Chapter Thirty · Wrench
CHAPTER THIRTY
WRENCH
I am going to write this one down in order, with the times, because I have been asked for it under oath twice and by about nine hundred people once, and because the times are the only thing about it I have ever been sure of.
I have been asked what we talked about maybe nine hundred times and I have never given anybody the whole of it, and I am going to give it here because that is what this book is for.
He came by the shop and he was in a good mood and he told me a story about a dog.
That is it. That is what my brother and I talked about on the last morning.
There is a dog at the Motor Court that Dorene has been feeding for two years and will not admit she has named, and Cinder had worked out what the name was by watching her mouth move when she thought nobody was looking, and he told me, and I laughed, and he was extremely pleased with himself about it.
I am not going to put the name in here. It is Dorene’s.
He had the December meeting agenda on a legal pad and he wanted to talk about the order of business.
He stood at the bench, because he does not sit down where somebody is working, and he was in a good mood, and he said the meeting would run ninety minutes and that he wanted Grace’s four pages read where it could be heard in full before anybody said anything.
I said, “Who’s reading them?”
“Me,” he said. “It’s my job to read out the thing that costs us.”
He was there fourteen minutes. The last thing he said to me was that Lorna had asked him to bring a ham on Sunday and that he had said yes without checking with anybody and would I go halves on it.
I said yes.
Between 9 and 4. Ordinary. I did a clutch, two inspections, and a wheel bearing on Charity’s Ford. Grace was upstairs. Amos was in his chair from about ten to noon.
4:20 p.m. Ada Grier called Grace. Ada had gone to Richmond on Thursday to the Library of Virginia and she had found a thing and she wanted the cabinet at the fire hall opened that evening to check it against the bound volumes.
The thing was this: the Blackthorn Recorder did not simply suspend. Ada had found a chancery filing from 1938 in which the paper’s press and type were sold at auction, and the purchaser was a man named E. B. Cardwell.
4:35 p.m. Grace called Cinder and told him. Cinder said he would meet them at the fire hall at seven, and to bring Alma in on the phone, and to get Mrs. Absher if she would come.
5:10 p.m. I told my brother I did not like a meeting at that building at night.
I want it recorded that I said it, and it ought to be recorded exactly how I said it, because I have spent a year hearing people tell me I did everything I could and I did not.
I said, “I don’t like it.”
That is all I said. Four words on a telephone to a man who had a paper in his hand about a newspaper press sold in 1938, and I did not say the rest, and the rest was: there is a vendor, and Kell said it happens at night in bad weather, and it is going to be nine people in a building with two doors and I will be one of them and I would rather it was tomorrow at noon.
I said four words. He said, “Marcus, it’s five of us in a room for a hour.”
And I said all right.
5:40 p.m. I went by the fire hall on my way home and walked the outside of it in the daylight for the last time it was ever the building it had been.
I did that because I do it, and because I had said four words on a telephone and had not said the rest and it was sitting on me.
Two bay doors, both down. Four man doors: north, northeast, south, and the one into the equipment bay from the lot.
Propane on the north side in a cage. The service entrance at the northeast corner where the gas line and the electrical come in about nine feet apart, which is how they built things in 1961 and how they have stayed.
I stood at that corner at twenty of six in the rain and looked at it for about a minute.
I have been asked whether I knew. I did not know.
What I had was a corner where two utilities enter a block wall nine feet apart, which every fire hall in these mountains has, and a job that makes me look at it, and a man in a lot in November telling me not to put four hundred people in one building.
There were going to be nine.
7:00 p.m. We got there. It was thirty-four degrees and raining, the cold kind that comes in ahead of the first real freeze, and the wind was out of the north.
There were nine of us. Cinder. Me. Grace.
Ada. Mrs. Absher, who came, at seventy-one, at night, in the rain.
Charity Teague, because Ada called her. Evelyn Barnes, nineteen, who has the cabinet key and would not hand it to anybody.
Denny Puckett and Cody Sifers, who came because Cody heard Evelyn was going and it was raining.
Nine people, in the training room, with the bound volumes out on the long table.
7:20 to 8:05. Ada was right. The chancery file matched. In April of 1938 the press, the type, the subscription list, and the masthead of the Blackthorn Recorder were sold at a commissioner’s sale to E. B. Cardwell for four hundred and eleven dollars.
The paper did not die on its own in September of 1936.
It went dark first and got bought after, and the year in between is the year the clerk certified four notices in a newspaper that was not printing, and a man bought the corpse of it eight months later so that there was nothing left to compare anything to.
Grace sat down when Ada said it.
“That is not a defect,” she said. “That is a design.”
8:05 p.m. Cinder said we would take it to the county on the eighth, ahead of the vote, and that Grace’s four pages might have to be rewritten.
Grace said, “They will have to be rewritten.”
And my brother said, “Then it’s a good thing we come out in the rain.”
8:08 p.m. Charity Teague made coffee in the training room and Evelyn Barnes photographed nine pages, and Mrs. Absher took her reading glasses off and said, to nobody, “Well, that’s the meanest thing I ever heard of,” and Ada wrote the citation on the butcher paper at the right-hand end of thirty-one feet of chain of title.
Grace was standing at the wall with her arms folded when I went past her.
