Chapter Sixteen · Wrench
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
WRENCH
He came to the shop on the twenty-ninth of August at four in the afternoon and it was the only time Ruben Kell ever came to me by myself.
Grace was in Roanoke. I have wondered about that since and I have decided he knew, because he had been here eighteen months by then and a man who reads records reads a lawyer’s calendar off the courthouse docket like everybody else.
He came in the bay door on foot. He had left the rental car at the bottom of the lot, which I noticed.
“Mr. Sullivan.”
I put the wrench down.
“I’ve got two things and then I’m gone,” he said. “The first is business and the second one isn’t, and I’ll do them in that order so you can throw me out after the first one if you want.”
“Say the business.”
He did not sit down and I did not offer. There are three chairs by that stove and every one of them belongs to somebody, and I am not going to pretend I did not think about that while he was standing there.
Amos Boyle was in his, by the way. Four in the afternoon on a Thursday, with the paper.
He did not get up and he did not leave and he did not say one word for the entire twenty minutes, and Ruben Kell looked at him exactly once, at the start, and then never again, and I have decided that was the single most professional thing that man ever did in these mountains.
“Six times value on this building and the two acres. That offer’s been open since April and you’ve never responded to it, and I’m not here to press it.
” He had his hands out of his pockets, empty, the way he does.
“I’m here to raise it. Eight times. Which is nine hundred and twelve thousand dollars for a fifty-two by eighty block building on two acres that assessed at a hundred and fourteen. ”
I let him talk.
“I mean to be honest about what that number is,” Kell said, “because you’re going to work it out anyway and I’d rather you had it from me.
That is not what this building is worth.
It has never been what this building is worth.
That number exists because the county’s lawyer works out of the front of it and because two hundred people a summer have been coming through your bay to sit by that stove, and my file says this is where the county keeps itself now. ”
“Your file’s wrong,” I said. “That’s the fire hall.”
Kell looked at me then, properly.
“That’s the first thing anybody here has ever corrected me on,” he said.
“In eighteen months?”
“In twenty years.” He said it plainly. “Mr. Sullivan, people lie to me constantly and it is fine, it is expected, a man ought to lie to the fellow buying his land. What nobody ever does is hand me a correction. A correction means you’d rather I had the right information than the wrong one, and there is only one reason a man on your side of the table would want that. ”
He waited. I did not fill it.
“It means you think being right helps you more than it helps me,” Kell said. “And that is either the most confident thing I have ever seen in this trade, or it is a mistake.”
“Which do you think?”
“I think,” Kell said, “that I have been in Blackthorn County eighteen months and everybody in it keeps handing me true things, and I have not yet worked out what it is they believe that makes that safe.”
And I had known it before I said it and I said it anyway, and I have thought about that particular four seconds every day since the thirtieth of September, and I am going to leave it in this account exactly as it happened.
“Second thing,” Kell said. “And this one you’ll want to throw me out for.”
“Go on.”
“You’re not going to sell this building. I’ve known that since March and I have told my client so in writing twice.” He leaned back against the fender of the truck I was under. “So I will say the part I’d want said to me, and then I’m done, and I’m not asking you to do anything.”
“You keep saying that.”
“I do.” He almost smiled. “It’s true every time and it’s the most dishonest thing I say.”
I did not expect that and I have never known what to make of it.
“Mr. Sullivan, you understand that I’ll still be here in ten years.”
“I figured.”
“Say it back to me, then. I want to know you’ve got it and not the version people take away.”
“You ain’t in a hurry,” I said, “and I am.”
Kell nodded slowly.
“Close enough,” he said, “and better put than I’d have done it.”
“No, I don’t think you do, and I’m not being clever.
” He crossed his arms. “This is what people never get. They think the fight is now. The fight is not now. My client has held this ground since 1903 and he does not have a quarter that has to look good, and I get paid whether anything closes this year or not. So here is what actually happens, and I have watched it happen in nine states and it happens the same way every time.”
He counted it off, and he did it flat, like a man reading a shipping manifest.
“Somebody’s transmission goes. Somebody’s wife gets sick.
Somebody’s boy needs bail money or tuition or a down payment.
A roof goes in February. And they don’t sell because they gave up, they sell because it’s Tuesday and the offer’s still open and it has been open for four years and it is the only door in the room.
” He looked around my shop. “I don’t cause any of it.
I don’t have to. I’m just the only person in the county who is still there when it happens, and I am there because I am paid to be there, and everybody else in your life is going to get tired. ”
“This county don’t get tired.”
“Every county says that.” No edge on it at all. “And every county means it. And it is true for about three years, and three years is not the unit of measurement.”
“What is?”
“A generation,” Kell said. “I’m not buying from you, Mr. Sullivan. I never was. I’m buying from whoever is standing where you are in 2049, and I have no idea who that is and neither do you, and that’s the entire trade in one sentence.”
I wiped my hands on the rag and put the rag on the bench.
“You done?”
“Nearly.” Kell stood off the fender. “Last piece, and then I’ll go. Everything I just said assumes people act like people, and my whole trade is that they do. But I’ve been on this ground eighteen months and something happened here in July that isn’t in any file I’ve ever been handed.”
“The scale house.”
