Chapter Seven · Grace
CHAPTER SEVEN
GRACE
The second wave of offers went out on the fourth of April and there were nine of them and every one was a raise.
Not to everybody. To nine specific people, and I sat at a folding table in the front of a repair shop with the list in front of me and understood inside four minutes what the nine had in common, and it took the wind out of me in a way the first forty-one had not.
Every one of the nine had, in the six weeks since February, done something publicly to hold.
Amos Boyle said no at the Ruritan meeting, on the record, in front of forty people.
Raised. Lorna Farrow told the Recorder she was not selling and let Lily quote her by name.
Raised. Renata Sowder, who had already sold her brothers’ forty acres, stood up at the fire hall in March and said she wished she had not, and that everybody left ought to think hard.
Raised, on a parcel she does not own, and that’s to say Cardinal Ridge offered to buy her mother’s house in town, which was not on any map in February.
Nine people spoke, and nine people got more money.
Ada saw my face. “Say it.”
“He’s not punishing dissent,” I said. “He’s pricing it.”
“Same thing.”
“It is not remotely the same thing, and the difference is going to be the reason we lose.” I put my pen down.
“If he punished people for speaking, that is retaliation and I can build something out of retaliation. There are causes of action. There are patterns you can put in front of a judge. But he is rewarding them. He is paying more to the people who resist, in public, in writing, and there is no court in this Commonwealth that will hear a complaint that a man offered my client too much money.”
Amos Boyle was in the third chair with the paper folded on his knee and he had not said anything.
“And what it does,” I said, “is it makes every person who holds out look like they’re holding out for a raise.”
Amos folded the paper the rest of the way and set it on the stove hearth.
“Say the rest of it,” he said.
“There is no rest.”
“Grace.”
I looked at him. Amos Boyle is sixty-five and has one of the nine letters in his coat pocket at that moment and had not mentioned it.
“The rest of it,” I said, “is that in about three weeks somebody here is going to say out where people can hear it that Amos Boyle is talking big at meetings because it’s worth thirty thousand dollars a speech.”
“Yep,” Amos said.
“And it will not be true.”
“Won’t matter.”
“No,” I said. “It won’t.”
He got up and got his hat off the nail and put it on and stood there a second with his hand on the door.
“He ain’t buying land no more,” Amos said. “He’s buying whether we can stand to look at each other.” Then he went out, and the bell on that door is a piece of pipe on a wire that Wrench hung the week I moved in, and it made the sound it makes.
The talk started nine days later at the Gap store, at the coffee urn, meaning where everything in Blackthorn County starts.
I was not there. Charlene told me about it in the way Charlene tells you a thing, and that’s by describing the weather for two minutes first.
A man from up the Coleman road, whose name I am not going to put down because he apologized in June and meant it, said that it must be nice to be Amos Boyle, and that some folks had been offered a fair price and taken it and gotten called quitters for it while other folks held out and got paid extra for the privilege of being called brave.
There was nothing false in a word of it. That is what made it work.
Bud Tackett, who had sold in March, said the thing back that ought to have ended it, meaning that Amos had not signed and was not going to.
And the man from the Coleman road said, all right, then why is he getting more, and nobody at that urn had an answer, because there is not one that fits in a sentence.
By the end of May, Ada had counted six households on that road who had stopped speaking to each other. Not over money. Over the shape of what the money implied about them.
I built a chart of it, because I build charts.
Down the left, the forty-one. Across the top, sold, holding, raised, spoke publicly.
And when I finished it I sat and looked at it for a long while and then I turned it face down on the table, because what I had drawn was not a chart of a real estate transaction.
It was a seating plan for a county that had started sorting itself.
I did not sleep that night and at four in the morning I did the thing I had been circling since March, which was to stop asking who owns Cardinal Ridge and start asking who owned the ground before anybody.
At six I called Ada. At seven she was at the courthouse waiting for Mrs. Absher to unlock, and by eight we had started at the top and gone backward, and I am going to explain what that means because most people have never watched anybody do it.
A chain of title runs backward. You take the current deed and find the deed that gave the grantor his title, and then the deed that gave that grantor his, and so on, back and back, and the county keeps every one of them in a bound book with a hand index in the front, and the books get older and the handwriting gets better and then it gets worse again, and if you do it right you end at a patent from the Commonwealth of Virginia or from the King of England, and if you do it wrong you end nowhere and have to start again.
Ada Grier can run a chain faster than anybody I have ever watched. She learned it in Charleston doing mine-safety records, and she talks while she works, which drives Mrs. Absher to distraction.
We ran the Gap tract. The big one. Eleven hundred and forty acres that includes the ground under the fire hall, the ballfield, the Motor Court, Harrow Salvage, and about half of Court Street, and which has been carved into pieces since 1937 and sold off in parcels, and which every one of the forty-one offers touches some piece of.
It took nine days of it.
Nineteen thirty-seven back to nineteen oh-three is not far in a courthouse. There were fourteen instruments in the chain and every one of them was clean and every one of them was recorded properly and every one of them was, I want to be precise, correct on its face.
The one at the bottom of the pile, the one that starts everything, was a deed dated the ninth of November, 1937, from the Clerk of the Circuit Court of Blackthorn County to Cardwell Land and Timber Company, conveying eleven hundred and forty acres sold at public auction for delinquent taxes.
Ada read it out loud twice.
“Cardwell,” she said.
“Cardinal Ridge,” I said.
“That’s not proof.”
“It is not proof of anything and I will say so in every room I stand in.” I was writing. “Ada, who did they take it from?”
