Chapter Twenty-Nine · Grace
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
GRACE
I wrote the advice on the twenty-ninth of November and it is four pages long and it is the best legal work of my career and I would give a great deal to have never written it.
The county meeting was the eighth of December. The club had asked me for a written opinion by the first. Ada asked me for one for the bureau. Charity asked me for one the program could read out at a class.
So I did what I do, and sat down at a folding table in the front of a repair shop on a Sunday and built it.
I need to put in what I was actually weighing, because the four headings make it look tidy and it was not.
I had, by then, seventeen people who had told me privately how they wanted it to go, and they did not agree, and every one of them was right.
Dorene wanted it taken. She is seventy-one and has a septic system that will fail again and a motel that has never in fifty years made money, and she said, “Grace, I have been holding on for six years and I would like to be told I can stop,” and there is no answer to that sentence.
Amos wanted it refused, and could not say why, and said so, and said, “I ain’t got a argument. I got a feeling and a hundred and nine acres and I know which one I’m supposed to weigh.”
Diesel wanted it taken and hated that he did.
Charity would not tell me. She said the program had four hundred people in it and half of them wanted each way, and that if she said one word either direction the program would be a side, and that the program cannot ever be a side.
Renata wanted it refused and told me her brothers would never speak to her again.
And Lorna Farrow, eighty-two, said the thing that got into the memorandum without her name on it.
She said, “Honey, I don’t care about the deed.
I have not once wondered whose house this is.
What I want to know is whether my grandbabies is going to be able to say where it could be heard what happened to them Ambroses, or whether it’s going to be a thing everybody knows and don’t say.
Because I have lived in a county like that. It was 1958 and I was twelve.”
I am going to reproduce the four headings, because everybody here has read the thing and there is no point pretending it is private.
One. What the offer is worth.
Four hundred and eleven general warranty deeds with title insurance paid fifty years is, at market, a hair over two million dollars in premiums and legal work alone.
The certainty is worth more than that and cannot be priced.
No litigation outcome available to this county produces it.
A judgment for Mrs. Pratt does not clean anybody’s title; it clouds every one of them further while the appeals run, and that’s four years minimum.
Two. What the offer costs.
The fire hall parcel at four times value, plus a replacement facility.
Non-opposition to the assemblage. Support for rezoning.
And a term I have to name plainly because nobody else will: a community that has agreed not to oppose is a community that has agreed not to say certain things in certain rooms, and no matter how the paper is drafted, that is what will be understood by everybody on both sides for the next thirty years.
Three. What happens if the county refuses.
The litigation proceeds. Every household stays a party for two to four years. Mr. Cardwell continues to acquire, lawfully, at above market, for as long as he lives and afterward through his estate. The county spends a decade being right.
Four. Recommendation.
Accept.
There is a fifth section and I did not number it, and it ought to be here because it is the only part of that memorandum anybody in Blackthorn County has ever quoted back to me.
Under the recommendation, in a single paragraph, I wrote:
Counsel is obliged to note that the recommendation above is correct and that counsel does not like it.
Those are two separate findings and the client is entitled to both.
If this county declines this offer, it will not be because its lawyer failed to advise it properly.
It will be because it decided something that is not a legal question, and there is no provision in the Code of Virginia for what that would be.
Priya Venkataraman read the memorandum on the thirtieth and telephoned me about that paragraph and said it should come out, and she was right professionally and I left it in.
I signed it and dated it and made four copies and then I sat there for about an hour and did not move.
Wrench came up at seven with two plates and read it standing at the window and did not say one word for six minutes.
Then he said, “It’s right.”
“I know it’s right.”
“I ain’t arguing with you.”
“I know you’re not, and that is somehow worse.
” I had my hands flat on the table. “Marcus, I have spent ten months telling four hundred people that this county’s only asset is that it writes everything down and does not go quiet.
And I have now put my name on four pages advising them to go quiet in exchange for the best deal any of them will ever be offered. ”
“That ain’t what it says.”
“It is exactly what it says in paragraph two and I wrote paragraph two myself so that nobody could pretend otherwise.”
He set the plates down.
“Then why’d you recommend it?”
And I gave him the true answer, meaning the one thing I did right that week.
“Because I am their lawyer,” I said, “and a lawyer who gives a client advice she likes instead of advice that is correct is not worth the paper. It is the right advice. It is the advice I would give my brother. It is the advice I would take myself.”
“And?”
“And I have wanted to be talked out of it since four o’clock this afternoon,” I said, “and you are the only person on this earth who could do it, and you are not going to, because you know it is right too.”
Wrench Sullivan stood at that window a long while.
“No,” he said. “I ain’t going to talk you out of it.”
That is when it went wrong between us, and it went wrong for about thirty hours, and it is the only thirty hours we have ever lost.
Because I said, “Then say something else. Say anything. Marcus, I have handed you the worst thing I have ever written and you have said four sentences.”
And he said, “What do you want me to say.”
And I said the unforgivable thing, and I am putting it in because I said it and because he has never once brought it up since.
“I need you to argue with me the way you would argue with your brother.”
He did not move.
