Chapter Thirteen · Grace
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
GRACE
He told me about the reading on a Saturday night in July, in the loft, and the reason I am putting it here instead of anywhere else is that it is the first thing he ever told me about himself that he had not been asked.
He had been up those stairs about a hundred times by then and had never once sat down. I had counted. Not on purpose at first, and then very much on purpose.
There is a chair in that office by the window that came out of the barn at the yard, one of the pieces of his mother’s that did not fit in the dry corner, and Cody Sifers carried it up in March and said, “This one wouldn’t stack,” and set it down and left, and neither Wrench nor I ever moved it.
It is the only piece of that furniture anybody uses. He has never sat in it.
We had been at the vault schedule until nine. He had come up with two plates and I had eaten mine at the desk and he had eaten his standing at the window, which he does, and then instead of going down the thirteen stairs he had put the plates in the box and sat down in the reading chair.
That was the whole event. He sat down.
I turned my chair around.
“Say it,” I said.
“I found something in the vault.”
“You’ve been in the vault?”
“Nights. Since June. Mrs. Absher’s key.” He had his hands on his knees. “Four hundred and six pages. Everybody else does a shift, I do a page. Ain’t but one of me and I’m the slowest reader in the county and I ain’t lying about that to make you feel a way about it.”
“Marcus.”
“Let me get it out.” He did not look up.
“The reason I never wrote in that book at chapel ain’t the whole reason I said it was.
There’s the statement I made when I was nineteen and that’s true and I’ll tell you that one when I can.
But there’s a other piece and it’s smaller and it’s the one I’ve never said to a living soul including my brother. ”
The lamp was on and the window was open and you could hear the creek.
“I can’t hardly read,” he said. “Not can’t.
It don’t hold still. Letters swap on me, and a page of a man’s handwriting takes me four times what it takes anybody, and every teacher I had from 1990 to 2001 told me I was lazy, and I quit in the eleventh grade and went in the shop with my daddy, where a picture of a thing is the same as the words for it and I have never once been slow at anything since. ”
“Marcus, that’s dyslexia.”
“I know what it is. I looked it up in 2009 in a library in Roanoke where nobody knowed me.” He almost smiled. “Took me a hour and a half to read the page about it.”
I did not say anything, because the first four things I thought of were all about me and none of them were any use to him.
The fifth thing was about him and I said that one.
“How long have you been reading everything I hand you?”
He looked up.
“Every memorandum, every draft, every chain summary. I have been putting paper in your hand since February and you have handed it back with the right question on it every single time.” I had my arms folded. “How long does that take you?”
Wrench turned the cup a quarter turn.
“The eleven-page one took me a night and a half,” he said.
“And you never said.”
“What would I have said?”
“You could have said it takes you a night and a half.”
“And then you’d have wrote them shorter,” he said, “and I’d have got a worse one.”
“So when Cinder opened that book and said any man can write in it,” he said, “and every one of them’s got a page now, Rook and Scout and Trip and Petey and my brother.
” He turned his cup. “Mine’s blank. And every man in that room thinks it’s because I’m hard, and I have let them think it for five years, because hard is a better thing to be than what they’d think if I told them. ”
“They would not think one word of what you’re afraid they’d think.”
“I know it.” He looked up then. “That’s the part I can’t explain. I know exactly what them men are. I have watched sixteen of them take the worst thing in a man’s life and set it down like a hot pan, four separate times, and I’d stake my life on any of them, and I still can’t make my hand do it.”
I got up and went and knelt down in front of that chair, which I have never done for anybody in my life, and put both hands on his knees.
“Marcus Sullivan,” I said. “You found something in the vault.”
“Yeah.”
“You read four hundred and six pages at four times the cost, at night, alone, where nobody could watch you do it. And you found the thing that two hundred and thirty-one people missed.”
He did not answer.
“Say what you found.”
“Nineteen thirty-five taxes on the Ambrose tract is marked paid,” he said. “In full. Receipt number in the margin. Page three ninety-one of the ‘36 land book.”
I put my forehead down on his knee and stayed there a second.
“Grace.”
“Give me a minute. I’m having a professional experience.”
Here is what I said when I got up, and I said it standing, because some things you do not say kneeling.
“I’m going to tell you what that page is worth and then I am going to stop being a lawyer for the rest of the night, and I would like you to hold me to that.”
“All right.”
“A tax sale requires delinquency. It is not a formality, it is the jurisdictional fact. If the taxes were paid, the treasurer had no authority to certify the tract, the clerk had no authority to sell it, and the deed conveys nothing. Not voidable. Void.” I had my hands flat on the desk.
“One year is enough. The deed recites three and if any one of the three is wrong the recital is wrong.”
“And?”
“And that is one page of one ledger, and it could be a clerk’s error, and there could be a corrected entry nine pages later, and there is a receipt number in that margin which means there is a receipt book somewhere, and I am not going to say one syllable of this aloud until we find it.
” I made myself take a breath. “But if it holds, Marcus, then on the ninth of November 1937 this county sold eleven hundred and forty acres it had no right to sell, and every deed in that thirty-one feet of butcher paper comes out of it, and none of us have ever owned a thing.”
He sat there with that.
