Chapter Twenty-Five · Grace
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
GRACE
The night of the twenty-third of October is the last good night and everybody here knows it and nobody says it that way.
There was food at the fire hall because Rae Tillman had been cooking since noon for four hundred people who had already eaten, and that’s what happens, and about two hundred came anyway, and it went until eleven.
I did not stay for it.
I want to be careful about the fire hall that night, because in the version people tell now there was a party, and there was not one.
Four hundred and eleven people had recorded a document that removed a risk they had not known they had, and what happens in a room after that is not celebration.
It is the specific tiredness of a crowd that has been frightened for three weeks and has just been told it can stop.
Rae Tillman fed them. Charlene brought what was left in the urn. Somebody put music on and turned it back off after nine minutes because it was wrong, and nobody could have told you why, and everybody agreed.
Lily Walsh wrote her nine hundred words at a folding table in the corner with people talking around her, and Ada Grier sat down beside her at about eight and did not read over her shoulder, and Lily has said since that it is the only time in her career anybody has sat with her while she wrote and not tried to help.
I want to be honest about why, since this is my chapter.
I had spoken to four hundred and a dozen people that day, the same four sentences, and by six in the evening my voice was a rasp and I had gone somewhere behind my own eyes.
There is a thing that happens after you have been the person who explains for nine hours, and it is not exhaustion.
It is that you have not had one thought that belonged to you since morning.
Every one of those four hundred and eleven people had a question, and about ninety of them had the same three questions, and I answered all of them correctly, and at some point in the middle of the afternoon I noticed that I had stopped listening to the questions and had started identifying which of the three it was going to be from the first four words.
That frightened me more than anything that happened in November.
Because that’s the beginning of the thing I have watched happen to every lawyer I admired at fifty, meaning that you get so good at the answer that you stop hearing the person, and then one day somebody asks you the fourth question and you give them the second answer and you do not even know you did it.
Wrench found me on the courthouse steps at twenty past seven, sitting down, which I do not do in public.
He did not ask if I was all right.
He said, “You want the fire hall or you want home?”
“Home.”
“All right.”
And he drove me up Court Street two hundred yards and put me out at my own stairs and went back to the fire hall for two hours, because he was Sergeant-at-Arms and there were two hundred people in a building, and he came back at half past nine.
I was in the reading chair with my shoes off and had not turned a light on.
He came up the thirteen stairs and stopped in the doorway.
“You want quiet or you want talking?”
Nobody in my life has ever offered me that menu. It took him about eight months to build it and he has offered it every time since and he has never once gotten it wrong.
“Quiet,” I said. “Then talking.”
So he sat down on the floor with his back against the chair and did not say anything for about twenty minutes, and the creek was going, and downstairs the shop was dark, and I put my hand in his hair and neither of us said one word.
Then I said, “Say the talking part.”
“He’s going to move,” Wrench said.
“I know.”
“I don’t mean a paragraph and a vendor. I mean it’s the twenty-third of October and that man has got a closing date of the fifteenth of May that’s already blown twice, and today four hundred and eleven people recorded a instrument that makes it so he can’t never buy his way out of it one house at a time.
” He had his elbows on his knees. “There ain’t a piece left to pick off.
That’s what today done. We took away the slow way. ”
“That was the point.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He turned his head. “And I’d do it again and I’d carry the paper myself. I’m just saying I’d like about four days of nothing before the next thing, and I have never wanted four days of nothing in my life.”
I got down off the chair and sat on the floor beside him.
“Then take them,” I said. “Chapel’s the twenty-eighth. Nobody needs anything from either of us until Tuesday.”
And he took them. Five days, the twenty-fourth through the twenty-eighth, and every one of them is in my notes because I kept notes on that week the way I keep notes on everything, and it is the only week of my adult life that has nothing in it worth reporting.
Saturday we drove to Fincastle and bought a chair.
That sounds like nothing and it was the largest thing either of us did that year.
The office had four filing cabinets, a folding table, a desk, a reading chair, and one chair from the barn at the yard that would not stack.
When somebody came to see me they sat in the barn chair, and it is a dining chair from 1961 with a cane seat that is going, and Amos Boyle had sat in it and Lorna Farrow had sat in it and Charity Teague had cried in it in November.
I said I needed a client chair and Wrench said there was one and I said I needed a chair a person could sit in for two hours.
So we drove to Fincastle and went in a furniture store on a Saturday morning like two entirely ordinary people, and it took an hour and ten minutes, and he sat in nine chairs and rejected six of them on the frame and two on the way the arm was joined, and the one he approved was forty dollars more than the one I liked.
And in the parking lot with it in the truck bed he said, “That one’ll go thirty years,” and I stood in a parking lot in Fincastle and had to look at the mountains for a second, because I had asked a man to help me buy a chair and he had bought one that would outlast both of us.
Sunday we ate at Lorna’s and Wyatt made us count the blue things in her kitchen and there were nineteen, and Wrench found one Wyatt had missed, and Wyatt was furious and then not.
