Chapter Thirty-Three · Grace
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
GRACE
The settlement was signed on the fourteenth of August and it took nine months to build and it is eleven pages long and I did not draft one word of it.
Alma Ambrose drafted it. I want that first.
She took a leave of absence from her firm in Charlotte in January and did not go back, and in March she opened her own office, and what she does now is title work for people who cannot afford title work, in four counties in two states, and about a third of it is heirs’ property.
Heirs’ property is what it is called when land passes down through a family without a will, generation after generation, until it is owned in undivided fractions by forty cousins who have never met, and any one of those forty can force a sale of the whole of it, and there are people who do this for a living, and it is legal, and it is how a very great deal of ground has left families in these mountains and everywhere south of here for a hundred years.
Alma had been on the other side of that work her entire career. Not the bad side, the paper side, which she says is worse because it is the side that makes the bad side possible and never has to look at it.
She has not once said that this is penance and I have not once asked.
She is a title examiner and not a litigator and she said so about forty times, and Priya Venkataraman reviewed every line and made nine changes and eight of them were commas, and the ninth was a definition, and on the eleventh page under the signature blocks Priya wrote, in her own hand, on my copy: In thirty years I have not seen a cleaner instrument. Tell her.
I told her. She said, “It’s a deed with a lot of talking in front of it,” which is the most accurate description of a settlement agreement I have ever heard.
Here is what it does.
Odessa Ambrose Pratt takes title to six hundred and eleven acres.
Not the parcels, and not the whole of the Gap tract, because the claim ran against eleven hundred and forty acres and you cannot take a deed from people who were never sued.
The claim was against Cardinal Ridge and Cardwell’s successors only, and it settled, and what it settled for is that Cardinal Ridge Holdings conveyed to her, by general warranty deed, every acre of the Gap tract it or its affiliates then owned, which by that August was six hundred and eleven acres, having bought thirty of the original forty-one parcels.
Six hundred and eleven acres.
She then, in the same instrument, on the same day, conveyed six hundred and seven of them into a trust.
The Ambrose Trust.
The trust cannot sell. That is not a policy, it is a limitation in the granting language, and Alma wrote it four different ways before Priya was satisfied, and what it says in the end is that the trustees may lease, may license, may permit use, may build, and may never convey a fee interest in any portion, ever, to anyone, including to themselves, including to the Commonwealth, including by any court order they do not appeal.
The trustees are five. Odessa Ambrose Pratt for life.
Alma Ambrose. The president of the Blackthorn County Volunteer Fire Department, ex officio.
The coordinator of the program, ex officio, and that’s Charity Teague.
And one trustee elected every three years by the residents of the Gap district, meaning a thing that did not exist in Virginia law and which Priya found a way to do inside a nonprofit corporation in nine days.
The first elected trustee is Mrs. Absher. She ran unopposed. She wrote her own name in the ledger.
She turned seventy-two in June and she has told the board of supervisors that she will retire as clerk in 2031 and not before, and she has begun training a twenty-six-year-old named Kayla Prine on the hand ledger, and the county has told her twice in writing that the hand ledger is not to be continued after she goes.
Kayla Prine is going to continue it. I know this because I asked her and she said, “Miz Absher’s ledger caught a truck,” and did not elaborate, and there was nothing to add.
The fire hall stays.
The trust granted the fire department a ninety-nine-year lease on the fire hall parcel at one dollar a year and a right of first refusal on any use of the ground it sits on, and the rebuild of the north end was paid for out of the settlement.
Nobody in Blackthorn County paid anything and nobody’s deed changed.
Odessa’s quitclaim from October stands. She never had a claim against them and she still does not. The four hundred and a dozen households are exactly where they were in January, minus a year of fear, and I am not going to pretend that is nothing.
The county gets nothing.
I want that plainly, because it has been misreported in two newspapers.
Blackthorn County received no money, no land, and no interest of any kind. The trust is not a county entity, the county has no seat on it that is not ex officio and unpaid, and the ninety-nine-year lease at a dollar a year is a lease and not a gift and can be forfeited for cause like any other.
What this county got out of nine months of drafting is that its fire hall stays where it is and that nobody has to be afraid of the mail.
Amos Boyle asked me in July, at the stove, whether that was worth a year.
I said I did not know. He said, “It ain’t,” and drank his coffee, and then said, “It weren’t for that, though,” and went back to the paper, and that’s the closest thing to a summation anybody has produced.
And the four acres.
Term four, from a kitchen table in Bluefield in October, unchanged in nine months of drafting:
The Gap school parcel out of the trust to a separate charitable corporation. The chimney stabilized. The foundation cleared and kept clear. A stone.
There is a piece of the drafting I want in the record because it was the hardest week of the nine months and it had nothing to do with land.
In May, Alma sent a clause that said the trust would hold the ground for the benefit of the descendants of Isaiah Ambrose and the residents of the Gap district, and I read it four times and then I called her and said the thing I had been avoiding since February.
“Alma, you have put us in it.”
“I have.”
“We have no business being a beneficiary of your family’s land.”
“Ms. Whitmore.” She has a way of using a name that ends a conversation before it starts. “Who do you think has been keeping that ground for ninety-one years?”
“That is not what happened and you know it is not.”
“I know exactly what happened. My family was taxed off it and yours built a fire hall on it.” She did not raise her voice one time in nine months.
“And for ninety-one years a county that had no idea what it was standing on kept every scrap of paper about it, in a vault, and behind a compressor, and in a footlocker, and when it found out what it was, it drove to Bluefield and told my grandmother before it told itself.”
