Chapter 6
Birdie
We came up the drive at seven-forty in the morning and the pump house door was open and the floor was open and my grandmother was sitting on the porch swing with a milk can between her feet.
She'd done it herself. Sometime before dawn. Seventy-nine years old, with a wrecking bar and a garden spade, in the dark, in October, while a vice president slept in her kitchen.
"Morning," she said.
Roman got off the bike and stood there.
"Odile."
"Coffee's made."
"Odile."
"There's biscuits."
"Odile."
"Roman Kade," she said, "if you're going to yell at me you can do it sitting down like a Christian."
Ash Delacroix came out onto the porch with a cup in his hand and a look on his face like a man who has recently been outmaneuvered by a small elderly woman and hasn't decided how much to admit.
"She turned the TV up," he said.
"She what?"
"She turned the TV up. Loud. Nine hours of a home shopping channel." He drank. "I thought it was a hearing thing."
"It is a hearing thing," my grandmother said.
"It was cover."
"It can be both, Ashley."
"It's Ash."
"Mm," she said.
I sat down next to her on the swing. The can was old galvanized, the size of a bread box, with a lid that had been hammered on and pried off more than once over the years.
"You went out there alone," I said.
"I've been going out there alone since 1998."
"With a wrecking bar."
"It's my wrecking bar."
"Grandma."
"Scarlett." She put her hand on my knee. Small hand. Cold. "I have had one job for twenty-eight years, and the job was: know where it is, and don't be the reason anybody dies over it. Wendell Pike put a pry bar on my hasp Friday night. So the job changed."
"Changed how?"
"Now the job is to be the one who hands it over," she said. "And I'd like to do that before somebody makes me."
Roman came up the steps. He stopped a foot short of the swing and looked down at that can like it was a live thing.
"Open it," she said.
"Odile—"
"You want somebody to say it's all right for you to look at it? I'm saying it. Sit down and open the can."
He sat on the top step with his back to the rail and put it between his boots and worked the lid off, and it came with a sound like a jar of pickles giving up, and I want to be very clear about what came out of a milk can that had been in the ground under a pump house since before I was born.
A feed sack, folded.
Inside the sack, six deeds in an accordion folder that had gone brittle at the fold lines.
And a business envelope, sealed, with nothing on the front.
That's it. That's all it ever was. My grandmother told me later she's had twenty-eight years to find that funny and she still gets there about four times a year.
"You went out there in the dark," I said.
"I've got a light."
"You've got a heart murmur and a hip—"
"I have got," said my grandmother, "a wrecking bar, and the boards were mine, and I put them down in 1998 with my own hands, and I'd like somebody to explain to me at what age a woman stops being allowed to lift up a floor she personally laid."
"Seventy-nine," said Ash.
"Ashley."
"Ma'am, I'm on your side. That's why I said the number."
Roman went through the deeds one at a time.
"Vaughn," he said. "Kesler. Both mineral tracts. Sanderson." He stopped. "Church camp."
"Keep going," Odile said.
"County road strip."
"Read the names."
He read them. And the reading took a long time because his voice kept going somewhere and coming back.
Deacon Ross. Marcus Bly Elder — no relation, and my grandmother says that coincidence has caused more trouble than the deeds. Otis Bell. Early Bell. A man called only J. R. Priest. And on the sixth one, the county road strip, the strip everything runs across:
Roman A. Kade.
Sixteen years old. Signed in a hand I recognized as a boy's.
"I never signed that," he said.
"You did."
"Odile, I was in a cellar—"
"You signed it in September," she said. "All six of you, at my table, before any of it.
Deacon had a man in Steubenville draw them up and he brought them out here and he made every one of you put your name on one, and you all thought it was a joke, and you were sixteen and you signed it Roman A.
Kade with a flourish on the K because you'd been practicing. "
Roman looked at the paper.
"There's a flourish on the K," he said.
"I know there is. I watched you do it."
He put his hand over his mouth and kept it there.
Ash sat down on the rail.
"So the parcels were bought in '97," he said. "By Vane senior. Before."
"That's right."
"And signed over in '98."
"Before," my grandmother said. "Not after. Everybody always wants it to be after because after is a robbery and before is worse."
"Before is what, exactly?"
And she looked out at the yard for a second.
