Chapter Four · Wrench
CHAPTER FOUR
WRENCH
She lost the office on the twenty-second of February, and she lost it politely, and I have decided that the politeness is the part worth setting down.
Harold Dabney signed on the nineteenth. Nobody blamed him and nobody was going to.
He came up the stairs himself the next morning at eight o’clock with his hat in his hands and told her to her face, standing in her own doorway, and gave her until the end of April, and then went back down and opened his store and sold four dollars of wood screws to Petey Ratliff, who did not need wood screws.
That is how a county comes apart. Not with anybody shouting. With a seventy-four-year-old man doing the decent version of a thing that ends somebody.
I heard about it Tuesday at Lorna’s, from Maya, who had it from Ada. I finished my supper and I helped with the dishes and I drove home and I sat in my truck in front of my own shop for about ten minutes.
There are two acres and a building. The building is fifty-two by eighty, block, with a steel roof my father put on in 1994 and I re-screwed in 2019, and the upstairs is one room the length of all of it with four windows on the road side and a bathroom in the corner that my father plumbed himself and did a better job of than a man would expect.
It has been storage for twenty-one years. Cases of oil, a parts washer that does not run, a boat somebody left in 2011, and every piece of my mother’s furniture, which came out of the house in Coal Creek when she died and went up those stairs and has not been touched since.
I sat in the truck and looked at those four windows and did the arithmetic.
Then I got out and went up and started carrying furniture down.
It took me four nights. I did not tell anybody, because the thing about telling people is they come and help, and then it is theirs.
Second night, Cinder came by anyway, because my brother is the best-informed man in the county and has been since he was eleven years old. He stood in the bay door and watched me come down the stairs with a chifforobe on a hand truck.
“That’s Mama’s.”
“It is.”
“Where’s it going.”
“Cody’s got a dry corner in the barn at the yard. It’ll keep better there than it’s been keeping.”
He came over and put a hand on the top of it, just laid his hand on it flat, the way you would put a hand on a horse. He did not say anything for a second.
“You know what you’re doing,” he said.
“I’m moving furniture.”
“Marcus.”
I set the hand truck down.
“She’s got till the end of April,” I said.
“There ain’t another second-floor office on Court Street that Cardinal Ridge don’t own the building of.
And she can’t take one anyhow, because the minute her rent’s paid to a man in Charlotte, the man in Charlotte’s got a lever on the county’s lawyer.
” I picked the handles back up. “This building’s mine.
Free and clear since 2007. There ain’t a piece of paper on it anywhere in the world with anybody’s name but mine. ”
He picked a photograph up out of the shoebox that had come out of the chest and was sitting on the step, and looked at it, and set it back.
“She never showed me them letters,” he said.
I had not told him I found them. He knew because he knew what was in that chest, because he had helped carry it up those stairs in 2007 with his parole officer’s permission and had not opened it since either.
“She never told me she had them,” I said.
“She wouldn’t.” Cinder put his hands in his coat pockets. “Mama had one rule about the two of us and she never said it once aloud. She wasn’t going to be the reason either one of us had to talk about it.” He looked at the chifforobe. “That worked out real good for us, didn’t it.”
Cinder looked up the stairs at the light coming out of the room I had half emptied.
“And it’s a hundred and forty feet from the fire hall,” he said.
“Hundred and sixty.”
He laughed, once.
“You going to tell her that part?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because then she’d have to decide whether that’s why I done it,” I said, “and she’d get it wrong, and it’d cost her about a week.”
My brother stood there in the cold with his hand still on our mother’s chifforobe.
“Sixteen years I’ve watched you not say things,” he said. “I always figured it was because you didn’t have them.” He took his hand back. “It ought to be in the book someday that I was wrong about that.”
The third night I got down to the last of it, and the last of it was a cedar chest, and I did not move it that night.
I sat on the floor of an empty room with my back against a block wall at half past ten at night and had the lid up.
There was a quilt in it, and under the quilt a shoebox of photographs, and under the shoebox a manila envelope with my mother’s hand on the front, and the hand said SULLIVAN, MARCUS, 2003, and inside it was every letter I wrote my brother at Coffeewood.
She kept them. He sent them back to her, and she kept them, and she never told either one of us, and she died in 2007 without saying a word about it.
I counted them. Two hundred and six. Four years, at a little better than one a week, from a nineteen-year-old, and I read the top one, and it was three lines long, and it was about a truck.
Every one of them is about a truck, or a carburetor, or the weather at the shop.
Two hundred and six letters and not one apology in the stack, because if I had put an apology in a letter it would have been a written statement about what happened in that shop, and I had already made one of those, and it had cost him four years.
So I sent him carburetors for two hundred and six weeks.
I put them back in the envelope and put the envelope back under the shoebox and closed the lid and carried the chest down the next night and did not open it again.
I finished on Saturday. I washed the windows, which took the longest, because nobody had washed them since my father, and I put a new fixture over where a desk would go, and I ran a dedicated circuit for whatever a lawyer plugs in, and I put a deadbolt on the outside door and a second one on the door at the top of the stairs, and I did not paint anything, because paint is a thing you offer somebody, not a thing you decide for them.
Then I called her at four in the afternoon, and I had worked out what to say, and I said it.
“There’s a room over my shop. It’s dry, it’s got heat, and nobody owns the building but me.”
Silence on the line long enough that I checked the screen.
“Wrench.”
“Yeah.”
“How long have you known I needed one?”
“Since Tuesday.”
“And how long has it been empty?”