I did not have an answer.
“So I am going to write the clause,” Alma said, “and you are going to let me, and in about forty years somebody is going to read it and think it was sentiment. It is not sentiment. It is a title examiner writing down who actually preserved a record, because that’s the only part of this that is my professional judgment and I am not going to be talked out of it. ”
The clause is on page four. It has not been changed.
The stone went up on the twelfth of September and there were six hundred people at the Gap.
It is granite, from a yard in Elliston, and it is four feet by three and it took the man nine days to cut, and he would not take payment beyond his cost and his cost was eight hundred and four dollars.
At the top it says:
THE AMbrOSE SCHOOL1911 to 1938
Then the nine names, in age order, because Odessa said her grandmother said them at Christmas in age order and that was how they went.
Then, at the bottom, one line:
MISS RUBY CANNADAY, TEACHER, WHO WENT WITH THEM.
Odessa Pratt was there. She was eighty-nine by then and she came in a car Alma drove and she used the cane in front of six hundred people because there was no help for it, and she stood on that foundation for about four minutes and did not speak, and did not intend to, and had told us in July that she would not.
And then she did.
She said eleven words and Lily printed them and they are on a card at the fire hall now.
“My daddy said it was all still there. He was right.”
Charity Teague read the nine names out.
She did it because Odessa asked her to in July, and I have never found out why she asked Charity and not Alma or Ada or me, and Charity has never speculated about it in my hearing, which is the most Charity Teague thing there is.
She read them slowly, in age order, and after each one she waited, and by the fourth name six hundred people had worked out that she was waiting on purpose, and by the seventh you could hear the creek.
Then she read the last line about the teacher and put the card in her coat and stepped back, and Rae Tillman started the singing without anybody asking her to, and it was the wrong hymn for the occasion and nobody cared, and Lorna Farrow, eighty-three, sang the whole of it sitting down in a folding chair on a foundation her mother’s people never once set foot on.
I have to record the part that is not clean, because this county does not get to have a clean ending after the year it had.
Not everybody was happy.
Eleven households on the Coleman road had sold to Cardinal Ridge in the spring of 2028 at three times value, and the trust now holds that ground, and it cannot ever be sold, which means those eleven families sold their farms to a man in Charlotte and the ground went to a trust that will hold it in perpetuity, and every one of them has done the arithmetic on what would have happened if they had held.
They would have been the same. That’s the true answer. They would own their land and be poorer and would have spent a year in a lawsuit. I have said that to four of them and it does not help and it should not.
Renata Sowder’s brothers do not speak to her.
Tildon at Eagle Rock sold his store in March of 2028 and he was at that stone on the twelfth of September and he stood at the back and left before the end.
And there are people here, and I know their names and will not write them, who think Blackthorn County gave away eleven hundred and forty acres to a family from West Virginia because its lawyer had a conscience.
Ada Grier put it to me in June in the way only Ada can, meaning by asking a question she already knows the answer to.
“Grace. If Wrench Sullivan had never gone in that vault at night, would you have found the paid tax ticket?”
“Eventually. Somebody would have.”
“And if the Recorder volumes had gone in the county dumpster in 1961 like the chief intended?”
“Then there is no proof and the sale stands and we never go to Bluefield.”
“And if Mrs. Absher had taken the state’s advice in 2004 about the redundant hand ledger?”
“Then there is no plate.”
Ada closed her notebook.
“Then I would like somebody to explain to me,” she said, “why the version being told in the Gap store is that a lawyer gave away eleven hundred and forty acres, when the actual version is that four people who nobody ever thanked kept four things nobody asked them to keep for a combined ninety-one years.”
I said, “Because the second version does not have anybody to be angry at.”
“No,” Ada said. “It does not. That’s the whole trouble with it.”
Nine of them have said so to my face. Three of them apologized later and six have not, and one of the six is somebody I have represented for eleven years and will represent again next week.
That is what it costs. Not the ground.
There is a last thing about Odessa Ambrose Pratt and I am going to put it here because there is nowhere better.
In June, before the settlement, she was asked in a deposition why she had not simply taken Meade Cardwell’s hundred and forty thousand dollars in September of 2028 and let the whole thing alone.
Her answer is on page ninety-one of that transcript.
She said: “Because he come to my kitchen and told me the truth about a paper and never one time told me the truth about a place. And them three women come and told me about a fire hall and a ballfield and a old woman that got served in her own driveway, and they told me it before they told me what it was worth, and there was a boy on my porch counting my steps.”
The lawyer asked her whether she meant that she trusted us.
And Odessa Pratt said, “No, sir. I mean they told me who was going to get hurt. That’s all trust ever is, is somebody telling you who’s going to get hurt before you ask.”
She died on the second of March, at ninety, at home, with Alma in the house, and the arrangements had been made by her in January and there were four instructions and every one of them was followed.
She is buried in Bluefield beside Willie Pratt.
Instruction three was that nobody from Blackthorn County was to drive up for it, because it is three hours each way in March and she said there was no sense in it.
Eleven of us went anyway and stood at the back and did not sign the book and drove home the same day, and Alma saw us and has never said one word about it to anybody, and I have decided she understood that it was the only way this county had left to disobey a woman it could not repay.
Instruction four was about the stone at the Gap.
She asked that when the time came, her name not be added to it.
Her exact words, in a letter in her own hand to Alma, which Alma read to me in April: That stone is for the nine that was in that school and the woman that taught them. I never set foot in it. Don’t you put me on a thing I didn’t earn.