“I have been in this building nine months,” I said, “and I have watched you say nine words at a table that changed a vote, and you have never once done it in this room. You give me the answer you have already checked twice. You never give me the middle of it.” I could hear myself and could not stop.
“And I have started to wonder whether that is because you are careful or because you have decided I am a person things get handed to when they are finished.”
Wrench Sullivan looked at me a long moment.
Then he said, “That ain’t fair,” which is the only unkind thing that man has ever said to me, and it was not unkind, and it was true.
And he went down the thirteen stairs.
He did not come back that night, which he had every right to do.
I am going to record what I did instead of going after him, because it is the worst hour of my professional life and it has nothing to do with a lawsuit.
I sat down and drafted a memorandum.
Four pages, headed, indexed, on the question of whether I had a conflict of interest arising from a personal relationship with a member of the client organization, and whether my recommendation on the Cardwell offer was affected by it, and whether disclosure to the full membership was required.
It took me ninety minutes. It is well written.
The conclusion is that no conflict exists, that the relationship was disclosed to the president in September, that the recommendation is supported entirely by the four headings and would be identical if I had never met the man, and that no further disclosure is required.
Every word of it is true and I wrote it at eleven o’clock at night after a fight, and there is only one reason a person writes a document like that at half past ten at night, and it is not conflicts law.
I read it back at half past midnight and understood that I had responded to a man walking down thirteen stairs by building a file.
That is what I am. That’s the thing he had not said and would not say and that I had accused him of not saying.
I sat in that office until two in the morning and understood two things.
The first is that I was correct. He does not give me the middle.
He has never given the middle of anything to anybody in his life, and it is not caution and it is not distance.
It is a man who learned at nineteen that the middle of a thing, said out loud, put his brother in Coffeewood, and who has spent twenty-five years handing people only the parts he has checked twice.
And the second is that I had said it on the worst possible night, for the worst possible reason, and that’s that I wanted somebody to fight me so I would not have to be the one who was right.
I went down at seven the next morning, the thirtieth of November, and the bay door was up and the light was on and he was under a truck.
“Marcus.”
He came out.
“I was wrong last night,” I said.
“You wasn’t.”
“I was wrong about when. Not about what.”
And Wrench Sullivan wiped his hands on the rag and stood there, and then he did the thing he does, meaning that he gave me the whole answer in about four seconds after twelve hours of not being able to say it.
“You’re right that I don’t give nobody the middle,” he said. “I been working on it since August and I ain’t there. And last night I had the middle and I couldn’t get it out and I went home and set in my truck in my own yard for a hour with it.”
“What was the middle?”
He put the rag down.
“That I think you’re right and I think we’re going to take that deal on the eighth and I think it’s the correct thing,” he said, “and that I have knowed since Tuesday that when we do, my brother is going to have to stand up in front of six hundred people and be the man that sold the fire hall, and he’s going to do it, and it’s going to be the last thing anybody remembers about him. ”
The shop was very quiet.
“That’s the middle,” Wrench said. “And it ain’t got a thing to do with your four pages and I couldn’t say it last night because it’s about him and not about you, and I did not want you carrying it into the eighth.”
“Marcus.”
“I’d like it if you didn’t tell him,” he said.
“I won’t.”
“And Grace.” He was already turning back to the truck. “Last night. You said I hand people things after I checked them twice.”
“I was unfair about when.”
“You wasn’t unfair at all,” he said. “I been doing it since I was nineteen and it ain’t careful, it’s a habit I got the hard way, and the hard way is that one time I handed a fella the middle of a thing and he wrote it down and my brother done four year.
” He picked up the wrench. “So I’m going to work on it.
It’s going to take me a while and I’m going to be bad at it, and I’d take it kindly if you’d ask me for the middle when you want it instead of waiting on me to offer it, because I ain’t ever going to offer it. ”
“That is the most reasonable thing anybody has ever proposed to me,” I said.
“It ain’t romantic.”
“Marcus, I am a lawyer. That is a procedure and I could weep.”
“Marcus.”
“I ain’t finished.” He put both hands on the fender.
“I been thinking on it since Tuesday and here’s where I come out.
He’ll take it. He’ll stand up and read your four pages aloud his own self and then he’ll call the vote and he’ll vote aye and he’ll be the man that sold it, and he will not one time say that he hated it, because he’s the chair and the chair don’t get to. ”
“And you want to spare him that.”
“No, ma’am.” He looked up. “There ain’t no sparing him.
He’s the president and it’s his job and he’d be furious if anybody tried.
” He wiped his hands again, which he had already done.
“What I want is for somebody besides me to know what it cost him. That’s all.
Because he ain’t going to say it, and Lorna’ll think he done fine, and in nine years somebody at that table is going to say Cinder sold the fire hall and there won’t be one living soul that knows what he give up. ”
He stopped, and then he said the rest of it, and that’s the part I did not expect.
“And I’m telling you and not him,” Wrench said, “because I have never in my life told my brother a thing that would make him feel better, and I don’t know how, and I have got about eight days to work it out before the eighth.”
He had eight days.
He had one.
That was a quarter past seven in the morning on the thirtieth of November.