"Before is a man buying six boys' silence," she said, "with the only thing he had that was worth anything. And then finding out in October that he'd paid up front."
Nobody said a word.
I picked up the envelope.
"And this?"
"That," she said, "is what the deeds cost."
"What's in it?"
"I've never opened it."
"Grandma."
"I have never opened it," she said, and there was a snap in it I'd only heard twice in my life.
"Deacon Ross put it in my hand at seven o'clock in the morning with blood on him and said better you don't, and I said don't tell me what's better, and then I opened the sack and I saw the deeds and I put the lid back on and I have never opened that envelope, and I'll tell you why. "
"Why?"
"Because I can't testify to what I don't know," she said, "and I have always intended to outlive all of them."
Ash said, quietly, "Christ."
"Language."
"Sorry, ma'am."
I looked at the six names again.
Four dead. One in Nevada who doesn't call. And Marcus, who my grandmother doesn't speak about, and whose deed had a name on it that made my whole spine go cold when Roman read it out: Marcus Bly Elder.
"Grandma."
"No relation."
"His name is Bly."
"It's a common name in this county. There's forty of them in the phone book and I'm related to none of them and I have said that sentence approximately nine hundred times in my life."
"Grandma."
"Scarlett Ann, I will not have this today."
"Was he—"
"He was a boy who ate at my table and he had a name that was also my name, and it caused a great deal of confusion in 1998 and a great deal more later, and it is not the interesting thing about him." She set her cup down. "Ask me again in the spring."
Which is how she says never, and which is how I know it isn't.
Roman said, "It's got to burn."
"No," I said.
I didn't decide to say it. It came out ahead of me.
"Birdie."
"No." I stood up with the envelope. "You burn that and what's left?
Six deeds with six dead men's names on them, and one live man, and no reason anywhere on earth that Callum Vane's father signed away half a county to a bunch of teenagers.
You'd be holding a stack of paper that reads like a forgery. "
"It reads like a forgery now—"
"It reads like a forgery until you can say what it was payment for."
"And then what," Roman said. He stood up too. "Then it's not a forgery, it's a motive. For five men. For a thing on a ridge road in October of ninety-eight that got called an accident."
"Four of those men are dead."
"Two of them are not," he said, "and one of them is me."
And there it was.
That's the shape of it, and we went around it for an hour on that porch and I'm not going to write out the whole hour because most of it was the same eight sentences with the volume changing.
Some of it was good, though. Ash was good.
"Say we file," he said. "Walk me through the first ninety days."
"Recorder's office rejects them," Roman said. "Or she takes them and flags them, which is worse, because then they sit."
"Sit where?"
"In a drawer with a note on them."
"And who reads the drawer?"
"Anybody Vane's paying," Roman said. "Which by my count is a title clerk, two people at the county, and Duane at the feed store, and I'm only kidding about one of those."
"Which one?"
"I'm not sure anymore," Roman said, "and that's the problem."
"Okay. Say we don't file. Say we sit on it another twenty-eight."
"Then he takes the north end and builds whatever it is he's building, and the road becomes a lawsuit in 2040, and Odile's dead and I'm seventy and there's nobody left who was at that table."
"And that's fine," Ash said.
"That's what?"
"That's fine, Roman. That's not the worst outcome. You keep talking like the worst outcome is Vane getting rich. The worst outcome is a woman getting shot over a milk can."
Nobody said anything.
"Ash Delacroix," said my grandmother, "you can have the last biscuit."
But here's the part that mattered.
"It's not yours to decide," I said.
"It's my name on—"
"It's not yours and it's not mine. It's hers."
Everybody looked at my grandmother.
Who had, at some point during the argument, gone in and come back out with a plate of biscuits and was eating one.
"Well," she said. "This is nice."
"Grandma. Tell them."
"Tell them what, sweetheart?"
"Tell them it's your call."
"Oh, they know that," she said. "They've known that since seven-forty. That's what all the shouting's been about."
Roman put his hands on the porch rail and dropped his head.
"Odile," he said. "If that envelope exists, they can put you in a room."
"Let them."
"They can put you in a room with a lawyer and a recorder and a man in a nice coat and ask you a question you can't answer any way but wrong."
"Roman Kade," my grandmother said. "I am seventy-nine years old.
