Chapter Eight · Wrench
CHAPTER EIGHT
WRENCH
We went out to check the deed on my own building on the last Thursday in April, at night, because that is when both of us had time and because the scale house at the yard is the only place in the county with a table big enough and a copier that works.
That’s the true reason. I have been asked about it since, more than once, in a joking way, and I have given the true reason every time and nobody has ever accepted it.
Harrow Salvage at ten at night is the quietest place I know.
The crusher is down, the lights on the poles are on the timer, and the scale house has a wood stove and a long table and fourteen feet of counter, and Renata leaves the key over the door frame because everybody in Blackthorn County knows it is over the door frame and nobody has ever taken anything.
She got there at nine forty with two boxes and a thermos and a look on her face I had not seen before, and I found out why in about four minutes: Cardinal Ridge had that afternoon offered to buy the Gap Motor Court out from under Dorene for the third time and had raised it again, and Dorene had said no for the third time, and had then sat down on the steps of unit one and cried, and Grace had been the one who found her.
She told me that standing in the door of the scale house with her coat still on.
“I didn’t do anything,” she said. “I sat on a concrete step with a seventy-year-old woman for forty minutes and I did not have one useful thing to say to her, because I can’t advise her and I can’t stop it and I can’t even tell her it will be over by Christmas.
” She put the boxes on the table. “So let’s do deeds.
I’d like to be good at something tonight. ”
“You sat forty minutes.”
“That isn’t a service, Wrench.”
“It is if you ain’t got one,” I said, and she stopped with her hand on the box lid and did not answer that, and we started in on the books.
She had the plat books from the courthouse. She had the 1937 deed, and the eleven instruments above it, and the 1949 deed that carved my two acres out of the Gap tract, and the 1971 deed to my grandfather, and the 1994 deed to my father, and the 2007 deed to me.
“Read me the bearings on yours,” she said. “The 1949 one. I want to hear them in a voice, my eyes are done.”
So I read them. Beginning at an iron pin at the northwest corner of the lands of Boyle, thence north eighty-two degrees fourteen minutes east three hundred forty feet to a stone, thence south four degrees no minutes west, and so on around, back to the beginning.
She was following it on the plat with a pencil.
“Wait,” she said. “Say the second one again.”
“North eighty-two degrees fourteen minutes east.”
“That’s not what I have.” She turned the book around. “I have north eighty-two degrees forty minutes.”
I looked at where her pencil was.
“You’re on the wrong line,” I said. “That’s the call above it. That one’s Boyle’s north line, it runs to the creek. Yours is the second one down.”
She looked at the page. Then she looked at me.
“How do you know that.”
“Because there ain’t a stone at three hundred forty feet on Amos’s north line,” I said. “There’s a locust post. The stone’s on mine. I’ve mowed around it my whole life.”
Grace Whitmore put the pencil down.
“Say that again,” she said.
“The stone’s on mine.”
“No.” She had gone very still. “You just corrected a metes and bounds description from 1949 out of a bound plat book because you have personally mowed around the monument.”
“It’s my yard.”
“Marcus.” She stood up. “I have practiced law in this county for eleven years and I have never once had a client who could tell me where the corner is. That is a whole industry. There are men in Roanoke who charge nine hundred dollars a day to go out and find a stone from 1949 and half the time they can’t. ”
“Well,” I said. “It’s a stone. It’s got a drill mark in it.”
And she laughed, and it went on longer than the thing was worth, and then it stopped, and she stood on the other side of that table in a scale house at half past ten at night with the stove going and looked at me.
I did not move. That belongs in the record because everybody assumes I did.
She came around the end of the table and stopped about a foot in front of me and said, “I am going to do something and I am going to say why first, because I am not a person who does things without saying why.”
“All right.”
“Six weeks ago you carried your mother’s furniture down a flight of stairs at night by yourself so that nobody would help you, because if they helped you it would have been theirs and you needed it to be mine.
” She had her chin up. “Two weeks ago you put six hundred and eighty-four thousand dollars in a drawer with the invoices. And thirty seconds ago you told me where a stone is because you have mowed around it since you were a boy, and Marcus, that’s the only thing anybody has said to me since February that was actually true. ”
I stayed quiet, because there was nothing to add to a correct statement.
“So,” she said. “I have checked it twice.”
Then she put her hand flat on my chest and kissed me.
Here is what I have to say about that and then I will go on.
I have known that woman eleven years. She came into this county at twenty-eight years old and she has stood between people I love and the worst hours of their lives and she has never one time asked anybody for a thing, and I have watched it from the end of a table for eleven years and never said a word about it to anybody, including her, including my brother, including myself.
A man who does not say things does not stop having them. He just runs out of places to put them.
I had two hundred and six letters in a cedar chest to prove that and I had not thought about it in that way until the twenty-fourth of April, standing in a scale house with my hands not knowing what to do, at forty-four years old.
When she stopped she stayed where she was and said, “You can say something now.”
And here is the longest thing I said in the whole spring, and I counted it afterward in the truck, and it is nine words.
“I’ve had that in me since before you had your office.”
She closed her eyes.
“Eleven years?”
“Eleven years.”
“You never said one word.”
“No, ma’am.”
“Why not?”
And that’s the question, and I gave her the honest answer, and the honest answer is the reason for everything that happened in this book from then on.
