Chapter Twenty-Two · Wrench
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
WRENCH
I told her the whole of it on the eighth of October in the loft, and I am going to put it down here the way I told it, in the wrong order, because that is how it came.
She got back from Bluefield on the fourth at nine at night and told me all of it, and then for three days she worked and slept badly and did not talk about it, and on the eighth she came down the stairs at seven in the evening and stood in the bay door.
“I need to not think about a woman in Bluefield for one night,” she said. “Give me something else.”
And I said, “All right,” and put the door down and washed my hands and we went up, and I gave her the rest of March of 2003.
Here is what happened, and it took me twenty-five years to be able to lay it out in order and it takes about nine minutes.
My father was Ray Sullivan and he had that shop from 1988. In 2002 the county reassessed and the shop went up and the business did not, and by that winter he was ninety days behind everywhere and had a note at Farmers and Merchants he could not carry.
He had insurance on the building. Cinder knew what it was because Cinder did the books.
They fought about it all that winter. Not about burning it.
About selling it. My brother was twenty-two and wanted him to sell the shop and go work at the plant in Fincastle for a wage and be done, and my father would not, because it was his building and his father’s before him, and every one of them arguments ended the same place.
On the thirteenth of March they had the worst one, in the kitchen, at supper, and it ran an hour and a half, and at the end of it my brother stood up and said, “Then burn the son of a bitch down and take the check, because that’s the only way you’ll ever get out from under it.”
He said it out of pure exhaustion. My mother told him to hush. My father laughed at him. Cinder went out and slept in his truck at the yard because he did that when he was mad.
The next afternoon, the fourteenth of March, my father was working alone at the north end of the shop on a rewire he should have paid somebody to do. There was a fire. He got a face full of it and went down between the bench and the parts washer.
I was nineteen and I was in the parts room, forty feet away, with the door shut, doing inventory.
I heard him shout. I got the door open and the north end was going and I could not get to him because of where he fell, and I want to be exact about this: I got about twelve feet and I could not get any further, and I have measured that eleven feet in my head every week for twenty-five years.
And my brother came in through the bay door.
He had come to the shop to apologize for the night before.
He got there while it was burning. He came in past me and got to my father and dragged him out through the bay, and he burned both hands doing it and that is why he has been called Cinder since 1998, which is a lie the county tells itself, because the name is from 2003 and everybody who knows it lets the wrong year stand because it is easier.
My father lived eleven days and died in Roanoke on the twenty-fifth of March.
He was awake for six of them and I was in that room for four of the six, and he did not say one word to me about the fire and I did not ask him one.
He talked about the shop. Which jobs was due out, who had left a deposit, what he owed the parts house. He made me write it on a pad and I wrote it and I have that pad.
On the ninth day he asked where Elias was, and my mother said down the hall, and my father said, “Tell him I said the thing about the truck,” and neither one of us knew what that meant and my mother would not ask him because she thought he was going.
He lived two more days after that and never said it again.
I have run that sentence about nine thousand times. There is a version where it is about a truck.
Two days after the fire a deputy asked me for a statement.
I was nineteen. I wrote two pages and I told the truth, and the truth included the thirteenth of March in that kitchen, because he asked me what had happened in the last day and I had been raised by a woman who did not permit leaving things out.
That sentence went in the file.
The insurance was a hundred and forty thousand dollars. The fire marshal at that time was a man named Curtis Rhea who has since died. The report said undetermined origin.
And the Commonwealth’s Attorney of Blackthorn County in 2003 charged my brother with arson.
He pled to a reduced charge in 2004 on the advice of a court-appointed lawyer, because the alternative was a jury in a county where everybody had already read a sentence in a newspaper, and he served four years at Coffeewood and came home in 2008.
I want to put in the nine days, because I have never said them to anybody either.
He was at the burn unit in Roanoke and he was awake for six of them. My mother stayed. Cinder stayed, with both hands wrapped, and could not hold a cup and would not go home.
And I went back and forth, because somebody had to keep the shop, and there was no shop, and I went anyway.
I spent nine days cleaning out a burnt building by myself because it was the only thing I could do with my hands, and I got the whole north end down to the slab, and on the eighth day I found the panel.
The main breaker was in the on position. The cover was off. There was a screwdriver melted to the bench nine feet away.
I did not say one word about that to any living person for twenty-five years.
Not because I hid it. Because two days after the fire I had already given my statement, and when they charged my brother in June I was twenty and I did not know that a person can go back and tell them more, and by the time I knew that, he had pled, and it was over, and my mother had stopped saying his name at the table.
There is a version of me that walks into that Commonwealth’s Attorney’s office in June of 2003 and says the main was on and the cover was off.
I have met that fella about four thousand times at two in the morning.
Grace let me get all of that out without one word.
Then she said, “Marcus, I am going to ask you four questions and every one of them is going to hurt, and You need to understand that I am not doing it as your lawyer or as anything else. I have wanted to ask them since August.”