I have a hip that predicts rain, I have outlived two of my children, and I have been sitting on this porch since 1968 waiting for somebody to come up that drive and ask me a hard question.
" She brushed crumbs off her lap. "Let them come. I'll make coffee."
"And if they don't ask," I said. "If they don't ask, Roman. If they just take."
Silence.
"Then it's already too late," Ash said, "and we should've had this argument in March."
I looked at Roman.
"You wanted her safe," I said. "So did I. But we don't get to buy that by deciding for her, because that's the same trade she made with you in that cellar, and it broke you, and you have spent twenty-eight years walking around a door."
He turned around slowly.
I have never in my life said a crueler true thing to anybody. I'd say it again.
"That's not fair," he said.
"It's not."
"That's not — Birdie, that's not fair."
"No," I said. "It's just right."
And my grandmother, on the swing, said, "She's got me. Lord help us, she's got both of me."
Roman laughed. It came out wrecked.
"Okay," he said.
"Okay?"
"It's hers. It's been hers since ninety-eight, and I'm the last one alive who ever pretended otherwise." He rubbed his face with both hands. "Odile. What do you want to do?"
And my grandmother said:
"I want to put the can back."
"What?"
"Put it back. Set the boards down. Put a new hasp on the door and let it be a pump house.
" She stood up, four foot eleven, holding a biscuit.
"They know it's there. They don't know what it is.
The minute they know what it is, one of us gets shot over it.
So it stays in the ground, and I stay on my porch, and the first person who asks me a direct question gets a direct answer, and everybody else gets coffee. "
Ash said, "That's actually not a bad—"
"I know it's not."
"It's a stall," Roman said.
"Everything's a stall," said my grandmother. "That's what a life is. You stall and you stall and then one Tuesday you don't have to anymore."
"One thing," Roman said.
"Go on."
"When I signed that. In September." He was still holding the sixth deed, the county road strip, the one with his own boy's handwriting on it. "Did Deacon know what it was?"
Odile didn't answer right away.
"Odile."
"Deacon Ross," she said, "was twenty-two years old and could barely read a menu, and he had six pieces of paper drawn up by a man in Steubenville who charged him forty dollars, and he brought them out here in a grocery sack because he didn't have a folder."
"That's not what I asked."
"No," she said. "He knew. He knew in September that there'd be an October. He'd known since August."
Roman put the deed down on the porch boards very carefully, like it might go off.
"He set the whole thing up ahead of it."
"He set the whole thing up ahead of it."
"And then he sat at your table and let five men find out one at a time like it was news to him."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because he was the oldest," said my grandmother, "and because he'd already decided, and because a man who's already decided still wants to hear the others say it out loud.
That's not a lie, Roman. That's what leadership is, and if you don't know that by now you have not been paying attention to your own life. "
Ash looked at the floor. I looked at Ash looking at the floor.
So we put it back.
Roman set the boards. Ash carried the can. I held the flashlight, and my grandmother stood in the pump house doorway supervising, and the whole thing took eleven minutes and felt like a funeral for somebody nobody liked.
It's a strange thing, standing in a cinderblock shed at nine in the morning holding a flashlight on the most expensive floor in Pennsylvania while a man in his forties fits boards back down and gets one of them backwards twice.
"That one's the other way round," my grandmother said.
"It's a board, Odile."
"It's got a worn side, Roman, look at it, it's been under a foot for twenty-eight years—"
"Nobody is ever going to see this floor."
"I'm going to see this floor."
He turned the board around.
"Thank you."
"You're welcome."
"There," she said. "Now it's a floor."
At the end, Ash put a new hasp on with a battery drill and a padlock the size of a fist.
"That'll stop 'em," he said.
"That'll stop nobody," said my grandmother.
"No, ma'am."
"But it's tidy."
"Yes, ma'am."
And on the way back up to the house she took my arm, which she has never done, not once, not even at the funerals, and she said, very low, so the men couldn't hear it:
"Birdie. If it comes to it, you give it to them."
"What?"
"All of it. The can, the envelope, the whole business. If it ever comes down to that or you." Her hand tightened. "Paper's paper. You promise me."
"Grandma—"
"Promise me."
And I said, "I promise," and I meant it at the time, and I want it on the record that I meant it, because four days later I stood in that kitchen and did something else entirely.