“Nine days,” he said. “Sixty people, half of them already cashed out, working for free on a building that eight of them will never set foot in again.” He put his hands in his pockets.
“That is not how it goes. I have watched a county lose a fire station in Ohio because they couldn’t raise nine thousand dollars in fourteen months.
So I have been sitting in a motel in Fincastle for six weeks trying to write a paragraph about it for a man who is going to read it in Charlotte, and I cannot get it to say what it is. ”
“Then don’t write it.”
He looked at me.
“I have to write it,” Kell said. “That’s the job.
And I’ll tell you the part that’s kept me up, since we’re being plain with each other and I don’t expect we will be again.
” He was at the bay door by then. “When I hand in a paragraph saying the ordinary way won’t work here, that paragraph does not go in a drawer.
It goes upstairs. And the men upstairs have never once in twenty years read a paragraph like that and decided to do nothing. ”
I said one thing and it is the only thing I said to that man the whole afternoon that I planned.
“Mr. Kell. You said you got a daughter starts college in the fall.”
He stopped in the door.
“She start?”
“Two weeks ago,” he said. “Tennessee.”
“She like it?”
Ruben Kell stood in my bay door with the light behind him for a moment.
“She called Sunday and talked for an hour about a girl on her hall from Kingsport,” he said. “I didn’t say nine words.”
“That’s the good kind.”
“It is.”
“My brother called me every week for four years from Coffeewood,” I said, “and I never said nine words either. Turns out that ain’t the part they keep.”
Kell looked at me then, properly, for the first time all afternoon. He looked at the floor of my shop. “Mr. Sullivan, do not do that again. I mean that kindly. I have a job to do here and I would like to be able to do it.”
Then he went down the lot to the rental car and drove out onto 626 and turned south.
Amos Boyle folded his paper.
“Well,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Marcus, that fella just told you the truth for twenty minutes and then told you he’s got to go write it down for somebody worse.” Amos got up and put his cup on the counter. “That ain’t a threat. A threat’s a thing a man can take back.”
He got his hat.
“You going to tell Cinder?”
“Tonight.”
“Tell him the last part first,” Amos said. “The part about the paragraph going upstairs. He’ll want to skip to it and he ought not have to.”
Then he went home, and I stood in that bay for a while.
Then I did the only thing that was mine to do, and that’s that I went and got the drawer under the parts counter and I put the eight-times letter in it, and I wrote nothing on it, because I do not write on things.
And then I stopped with my hand on the drawer.
I went up the thirteen stairs and sat down at Grace’s desk with her good pen, and I got out one of her legal pads, and it took me about forty minutes and it is nine lines and I checked every word of it three times because I know what my spelling does.
August 29. 4 p.m. Ruben Kell came to the shop alone. Grace in Roanoke, he knew it.
Raised to eight times. 912,000. Said the number is not the building, the number is the lawyer and the stove.
I corrected him. Told him the county keeps itself at the fire hall. He said nobody here has ever corrected him before. That was my mistake and I done it on purpose and I don’t know why.
He said he will still be here in ten years and that people sell because a roof goes in February.
He said the scale house is not in any file he has ever been handed and he has to write a paragraph about it for Charlotte.
He said men upstairs have never read a paragraph like that and decided to do nothing.
I believe him.
This is the first thing I ever wrote down.
M. Sullivan.
Then I left it in the middle of her desk where she would find it, and I went down and put the bay door down and went home and did not sleep much.
She never said one word about it. Not that night, not the next day, not ever.
I did tell Cinder that night, at his kitchen table, at ten o’clock, and I told him the last part first the way Amos said.
My brother listened all the way through and then sat there with his hands around a cup.
“Eight times,” he said.
“Nine hundred and twelve.”
“Marcus, that’s the shop and the house and forty years.”
“I know what it is.”
“I ain’t asking you to take it.” Cinder turned the cup.
“I’m telling you I run the number tonight before you got here, because Grace called me Tuesday and told me what the offer was, and I set at this table for two hours and worked out what I’d say if you come in here and told me you was taking it. ”
“What’d you work out?”
“I worked out that I’d say take it,” he said.
“And that I’d mean it, and that I’d be all right, and that this county would be all right, and that don’t nobody owe a place their whole life.
” He looked up. “And then you come in here and told me about a paragraph going upstairs and you ain’t mentioned the money once, and I have set here for four minutes now waiting on you to bring it up. ”
“It’s in the drawer.”
“With the invoices.”
“With the invoices.”
“I know where it is.” My brother rubbed his face with both hands. “Marcus, and I will say a thing and I want to say it right and I ain’t going to.”
“Then don’t.”
“No, I’m going to do it badly.” He put his hands flat on the table. “In 2003 you told the truth about me and I done four year, and I have never one time in twenty-five years told you that you was right to.”
I kept still.
“I ain’t going to do it tonight either,” Cinder said, “because you’d go out that door and I’d have got rid of it instead of said it.
But I’m telling you it’s coming, and I want it wrote in your head that it’s coming, so if anything ever happens to me you ain’t got to wonder whether I was ever going to. ”
He said that on the twenty-ninth of August.
She had it framed. It is in the metal cabinet at the fire hall now, in a frame, and there is no card on it explaining what it is, and about four hundred people have walked past it and maybe nine of them know what they are looking at.