“Ask them.”
“Did your brother ever tell you he did it?”
“No.”
“Did he ever tell you he didn’t?”
I sat there.
“No,” I said.
“In twenty-five years.”
“We ain’t never said one word about it. Not one. Not in 2003, not when he come home, not since.”
“How is that possible? You eat supper together.”
“You’d have to know how it went.” I had to work at it.
“He come home in ’08 and I had the shop going again and he come and worked in it for two year with them hands, and I never asked him nothing and he never offered nothing, and after about six months of that it weren’t a thing we was avoiding no more. It was just the shape of us.”
“And your mother?”
“Died in ’07. Ten months before he got out.
” I looked at the floor. “She wrote him every week and she never once wrote me about him, and I never once asked her what she thought, and I have wondered since whether she was waiting on me to.” I had my hands on my knees.
“He said one thing to me in August at his kitchen table and it’s the closest either of us has ever got. ”
“What was it?”
“That he never once told me I was right to.”
Grace nodded slowly.
“Third question. Was the fire electrical?”
And I could not answer that either, and she waited.
“There ain’t a doubt in my mind,” I said finally.
“That building had a hundred-amp service from 1961 and he was in the panel with the main on because he always was, and I have been in nine hundred fires’ worth of burnt buildings since and I know what I seen.
” I heard my own voice go. “But I was nineteen and I loved him and I have knowed since I was thirty that a man who wants a thing to be true ain’t a witness. ”
“That’s the most honest sentence anybody has said to me this year,” Grace said.
“It ain’t honest. It’s just a thing I worked out.”
“Marcus, I have cross-examined about nine hundred people. Do you know how many have ever volunteered the reason their own testimony should be discounted?” She waited. “Two. You and a man in 2019 who was dying.”
She came and sat on the arm of the chair.
“Now the fourth one.”
She got up and came and stood in front of me.
“Marcus, why has nobody in Blackthorn County ever told you that a fire marshal’s report of undetermined origin, plus a hearsay statement about a kitchen argument, plus no accelerant, plus no physical evidence, is not a case?”
I looked up at her.
“Because that is not a case,” she said. “It is not a weak case. It is not a case at all. No prosecutor in Virginia charges arson on that in 2003 or any other year, and no defense lawyer worth a dollar lets a client plead to it, and I have been sitting on that since August and I could not say it to you until you gave me the rest.”
“Then how’d it happen?”
“That,” Grace said, “is the question you have never once asked in twenty-five years, and it is the only question in this whole thing.”
I sat there.
“Say the rest of what you’re thinking,” I said. “You got a look.”
“I am not going to say the rest tonight.”
“Grace.”
“No.” She was standing at the window. “Because what I am thinking is a shape and not a fact, and I have spent all year telling four hundred people the difference, and I am not going to hand you a shape about your own brother at half past ten at night and let you build a house on it.”
“Then give me the question instead of the answer.”
She turned around, and she thought about it, and she gave me one.
“Who held the note on that building in 2003?”
I looked at her.
“Farmers and Merchants,” I said.
“Who held the paper behind Farmers and Merchants?”
“A bank holds its own paper.”
“A bank in a county of eleven hundred people in 2003 sells its paper, Marcus. It has to. It does not have the balance sheet to carry a commercial note on a repair shop.” She was not looking at me. “And somebody bought it.”
“And you think you know who.”
“I think nothing. I have a shape and I told you I would not hand it to you tonight and I am not going to.”
And I did not push, and I have wished about four hundred times since that I had, and it took Ada Grier until the fourteenth of November to find out.
We did not go any further that night.
There is a piece of that night I nearly left out and Grace told me to put it in.
At about midnight I said, “What do you do with it now?”
“With what?”
“The part where I was wrong for twenty-five years about the only thing I ever knowed about myself.”
She sat up.
“Marcus, listen to what you just said. You did not say I was wrong. You said you were wrong about the only thing you ever knew about yourself.” She turned the lamp partway. “That is not a fact you are revising. That is a load-bearing wall.”
“Then what do I do.”
“You do nothing for a while, and you let it hold or not hold, and you find out.” She was very calm. “And in the meantime you keep doing every single thing you were doing yesterday, because a man does not become a different man in one night and anybody who tells you otherwise is selling something.”
“That ain’t comfort.”
“No,” she said. “It is the best I have got and I have given it to about two hundred people.”
But I am going to set down two things she said before we let it alone.
The first is that she asked me who the Commonwealth’s Attorney of Blackthorn County was in 2003, and I said Bertram Sowder, and she said the name back to me and then wrote it on the pad by her bed and put the pen down and did not say anything about it for four days.
And the second is what she said at about one in the morning, in the dark, when I had thought she was asleep.
“You have carried this as a thing you did,” she said. “You are going to have to consider the possibility that it is a thing that was done to you, and I am telling you now so it can start working on you, because it is going to take you about a year and I do not want to lose that year.”