“Since Saturday,” I said.
Another silence.
“You emptied it.”
“It’s storage. It ain’t been anything for twenty-one years.”
“Marcus Sullivan.” Her voice had gone very level and I could not read it at all, and I have thought since that this was the first time I had ever wanted to. “What was in it?”
I could have said boxes. I have gone over that afternoon a good many times and I could have said boxes and she would have taken the room and none of the rest of it would have gone the way it went.
“My mother’s furniture,” I said.
The line was quiet for a while.
“Where is it now?”
“Barn at the yard. Dry corner. Cody put pallets under it.”
“Did you ask him to?”
“He was there.”
“Wrench, did you ask him to put pallets under it, or did Cody Sifers put pallets under your mother’s furniture because he understood what he was looking at?”
I did not have an answer to that, and she let it stand there for a second, and then her voice changed.
“I’ll take it,” she said. “And I’m paying rent. Market rent, on a written lease you’re going to let me draft, and if you argue with me about it I will find a room over a beauty shop in Fincastle and drive forty minutes each way out of spite.”
“All right.”
“That was fast.”
“You’d do it,” I said.
“I would.” A pause. “Wrench, I need to say one thing and then I’ll let you go, and I’d like you to not answer it, because if you answer it you’ll do it badly and I’d rather have the silence.
” She waited. “There are four people alive who have ever done a thing for me I did not ask for. Two of the four are dead now and one of them is my brother.” Another second.
“I’m not thanking you. I’m telling you the size of the number, because you’re a man who works in numbers and I need you to have it. ”
I did not answer it.
“Good,” she said. “Saturday, then.”
She moved in on the last Saturday in February and about a third of the county turned out for it without being invited, and I have never been able to decide whether that was for her or against Cardinal Ridge, and Grace says it does not matter and I say it does.
Farrow and Trip and the yard crew moved the filing cabinets, four of them, and every one of them full, which nobody had thought about.
Ada Grier came with the bureau’s hand truck.
Charity Teague brought her boy and a box of trash bags.
Lorna Farrow came with two pies and stayed four hours and directed traffic from a folding chair in the middle of the room like a woman running an airfield.
Wyatt Stallard counted the stairs, thirteen going up, and then counted them again coming down and got thirteen and said so, twice, to two different people, so it would be on record.
I stayed downstairs in the shop with the door up and worked on a water pump for the Ruritans’ mower and let them do it, because it was hers now and a man standing in the middle of a thing that is not his is furniture.
At about two o’clock she came down. She had dust in her hair and she had taken her jacket off, and I had never in eleven years seen Grace Whitmore without a jacket on inside a building she was working in.
She stood in the bay door and looked at the shop, and I put the wrench down.
“There’s a problem,” she said.
“Say it.”
“There are thirteen stairs and my clients are old.” She folded her arms. “Half the people who need me can’t do thirteen stairs.
I have been managing that for eleven years by going to them, which was fine when I had a car and a schedule.
It is not fine now, because now everybody here who is scared wants to sit in a chair in front of me and be told something, and they are going to want it all at once, and I am going to be sending eighty-year-olds up thirteen steps. ”
I looked past her at the bay.
The shop is fifty-two feet long. The front twelve of it, by the office window, is where the parts counter is, and there is a wood stove in that corner my father set in 1988, and it has three chairs around it that have been there my entire life, and there is not a week goes by that four men are not in them.
“Take the front of the shop,” I said.
I did not think about it first. That is worth putting down, because I think about everything first, and it is the only sentence I said all spring that got out ahead of me.
She turned around and looked at it.
“That’s your parts counter.”
“It’s three chairs and a stove.”
“Wrench, men sit there. Amos sits there. That’s the last room in Blackthorn County where a man can sit down without buying something.”
“I know it,” I said. “So it’s already got the chairs.”
She stood there with her arms folded and her back to me for long enough that I went back to the water pump, and then she said, without turning around, “You are going to have to let me say thank you at some point.”
“No, ma’am.”
“Why not?”
“Because if you get to say it, it’s a debt,” I said, “and then it’s a thing between us with a number on it. I’ve watched this county get bought this month. I ain’t putting a number on anything else.”
Grace Whitmore turned around then, and looked at me across a shop floor for four seconds, and said nothing at all.
Then she went back up the thirteen stairs, and I heard Lorna say something and the room laugh, and I stood there holding a water pump and understood that something had happened and did not know what it was.
Amos Boyle worked it out before I did, which figures.
He came in Monday at seven in the morning, before she was there, and sat down in his chair by the stove and did not take his coat off and looked at the new fixture over where her desk would go.
“You run a circuit up there.”
“I did.”
“Twenty amp?”
“Thirty.”
Amos nodded at the stove.
“Marcus,” he said, “I’ve set in this corner since your daddy had it. Thirty-one years.” He turned his cup a quarter turn. “And in thirty-one years I ain’t once seen you put a thing in this building you didn’t need.”
I said nothing.
“A thirty-amp circuit for a lawyer,” Amos said.
“That ain’t for a lamp and a laptop. That’s for a copier and a shredder and a coffee maker and about four years.
” He drank his coffee. “I ain’t asking you nothing.
I’m telling you that a man that runs thirty amp has already decided, and you might as well know you’ve decided, because everybody else in this shop’s going to know by Thursday. ”
Then he read the paper for forty minutes and left, and I stood at the parts counter with a thirty-amp circuit over my head and considered that I had been found out by a sixty-five-year-old man in twenty words about wire.