Chapter Twenty · Wrench
CHAPTER TWENTY
WRENCH
Cinder put it up cold.
“Grace has found a living heir of Isaiah Ambrose. Eighty-eight years old, in Bluefield. Nobody outside this room knows it and nobody outside this room is going to until we vote.”
Then he sat down, which he does, and let the room have it.
I am going to put down the argument honestly, including the parts that do not flatter anybody, because a room that only records its good hours is not keeping a record, it is keeping an advertisement.
Grace laid the file out first. Twenty minutes, no argument in it.
Who Odessa Ambrose Pratt is. Where she lives.
The Bluefield city directory and Ruby Cannaday four doors down.
Nathan Ambrose, laborer, Isaiah’s son, twenty-six years old in 1938.
Nine children on a school register at the Gap in 1936.
What a void tax deed is. What a cloud on title does to an assemblage.
And then she said the sentence she had built and I watched her set it down like a man setting down a load he has carried a long way.
“If that woman files, every one of you loses your deed and so does he. If she does nothing, none of you loses anything and neither does he. She is the only person alive who can end this and she is the only person alive who was never asked.”
Trip went first, and Trip is thirty-eight and has two kids and a mortgage on eleven acres up the Coleman road.
“I’ll say the selfish thing so somebody’s said it,” he said. “If we go up there and tell that woman what she’s got, she can end us. Not him. Us. My house. Amos’s home place. The fire hall. She could file Monday and every deed here goes to paper.”
“That’s right,” Grace said.
“And you’re telling us to go do it anyway.”
“I am not telling you anything. I am telling you what is true and this room votes.”
Petey Ratliff said, “What if we tell her part of it?”
Grace said, “Say what part.”
“Tell her the land was took wrong. Don’t tell her about the assemblage. Don’t tell her what it’s worth to him.”
“Then she cannot make a decision,” Grace said, “because she does not know what the decision is. Petey, that is not a compromise. That’s the same act, done politely.”
Amos Boyle said the thing that turned the first hour.
“I’d like to know what we’re apologizing for.
” He had his hat on his knee. “I mean to be careful and I ain’t being smart.
My daddy bought that home place in 1958 off a man that bought it in 1949.
Didn’t nobody in my family take nothing off nobody.
And I have set here two hours in August and let a lawyer tell four hundred people that ain’t none of us owns nothing, and I went home and set on my porch and I thought, well, all right, but I still don’t know what I done. ”
Nobody answered fast.
“Amos,” Grace said, “you did nothing. Not one thing. And that’s the exact reason this is hard, because if somebody in this room had done it there would be somebody to blame and a way to be sorry and it would be over in a week.
” She had her hands flat on the wood. “Nobody alive did this. And everybody alive is living on it. Those are both true and there is no arrangement of them that lets anybody off.”
Amos thought about that a good while.
“Then it ain’t an apology,” he said.
“No.”
“It’s just telling somebody the truth about a thing they own.”
“Yes,” Grace said. “That is all it is and that is all it ever was.”
Amos Boyle put his hat back on the table.
“Then I don’t know what we’ve been arguing about for two hours,” he said, “and I’d like the floor back when somebody explains it to me.”
Diesel Harrow took the second hour.
“There’s a thing nobody’s said and I’ve been waiting on somebody younger to say it.
” He leaned forward. “We ain’t going up there clean.
Ain’t a one of us going up that road for her sake and I want that admitted in this room before we vote.
We’re going because there’s a man buying our county and she is the only thing on this earth that can stop him.
” He looked around. “So when we knock on that door we are going to be exactly what we say we ain’t.
We are going to be a county that ignored a family for ninety-one years and showed up the week it got useful. ”
Cinder said, “That’s true.”
“It is true, and we’re going anyway,” Diesel said, “and here is why, and then I’ll hush.
Because the alternative ain’t purity. The alternative is that woman never gets told at all, and dies not knowing, and a fella in Charlotte closes his position, and it stays exactly like it’s been since 1937.
” He sat back. “We don’t get to be clean.
We just get to be honest about what we are while we do the right thing.
That’s the whole of what I’ve learned in forty years and I’ve said it about six ways tonight. ”
Cinder took the third hour and he took it by asking questions instead of answering them, meaning how he ran that table for two years and which I did not understand the value of until I had to do it myself in November.
He asked Charity Teague, who was in that room because Grace asked for her and because sixteen men voted her in for the night, what the program would do.
“If that woman files Monday,” Charity said, “the program don’t change one thing. We got no deed. We got a cabinet and a schedule and four hundred trained people, and don’t none of that live on paper.”
He asked Ada what the bureau would do.
“Publish it,” Ada said. “All of it. Including the part where we found her because a schoolteacher moved a hundred and ten miles.”
He asked Grace what happens to her.
“If she files? I would very likely have to withdraw from representing anybody in Blackthorn County on any land matter for the duration, meaning years.”
“And your office?”
“Is in a building whose deed comes out of the same sale as everything else.”
Cinder nodded and did not comment, and went around that table and made every man say what he personally stood to lose, by name, out where the others could hear it, and it took forty minutes and it is the reason the vote held in October when it got hard.
Amos Boyle: a hundred and nine acres and a house his father built.
Trip: eleven acres and a mortgage.
Farrow: the yard, meaning not his, and his job, which is.
