at the convenience of the community, to explain what he was prepared to do, and that he would come alone, and that he would answer any question put to him.
And it said, in the last line: I am aware that I am the only party who is able to give these people their titles back. I would ask you to consider whether that is a reason to refuse to hear me.
I read it four times and then I sat down in my own office and understood that I had spent ten months building a case against a man who was about to walk into my fire hall and offer to fix everything.
I took it downstairs.
Wrench read it at the parts counter, which took him about six minutes, and he read it twice, and he set it down and put his hand flat on it.
“Is it true?” he said.
“Every word, as far as I can tell.”
“Can he do what he says?”
“Yes. He is the only person alive who can. He owns the claim’s only defendant, he owns the tract, and he has the money to buy Odessa’s claim and warrant four hundred and eleven titles and insure every one of them, and no court could give this county in four years what that man could give it in one afternoon with a pen. ”
Wrench turned the letter around and read the last line again.
“Then what’s wrong with it,” he said.
“Nothing.”
“Grace.”
“There is nothing wrong with it, Marcus, and I have been standing at the top of my stairs for two hours trying to find something.” I heard my voice go.
“He is going to come here and be honest and generous in front of six hundred people and give this county back its titles, and the price is going to be a building and a vote and our mouths shut about one thing, and every person in that room is going to look at me, and the correct professional advice is going to be take it.”
He did not answer that for a second.
Then he said, “That ain’t the black part.”
“No.”
“Say the black part.”
And I said it in my own building, to the only person I could have said it to.
“The black part is that I have wanted somebody to make this stop since February,” I said, “and on the eighteenth of November a man in Charlotte offered to, and for about four seconds before I got hold of myself I was relieved. Not conflicted. Relieved.”