She turned the book. The 1937 deed recites the delinquent taxpayer by name, as it must, and the name is written in a clerk’s hand in ink that has gone brown, and it says:
the lands of ISAIAH AMbrOSE, deceased, and the heirs of his body, taxes delinquent for the years 1934, 1935 and 1936.
Neither of us said anything for a while.
“Grace,” Ada said. “Tildon said that name to me in March. He called that parcel up the Gap the old Ambrose place. I wrote it on the back of a receipt.”
“I know.”
“Nobody in Blackthorn County has been named Ambrose in my lifetime.”
“No,” I said. “They haven’t.”
And that is when this stopped being a case about a company and became something else, and I want to set down honestly what I felt at that table at four in the afternoon on the seventeenth of April, because it was not triumph.
It was the first cold touch of the thought that if I pulled this thread all the way, I was not going to find a weapon.
I was going to find somebody we had wronged.
I went to see Lorna Farrow about it before I told anybody else, and I am not entirely sure why, and I have decided the reason is that Lorna is the only person alive who was here in 1937.
She was born in 1946, so she was not, and she is the first to say so.
But her mother was, and her mother-in-law was, and Lorna Farrow has been the memory of the upper end of this county since about 1970, and if a thing was said at a kitchen table in these mountains between the wars, Lorna heard the third-hand version of it before she was twenty.
I said the name and did not say anything else.
“Ambrose.”
She was shelling something into a bowl and she did not stop and she did not look up.
“Isaiah Ambrose,” I said.
Lorna shelled about four more, and then she set the bowl down on her knee.
“There was Ambroses at the Gap,” she said.
“My mother knowed them. There was a store, and I will be careful, because I’ve got about six sentences on this subject and I have had them since I was a girl and I don’t know which of them is true.
” She looked at the window. “There was a store and there was a church and there was a school for them children, up the Gap, and my mother went to a funeral there in about 1931 with her daddy, and she talked about the singing at that funeral until the day she died.”
“And then?”
“And then there weren’t.” Lorna picked the bowl back up.
“That’s the whole of it, Grace. There weren’t.
And there ain’t been since before I was born, and don’t nobody talk about it, and I have lived eighty-two years four miles from that Gap and it never one time occurred to me to ask where they went. ”
She shelled for a while.
“You go find out,” she said. “And you come tell me, and don’t you soften it.”
There is a thing I have to put in here and I have put it off for two pages.
The nine raises included one that was not on the list I gave the club.
Cardinal Ridge Holdings, through a broker in Roanoke, made an unsolicited offer on the twelfth of April for the purchase of the entire building and two acres at 4114 Court Street, being the premises known as Sullivan’s Garage.
At six times assessed value.
Not four. Six. Which is more than any parcel on that road got, more than the yard, more than the Motor Court, more than the fairgrounds, and which arrived twelve days after the county’s lawyer moved her office into the front of it.
He did not put my name in the letter. He did not have to. The letter is one page and the number is on it, and the number says everything a threat would say, and there is not a syllable in it that a court could reach.
Wrench brought it up the stairs at four in the afternoon and put it on the corner of my desk and went back down without a word.
I sat with it for a while. Then I went down the thirteen steps and stood at the parts counter, and he was under a truck and did not come out, and I said it to the underside of a Chevrolet.
“You know what this is.”
“Yeah.”
“He’s not buying your shop. He’s buying my office, and he’s paying a quarter-of-a-million-dollar premium over what he offered anybody else on that road, for the pleasure of putting the county’s lawyer out on the street twice in one spring.”
“Yeah.”
“Marcus, come out from under there.”
He came out. He wiped his hands and he leaned back on the fender and he looked at me and he did not say anything, and that’s the most infuriating and the most steadying thing about that man in equal measure.
“You need to hear me say the professional version first,” I said, “because you deserve to have it before I say the other thing. You should take it. It is six times value on a building your father built, you are forty-four years old with no retirement, and you could buy a shop in Fincastle and a house and a boat, and every person in Blackthorn County who loves you would tell you to sign it, and they would be right, and I would put that advice in writing if I were allowed to give you advice, which I am not.”
“All right.”
“And the other thing is that if you sell that building I will have nowhere to sit here and neither will Amos, and I need you to know that I know that, and that it is not a reason.”
Wrench Sullivan looked at the floor of his own shop for a second.
Then he took the letter out of my hand, and he did not tear it up, because he is not a man who performs, and he folded it in half and put it in the drawer under the parts counter with the invoices, and shut the drawer.
“That drawer’s got everything in it since 1994,” he said. “It’ll hold one more.”
I went back up the thirteen stairs and sat down and did not work for about half an hour.
Here is what I could not get past, and it is a lawyer’s objection and I know how it sounds.
He had not asked me anything. In three months that man had not asked me one question about what I wanted, or what I was going to do, or how long I intended to stay in a room over his shop, and he had now declined six hundred and eighty-four thousand dollars without asking me to account for it.
I have spent my professional life in a world where every act is consideration for another act. Somebody does a thing, somebody owes a thing. It is not cynicism, it is the architecture of contracts and I have made a living inside it since I was twenty-five.
And there was a man under a Chevrolet downstairs who had put the architecture in a drawer with the invoices.
I am going to record what I did about it, because it was the smallest possible thing and it took me forty minutes to work up to.
I went down and stood at the counter and said, “What do you take in your coffee.”
He came partway out from under the truck and looked at me like I had asked him the year.
“Nothing.”
“Since when?”
“Since always.”
“Then why is there sugar on the shelf behind the urn?”
“Amos,” he said, and went back under the truck.
And I stood there in the bay of a repair shop and understood that in eleven years I had never once asked that man a question about himself, and that neither had anybody else, and that he had arranged it that way on purpose.