Monday I did not open the file. Not once. I have not managed that on any other day since February.
I did open one thing. At about four in the afternoon I got out the page I had started in June, the one I have never told him about, and I read the whole of it end to end for the first time.
Forty-one entries by then. Every one of them a thing that man did that nobody was ever going to write down.
Carried his mother’s furniture down four nights alone so nobody could help.
Put 684,000 dollars in a drawer with the invoices.
Ran thirty amp for a copier he has never seen.
Read 406 pages at four times the cost, at night, where nobody could watch.
Nine lines on a legal pad, Aug 29.
And at the bottom, in June, in my own hand, the note I wrote when I started it, which I had forgotten:
He will never keep one. Somebody has to.
Tuesday morning he fixed Charity’s alternator and I wrote three wills and a deed of easement for people whose problems had nothing to do with any of this, and at four in the afternoon Amos Boyle came in and sat by the stove and read the paper and said nine words to us all afternoon.
That’s the whole of it. That is what we got.
Five days. I have gone back over them about a hundred times looking for the thing I should have noticed and there is nothing to notice, and that’s the point, and I have had to make my peace with a week whose entire value is that nothing in it was worth reporting.
Wednesday we did nothing at all and I mean that precisely. He worked, I worked, we ate supper, and at nine o’clock he came up the stairs and we sat and did not talk for two hours, and I read a novel for the first time since February and did not finish it and have not since.
Thursday morning Odessa Ambrose Pratt called me to say that her suit had been filed on Monday and that her lawyer had told her the other side had thirty days, and she asked whether that meant nothing would happen until December.
I said yes.
I said yes on the twenty-ninth of October, to an eighty-eight-year-old woman, in the voice I use when I am sure.
There is one more thing from that week and it is mine and I am putting it in.
On the Sunday night, in the loft, with the window open because October did that thing it does where it gives you back a week of September, I said a sentence I had been building for about a month.
“I would like to say a thing and I would like you to not answer it tonight.”
“All right.”
“Marcus, I am thirty-nine years old and I have been on my own since I was twenty-nine, and I have been very good at it, and I will be exact about what I am about to say so that it does not come out as a woman being sentimental at the end of a hard day.” I had my hand flat on his chest. “I have made a decision about you and I made it in about July and I have not told you because you were not ready to hear it and because I am not in the habit of saying things before there is proof.”
He waited.
“The decision is that I am not going anywhere. Not if the county goes. Not if the office goes. Not if you never open a page in that book as long as you live, and not if you open it next Tuesday.” I could hear my own voice being very level and I let it.
“You have spent eight months arranging things so that I am free to leave. I have watched you do it and it is the kindest thing anybody has ever done for me and I want it to stop.”
He was quiet for a long time.
“You said not to answer tonight.”
“I did.”
“I’m going to answer part of it.”
“All right.”
And Marcus Sullivan, who is two hundred words a day, said: “It ain’t kindness. I’ve been building you a door out since February because I figured you’d want one, and about the middle of September I quit building it, and I ain’t told you that neither.”
“Why did you quit?”
“Because you moved a chair,” he said.
I did not know what he meant and then I did.
There is a chair in that office that came out of the barn at the yard because it would not stack, one of his mother’s, and in September I had moved it from the window to beside the desk, where a person sits when they are talking to somebody who is working.
He noticed that in September and said nothing about it for six weeks.
“That is the thinnest evidence I have ever heard a decision rest on,” I said.
“It ain’t thin.”
“Marcus, it is a chair.”
“It’s where you put it.” He had his hands behind his head.
“A person that’s fixing to leave a room don’t rearrange it.
They live out of the middle of it and they don’t hang nothing on the walls and they keep everything where the movers can get it.
” He turned his head. “You moved a chair four foot so folks could set closer to you while you worked. That’s a woman that’s staying, and I quit building the door the same week, and I ain’t built one since. ”
I am not going to write the rest of that night down. I will say that it was the third time and that it was the first one that had nothing in the room with us, no case, no fire, no man in Charlotte, no dead father, and that I found out what that man is like when there is nothing to hold up.
He is very quiet and he does not close his eyes.
And afterward he said one thing, into the dark, and it is the only time in eight months I heard that man ask for reassurance about anything.
“If it goes bad.”
“Say the rest.”
“If it goes bad, and the county goes, and there ain’t no office and no stove and no shop.” He was looking at the ceiling. “Would you still have moved the chair?”
“Marcus Sullivan,” I said, “I would have moved the chair in a parking lot.”
He did not say anything for a while.
“Say it back,” I said.
“Say what back?”
“Whatever you have been holding since February. You are the only man I have ever met who can be in a room for eight months with a thing he has not said, and I am not going to make you say it tonight, but I would like to know that it exists.”
“It exists,” Wrench said.
“Good.”
“It’s got a date on it and everything.”
I laughed into his shoulder in the dark and did not ask, and he did not tell me until the fourteenth of December.
That’s the last completely happy sentence in this account and I have known it since I wrote the first page.