“Then it ain’t a weapon,” he said.
And I stopped, because that is exactly the sentence I had been walking around for three days without letting myself write down, and he got to it in four seconds sitting in a chair.
“No,” I said. “It isn’t.”
“It’s a debt.”
“It’s a debt.”
Wrench Sullivan nodded slowly.
“Then we better find them people fast,” he said, “before he does.”
“And tell them what?”
“The truth.”
“Marcus, the truth is: your family’s land was taken by my county ninety-one years ago, the county has spent every day since building houses and a fire hall and a graveyard on it, and now we would like to talk to you about it because it has become convenient for us.
” I sat down on the desk. “That’s the sentence.
There is no kinder version that is also true. ”
He thought about it.
“Then say that one,” he said. “Including the convenient part.”
“They will throw us out.”
“They might.” He stood up. “Grace, they been throwed out once already. Ain’t nothing we can do to them worse than being lied to polite.”
That was the last thing anybody said about the case that night and I am going to record the rest of it plainly, because there is no reason to be coy about a thing two grown people did on purpose in their own building.
I said, “You’ve been carrying plates up thirteen stairs since February.”
He said, “Yeah.”
I said, “I’d like you to stay. And I want to say the terms out where they can be heard, because I am incapable of doing anything else and you would not believe me if I tried.
” I turned the chair. “This is not gratitude. If you thought for one second that I was in this room because you gave me an office, I would rather we never did it at all. And it is not a bad week and it is not the case.”
“All right.”
“Say something back.”
Wrench Sullivan looked at me from the reading chair.
“It ain’t been the case since March,” he said.
“March.”
“The day he come to the yard.” He turned the cup. “I called you at ten of eleven in the morning to say one sentence about a fire hall, and I have run that back about two hundred times since, and there weren’t no reason on this earth I had to say it to you and not to my brother.”
“You said it to me because I keep a record.”
“I said it to you,” Wrench said, “because I wanted you to know a thing about me before anybody else did. That’s the whole of it and I have known it since about noon that day.”
And he did not say anything for about three seconds, which with that man means he is doing arithmetic, and then he said, “I ain’t going to be good at the talking part.”
“I have talked professionally for fourteen years,” I said. “I am extremely well supplied.”
He laughed. It is not a thing he does above a certain volume and I have heard it maybe six times.
Then I turned the lamp so it was not in our eyes, because I was not going to do this in the dark like something either one of us was ashamed of, and he stood up out of that chair, and the first thing he did was put both hands on the sides of my face, and he did it the way he picks up something he does not want to drop, and that stayed with me longer than anything else that happened.
I said, “Tell me one thing you want. Out where I can hear it.”
And he had never in his life asked anybody for a thing, and he stood in the middle of a room he had emptied for me in February and he took his time and got it out.
“Stay in the light,” he said. “I want to see you.”
That’s the first thing Marcus Sullivan ever asked me for.
I said, “That is the correct answer,” and my voice was not steady and I did not care, and he said, “It weren’t a answer,” and I said, “It was to a question you have been asking me since February,” and that was the end of anybody being clever.
He did not have to ask twice, and he did not have to ask for anything else all night, because it turned out that a man who spends his life reading where a load rides does not have to be told twice where anything is, and I am going to leave the rest of it in that room where it happened.
At two in the morning he was asleep and I was not, and I lay in the dark in my own office over a repair shop and did the arithmetic I do.
Two hundred and thirty-one people in a vault. Nine thousand pages. One line in a clerk’s hand from 1936.
And a man beside me who had gone in there alone at night, four times slower than anybody, for six weeks, because it was the only room where nobody could see him be slow.
There is one more thing and then I am done with July.
At about half past four he woke up, the way he does, all at once and without moving, and he said into the dark, “You ain’t slept.”
“No.”
“The page?”
“The page.” I was looking at the ceiling. “Marcus, if it holds, I have to go find those people. And I have to do it before he does, and he has ninety pages about families and I have one line in a ledger, and he has been at it since before I was born.”
He thought about that.
“He’s been at it since before you was born,” he said, “and he ain’t found them either. Else they’d already be bought.”
I turned my head.
“Say that again.”
“If that man had the Ambroses,” Wrench said, “he’d have had them sign a quitclaim in 2019 for forty thousand dollars and there wouldn’t be nothing for anybody to find.
He ain’t done it.” He put his arm back over his eyes.
“So either he don’t know they exist, or he knows and he can’t find them, or he found them and they told him no. ”
I lay there in the dark and did the only thing I know how to do, and that’s to rank three possibilities by how much work each one implied.
“Go to sleep,” I said.
“You ain’t going to.”
“No,” I said. “I am not.”
I have won cases with better evidence than that page.
I have never in my life had anything that cost somebody more to hand me.
I got up at four and wrote it down. Not the case note. The other one.
Twenty-fourth of July, 10:30 p.m. Marcus Sullivan, alone, page 391, 1936 land book: 1935 taxes paid.
I put it in the file I had opened in June and had not told him about, and there are eleven entries in it by that point and forty-one by October, and every one of them is a thing that man did that nobody was ever going to write down.
He has a page now. He has had one since June. He just was not the one keeping it.