Chapter Twenty-Three · Grace
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
GRACE
Odessa Ambrose Pratt called me on the seventeenth of October at nine in the morning and said, “You need to come back up here, and bring the records woman, and I’ve got somebody for you to meet.”
Alma Ambrose is forty-four years old and she is a title examiner in Charlotte, North Carolina.
I want to leave that fact standing alone for a second the way it stood in that kitchen.
Odessa’s granddaughter has spent twenty years examining chains of title for a living.
Searching them, abstracting them, certifying them.
She has, in her career, certified several thousand titles in eight states, and she is licensed and insured and good at it, and she has never once in twenty years examined a chain in Blackthorn County, Virginia, because she had no reason to and because nobody there ever hired anybody from Charlotte.
She was sitting at her grandmother’s table with my file open and about nine pages of her own notes when we walked in, and she did not stand up and she did not shake my hand.
“Your 1937 deed is void,” she said. “I mean to say that first so you know I’m not here to argue with you about the law. I ran it Tuesday. You’re right.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t.” She turned a page. “Ms. Whitmore, do you know what I do for a living?”
“Your grandmother told me.”
“Then you know what it means that I ran my own family’s chain for the first time this week at forty-four years old.
” Her voice was completely level and it was the worst thing I heard all year.
“I have certified titles for twenty years. I have written the paragraph that says the examiner finds no defects of record about four thousand times. And it never once occurred to me to run my own people, because my people didn’t own anything, because my grandfather was a laborer and his father was a laborer, and that’s the story I got, and I never asked where a laborer’s father came from. ”
Nobody said anything.
“So I am not angry at Blackthorn County this morning,” Alma Ambrose said. “I’ll get to you. I have been angry at myself since Tuesday and I would like to be finished with that before I start on anybody else.”
Alma had also done something before we got there that I did not learn about until we were leaving.
She had run Cardinal Ridge Holdings herself, as an examiner, from Charlotte, over four days, and had gotten further in four days than I had in eight months, because she was not looking for a person. She was looking for a filing pattern.
“It’s not one company,” she said. “It’s nine.
Cardinal Ridge is the one buying in your county.
There are eight others with the same registered agent and the same Charlotte suite history and every one of them owns ground in a different county, and I found them by pulling grantee indexes in four states looking for who else uses the exact same deed form.
” She turned her notes. “The form has a typographical error in the acknowledgment block. It has had the same error since 1971 and nobody has ever fixed it because nobody has ever read it.”
Ada Grier said, “I could kiss you.”
“Don’t,” Alma said. “I have been doing this twenty years and I found it Wednesday because for the first time in my life I was looking at it as mine.”
She had gone through everything, and she had found two things we had not.
The first is that she pulled the 1937 tax tickets herself, from a photograph Ada sent her, and found what Wrench found and then found the thing under it, meaning that the receipt number in the margin of the 1935 entry corresponds to a receipt book that is also in that vault, and that the receipt in that book is signed, and that the signature is Isaiah Ambrose’s mark.
He could not write. He signed with a mark and the deputy treasurer witnessed it.
“He paid,” Alma said. “In cash, in person, and he had somebody write his name and he made his mark, and the county took his money and wrote him a receipt and then sold his land two years later for not paying it.”
The second thing is worse and it is the reason the rest of this book happened.
She had gone looking for what the Cardwells did with the tract after 1937, and she had done it the way an examiner does, and that’s by running the grantor index instead of the grantee index, and she found that between 1938 and 1961 Cardwell Land and Timber sold off two hundred and eleven parcels out of those eleven hundred and forty acres.
And every single one of those deeds contains a special warranty.
“Not a general warranty,” Alma said. “A special warranty deed warrants only against defects arising during the grantor’s own ownership. It expressly does not warrant against anything that came before.”
Ada said, “Is that unusual?”
“In 1938, in a rural Virginia county, on a residential lot to a local family?” Alma turned her notes around.
“It is not unusual. It is unheard of. Everybody used general warranty. Every form book, every clerk, every country lawyer. Somebody had a lawyer draft two hundred and eleven special warranty deeds over twenty-three years, at real expense, in a county where nobody was asking for one.”
I sat down without meaning to.
“They knew,” I said.
“Somebody knew,” Alma said. “I will not tell you Meade Cardwell knows, because he was born in 1957 and he inherited a file. But somebody in 1938 knew that title was bad and made certain that when the family sold it off, it never warranted anything to anybody about what came before 1937.” She closed her folder.
“And they have kept a title company on retainer ever since to make sure nobody ever looked.”
“Can you prove any of that?” I said.
“I can prove the deeds. Two hundred and eleven special warranties, book and page, and I have already pulled forty of them.” She squared her notes.
“I cannot prove what anybody knew, and I am not going to try, and if you put me on a stand I will say exactly what I have said in this kitchen and nothing further.”
“That’s the correct answer.”
“I know it’s the correct answer,” Alma Ambrose said. “I have been the person who writes no defects of record for twenty years, Ms. Whitmore. I am not going to become somebody who says more than the paper says just because this time it is mine.”
Odessa Pratt had been quiet for an hour.
Then she said, “Ms. Whitmore. What do you want.”
“Nothing.”
“Don’t do that. You come up here twice and I am eighty-eight and I have not got the time.