Petey Ratliff: nothing. He rents. He said so and the room did not laugh and he did not apologize for it.
Diesel Harrow: forty acres, a business, and a family cemetery with nine people in it.
And my brother, last, in fourteen words: “The clubhouse, this table, and the ground my daddy’s buried in.”
Then Scout Carlisle said the thing I have thought about most.
He does not talk much at that table. He is Road Captain and he talks about routes.
“I got a question about the order of operations,” he said. “Grace. When we go up there. Do we ask her for anything?”
“Not on the first visit.”
“Not ever.”
The room turned.
“I mean it,” Scout said. “Ever. We tell her what we found. We give her the file. We tell her what it’s worth and what it can do and who’s buying and how much time there is.
And then we come home and we don’t ask her for one thing, not that day, not in a month, and if she never calls, we never call.
” He put his hands flat on the table. “Because I have been on the other end of somebody showing up with a true thing that had a hook in it, and I can tell you exactly what it feels like from where she’s setting, and there ain’t but one way to do this that ain’t that. ”
Cinder said, “And if she does nothing?”
“Then we lose the county,” Scout said. “And we lose it clean, and my boy grows up in a place that done it right one time.”
That is the sentence the vote came out of, and Maya Carlisle was not in that room and I have always believed she wrote it.
Grace asked to say one more thing before the vote and Cinder gave it to her.
“I am going to put something in the minutes and I want it in my own words.” She stayed sitting.
“What you are about to vote on is the only thing I have seen in fourteen years of practice that a court cannot reach, in either direction. No judge can make you do it. No judge can stop you. There is no statute, no duty, no cause of action, and no consequence for doing nothing at all.” She looked around the table.
“In my profession we call a thing like that discretionary, and we mean it dismissively, and I have been wrong about that my entire career.”
Cinder said, “What do you call it?”
“I have not got a word for it,” Grace said, “which is why I am sitting in a motorcycle club at ten o’clock at night instead of an office.”
They went around the table.
Sixteen men and every one of them said it where it could be heard with his own mouth, and that’s Cinder’s practice on a vote that costs something, and it took nine minutes.
Sixteen ayes.
Amos Boyle voted last and said, “Aye, and I’d like it wrote down that I don’t understand what we’re apologizing for and I voted for it anyway,” and Cinder wrote exactly that.
Cinder wrote it in the book himself and read it back.
Sept 23. Moved: that this club, on behalf of no one and asking nothing, carry the record of the 1937 sale to Mrs. Odessa Ambrose Pratt of Bluefield, W.Va., in person, and inform her fully of its nature, its value, and its effect, and make no request of her of any kind, now or ever. 16-0.
Then he set the pen down and looked down the table at me.
“Sergeant-at-Arms.”
I put my chin up.
“You’ve said nothing for two hours and forty minutes,” my brother said. “Say something.”
And here are the nine words, and they are the only thing I said in that room that night, and I have thought about them every day since the thirtieth.
“We ought to go tomorrow,” I said. “He’s already close.”
The room went quiet.
“Say why,” Cinder said.
“The lawyer from Salem said it on the ninth and don’t nobody appear to have took it home.
” I put my hands flat on the wood, which I do not do.
“That family has kept the same title company since 1958 and the same records since 1903 and there ain’t a mark on any of it in ninety-one years.
A man don’t maintain a thing that good unless he knows where the crack is. ”
Diesel said, “Go on.”
“He’s knowed about that 1937 sale longer than any of us has been alive,” I said.
“And he ain’t bought them people off, which means he can’t find them, which means he’s been hunting Ambroses about as long as we been hunting a chestnut stump.
” I looked at Grace. “And on the ninth of September a lawyer come from Salem and set in my shop for four hours in front of a window on Court Street. And on the ninth of September somebody filed a complaint on Dorene’s septic. ”
Nobody said a word.
“I ain’t saying them two things is connected.
I got no evidence and Grace has told me forty times what that’s worth.
” I sat back. “I’m saying he’s been eighteen months slow and patient and it turned into a same-day complaint the week we got close, and a fella don’t change his method when he’s ahead. ”
Cinder Sullivan looked down that table at his brother for a long moment.
“All right,” he said. “Grace. How fast can you be ready?”
“I need nine days,” she said. “And before anybody argues with me about that, I will tell you what the nine days are for. Every document indexed and copied twice. A written summary in plain English that an eighty-eight-year-old woman can read at her own table without me in the room. A list of three attorneys in Bluefield who have no connection to me or to this county, so that when she wants her own counsel she does not have to take mine.” She squared her file.
“I am going to hand that woman a complete file and a way to check every word of it without trusting one thing I say. That takes twelve days and it is not negotiable.”
“Then it’s the fourth of October,” Cinder said. “Who goes?”
And that argument took another twenty minutes, and it ended where I knew it would, and that’s that the club did not go at all.
Grace went. Ada went, because Ada found her.
And Charity Teague went, because Grace said one sentence that ended it: the only person here who has ever had somebody knock on her door with a true thing and a hook in it is sitting at this table, and she is the only one of us who will know what it feels like from the other side.
Three women in a car. No cuts, no bikes, nothing with a crest on it.
I did not argue. I drove them to the county line on the fourth of October and turned around and came home, and it is the only time in five years I have been glad to be told to stay.