“Because I’ve said a true thing one time in my life,” I said, “and it cost my brother four years.”
She did not chase it. I have thought about that as much as I have thought about the rest.
Another woman would have asked. She had every right to and she was the only person alive with the standing to, and she stood there in a scale house with her hand still on my shirt and she looked at me a moment and she said:
“All right. Not tonight, then.”
“Grace.”
“No.” She stepped back and she picked the pencil up off the plat book, and her hands were not steady and she made no attempt to hide that they were not.
“I have spent eleven years being the person who makes people say the worst thing they have ever done, out where it can be written down, because it is my job and because it saves them. And every one of them chose their hour.” She squared the book.
“You’ll choose yours. I’ll be there when you do.
And if it takes you until August, it takes you until August.”
It took me until the twenty-second of June, and she never asked once.
We stood there a minute after that with the stove going. Then she said, in a completely different voice, “I am going to need you to know one thing about me and it is going to sound like a lawyer.”
“Go on.”
“I have been divorced ten years. I was married four. He was a decent man and I was a bad wife, and I was a bad wife in exactly one way, and that’s that I never once let him do anything for me.
” She was looking at the stove and not at me.
“Not a thing. Not a ride to the airport. He said at the end that living with me was like living next door to a courthouse. Lights on all night, everybody’s business inside it, and no way in. ”
I did not say anything.
“So when you gave me a room,” she said, “and then a stove and three chairs, and then put six hundred and eighty-four thousand dollars in a drawer, I want you to understand that I have been sitting up at night with it, and not for the reason you think.” She finally looked over.
“I have been sitting up because I have not once wanted to give any of it back. And I do not know what to do with a version of myself that takes things.”
“Ain’t nothing to do with it.”
“That is not an answer, that is a shrug in a coat.”
“No, ma’am.” I put the poker back on the hook.
“It’s a bearing. You take a thing from a fella that wants something back, you’re in debt.
You take it from a fella that don’t, you’re just took care of.
” I looked at her. “And you’ve had four hundred people here took care of by you for eleven years and not one of them ever paid you, and you never called any of them in debt. So don’t start with me.”
Grace Whitmore sat down on the edge of that table like her legs had quit.
“That is the most words you have ever said to me,” she said.
“It ain’t.”
“It is. I count them.”
“So do I,” I said. “Two hundred and six.”
“Two hundred and six what?”
“Another time.”
She laughed at that, and then she stopped laughing, and she came back around the table and took hold of the front of my shirt in both hands, and this time neither one of us said anything about it first.
One more thing from the scale house, and it is the part I have never told her.
While she was running the 1937 book with the lamp pulled down, I stood at the window with my coffee and looked out at that yard.
Eleven acres of it. The crusher, the shear, the two rows of hulls, the barn where my mother’s chifforobe was sitting on pallets.
Pike Danner ran a scale on that ground for twenty-six years and Diesel has run it forty and Farrow will run it after, and there is a stone at the top corner with a drill mark in it that a man set in 1949, and I have known where that stone is since I was nine years old.
And I understood, standing at that window, that I had spent my whole life believing that knowing where the corner is was the same thing as owning the ground.
It ain’t. It is a better thing than owning the ground and it is not the same thing, and the difference is that one of them holds when a man in Charlotte puts a number on it and the other one does not, and a man in Charlotte had spent forty years learning the difference, and I had spent forty-four years not needing to.
We finished the deeds at midnight because we finished them, because neither one of us was going to be the person who left work on a table.
And what we found is that my two acres came out of the Gap tract in 1949, and that every parcel that ever came out of the Gap tract carries the 1937 tax deed in its chain, and that includes the yard, and the Motor Court, and the ballfield, and the fairgrounds, and about half of Court Street, and Amos’s home place, and the fire hall.
Every one of them. The entire middle of this county traces back through one November afternoon in 1937 to eleven hundred and forty acres that the clerk of this court sold on the courthouse steps for delinquent taxes.
Grace put her hand flat on the 1937 book.
“Marcus,” she said, “do you understand what that means about the four holes?”
“Say it.”
“He didn’t leave the fire hall and the church and the courthouse out because he can’t buy them.
” She had that voice she gets, low and very level.
“He left them out because he already knows what’s under them.
And if I am right about the next part, then Cardinal Ridge Holdings does not need to buy this county at all. ”
“Because?”
“Because it might already own it,” Grace said. “And has since 1937. And nobody here has ever held anything but a piece of paper that came out of the bottom of that stack.”
The stove ticked. Out the window the pole lights went off on the timer, all at once, the way they do at midnight, and the yard went black except for what came out of the scale house window.
“Then what do we do,” I said.
“We find out if the sale was good,” she said.
“And Marcus, hear the whole of what I just said, because I am going to say it once and then I am going to be careful in public for six months.” She put her hand flat on that book.
“If it was good, we lose slowly and this county gets a bypass and a data center and forty families get paid and it is nobody’s tragedy. ”
“And if it weren’t good?”
“Then every deed in Blackthorn County is a piece of paper somebody made up,” she said, “including yours, including mine, including the one under the building four hundred people are going to be standing in, and the only people on this earth with a real claim to any of it are named Ambrose, and I do not know where they are, and neither does he.”
She turned the lamp off.
“Yet,” she said.