” She pointed at me with two fingers. “You’ve got four hundred people and a fire hall and a man buying your county, and you have come to my table twice and you have not asked me for one thing, and I have set here for two weeks trying to work out whether that is decency or whether it is the best negotiating I ever seen. ”
And that’s the fairest thing anybody said to me in that entire year.
“It is both,” I said.
The room went very still.
“I am not going to sit at your table and pretend it is only one,” I said.
“I have known since the ninth of September that if you file, that man’s position goes to zero, and I have wanted you to file since the ninth of September, and I have known that if I asked you for it I would have turned you into a tool, and I did not want that either.
Both of those are true at once and they have been true every minute I have been in your house. ”
Odessa Ambrose Pratt nodded slowly.
“All right,” she said. “Now we can talk.”
Alma said, “Grandma.”
“Hush. She told the truth about being crooked and that’s the only kind of straight I trust.” Odessa Pratt pushed her cup to one side. “Alma, get the pad.”
And I understood, watching a forty-four-year-old title examiner get up and fetch a legal pad without one word of argument, that these two women had worked all of it out before we ever came up the walk, and had spent two hours letting me prove I would not lie about my own motive, and that if I had said nothing, we want nothing one more time I would have been out on Vermont Street with a folder under my arm.
Here are her terms, and Alma wrote them, and Priya reviewed them, and they are the reason the thirtieth of September did not end this county.
One. She would not file a claim against the county. Not against the fire hall, not against the church, not against the graveyard, not against one house belonging to any person in Blackthorn County.
Two. She would file, and would prosecute to judgment, against the successors of Cardwell Land and Timber, as to every acre of the Gap tract that Cardinal Ridge Holdings or its affiliates presently owned or had contracted to purchase, and against nobody else.
Three. She wanted no money from any person in Blackthorn County. Not a settlement, not a fund, not a collection, and she was specific that no jar was to be put on any counter anywhere, and she said that after Charity told her about her father, and she said it looking at Charity.
Four. She wanted the school.
I read those four terms where it could be heard twice at that table to make sure I had them, and then I did something I have done perhaps nine times in fourteen years, and that’s that I put my pen down in the middle of a client meeting.
“Mrs. Pratt, I have to say a professional thing and it is going to sound like I am trying to talk you out of your own money.”
“Go on.”
“Term two is worth an enormous amount. If you prosecute against Cardinal Ridge alone, on this record, with this examiner, you have a claim to eleven hundred and forty acres of ground that a man has spent two years and many millions of dollars assembling. Any lawyer in Virginia would tell you to settle that for a number with seven figures in it, and they would be right, and I am telling you so in your own kitchen with witnesses.”
Odessa Pratt looked at me.
“And term one?”
“Term one gives away, for nothing, the only leverage you have over four hundred people who have lived on your family’s land for ninety-one years. It is the single most valuable thing in this file and you are proposing to hand it back on a Saturday morning.”
“Is it wrote down that I did?”
“It will be. In a deed, recorded, permanent, and every one of those four hundred people will hold a copy.”
“Then it ain’t give away,” she said. “It’s spent.”
I have quoted that sentence about forty times since and I have never once gotten it to land on anybody the way it landed in that kitchen, and I think it is because you have to have spent eight months believing you were holding a weapon to hear an eighty-eight-year-old woman correct the word.
“Spent on what?” I said.
“On being the one that didn’t.” She reached over and squared the folder I had brought.
“Ms. Whitmore, I am eighty-eight. I have got about four things I can still do in this world and one of them is decide what my grandaddy’s name is going to mean in a county that never said it.
” She pushed the folder back across the table at me.
“And it ain’t going to mean the woman that took four hundred houses. Not while I’m setting up.”
I did not understand the fourth one and I asked her to say it again.
“The Gap school,” Odessa said. “It’s gone.
Ada told me. There’s a foundation and a chimney and about four acres and it belongs to whoever’s got the paper on it now.
” She folded her hands. “My daddy went to that school.
His brothers and sisters went to that school.
Nine of them children on that register you brought me and I knew every one of their names before you come in this house, because my grandmother said them at Christmas.
“I want them four acres deeded to a thing that can’t sell it. A trust, a church, whatever your lawyer says. And it ought to be wrote in the paper that it was the Ambrose school, and I want a stone with them nine names on it and the teacher’s name, and it ought to be kept.”
She looked at me.
“That’s the whole of what I want out of eleven hundred and forty acres,” she said, “and if that ain’t enough for your county, then we don’t have nothing to talk about.”
I did not answer for a second, because I could not.
Alma said, “Grandma, tell her the other part.”
“She don’t need the other part.”
“Tell her.”
Odessa Pratt was quiet a while.
“When I was a girl my daddy would not say the word Blackthorn,” she said.
“Not one time in thirty-one years that I ever heard. And I asked my grandmother about it once, in about 1952, and she said, there was a place and then there wasn’t.
” She turned her cup. “And I have carried that my life and I always took it to mean the place was gone. Burned or drowned or mined out. It never once come into my head that it was still setting there with people in it.”
She looked up.
“And then three women knock on my door with a folder and there’s a fire hall on it,” Odessa said.
“With a ballfield. And a boy on my porch counting my steps.” She put her hand flat on the folder.
“So I don’t want your money, and I don’t want your houses, and I have thought about it two weeks and what I want is for that place to have to say our name out loud every year at a ballgame, forever, and not be able to quit. ”