She said, “Where are you going?”
“Lot.”
“It’s raining.”
“Yep.”
That’s the last thing I said to Grace Whitmore before, and the last thing she said to me before, and I have wished about nine hundred times that either one of us had spent a better sentence on it, and Sienna Reeves has told me twice that everybody wishes that and it is never the last sentence anybody would pick, and I do not care.
8:11 p.m. I went out to the lot.
I want to be exact. Nobody sent me. Nothing happened.
I went out because I go out, because I had been in a room for an hour and eleven minutes and I had not walked the outside of the building since we got there, and it is my job, and I do it about every forty minutes and I have done it for five years and nobody has ever once noticed me doing it.
The lot lights were on. There were five vehicles. The rain had gotten harder.
The propane tank is on the north side behind a chain-link cage and I checked the cage because I check the cage.
And there was a man at the northeast corner of the building with a five-gallon can.
I am going to put down the next four minutes as flat as I can.
He was maybe thirty-five and he was wearing a rain jacket and he had a can in his left hand and he was crouched at the corner where the gas line comes in and the electrical service enters the block, and he had a bar in his right hand.
He was not hiding. That’s the thing I could not make anybody understand for a year.
He was working. He was doing a job the way a man does a job at eight at night in the rain when he believes there is nobody within a mile of him, and the reason he believed that is that there were five vehicles in a lot at a building that holds four hundred and he had been told there was a meeting on the eighth.
I said, “Hey.”
That is all. I said hey, from about forty feet, in the rain, with my hands empty.
He came up off his heels and he did not run, and I understood inside of one second that this was not a man who was frightened of me, and that’s the only part of it I got right.
I got between him and the door.
That is the whole of my job. I have done it for five years and it is the only thing I know how to do, and I did it, and I did it correctly, and I put myself between a man with a can and the northeast corner door of that building, and I yelled once, and what I yelled was my brother’s name.
I have thought about that every day since. There were nine people in that building and I yelled the name of the one who would come.
He hit me with the bar across the left forearm and I got hold of the can and it went over on both of us, and it was gasoline, and it went across the block wall and the concrete apron and me.
The door opened at the north end.
It was not Cinder. It was Cody Sifers, twenty-eight, who was closest, and the man swung on Cody and caught him above the ear and Cody went down in the gravel.
Then it was Cinder.
My brother came out that door at a dead run and he did not stop at me and he did not stop at Cody, and I have gone over that too, and he did the correct thing, and that’s that he went for the man and not for either of us, because the man had a bar and there were seven people still inside.
He got him. Forty-seven years old and he got a man ten years younger around the middle and took him into the block wall.
And the man had a lighter.
I have to say this part right.
It was not an explosion. It was not a fireball. It does not look like it looks.
Gasoline vapor at thirty-four degrees on wet concrete goes up in a low fast sheet that runs where the liquid ran, and it ran along the apron and up the wall and across two men on the ground, and the whole of it lasted maybe nine seconds before the rain and the concrete had it beat.
Nine seconds.
I have said that number to about four hundred people and every one of them has looked at me like I am protecting somebody.
Nine seconds is a very long time. Ask anybody who has taken a burn class in that building. Charity times it. She has people hold a hand over a candle and count, and nobody makes four.
I was twelve feet away with gasoline on my right sleeve and my left arm broken and I got to them in about two seconds and I have never been able to account for the other seven.
The sheet went where the liquid had run, down the wall and across the apron, and the path I took was off the concrete, across the gravel, and my sleeve was soaked and it did not take, and I have had a year of people telling me how close that was and they are right.
Charity Teague came out that door with the extinguisher off the training room wall, meaning where she put it in 2027 and which she has checked every quarter since the day she hung it, and she used it correctly, and she was on my brother in four seconds.
Grace got Cody’s collar and pulled him back with her hands.
Evelyn Barnes, nineteen years old, called it in and gave the address and the number of patients and the mechanism before the first ring finished on the other end, because Sienna Reeves taught her that at fourteen and made her say it back thirty times.
And Mrs. Absher, seventy-one years old, went the wrong way.
She went back into a burning building for the bound volumes.
Ada Grier went after her and got her by the arm at the cabinet, and Mrs. Absher said the only thing anybody said in that building that night, and about four hundred people have heard it since and there is not one of them who can say it without stopping.
She said, “They’re the county’s.”
They got out. Both of them. Ada carried nine volumes and Mrs. Absher carried four, and the fire never got past the block wall on the north end, because the building is block, and because a volunteer fire department is nine hundred feet from that lot.
The man’s name is Dwight Prater. He is thirty-six years old, he is from Wise County, he had been paid twelve thousand dollars in cash by a man he met twice in a parking lot in Bristol, and he had a burn on his right hand and he was picked up at four in the morning at a motel in Wytheville because Evelyn Barnes gave dispatch a vehicle description that included a dent.
He has never been able to name who paid him. He has tried. He gave four hours on the second of December and he has given everything he has and it stops at a man in a parking lot with cash.
The fire marshal’s report on that building is nine pages and says incendiary.
It is the same investigator out of Salem who did the scale house in July, and she recognized the county and asked to be assigned, and she has said in a deposition since that she spent four days on the scale house and twelve on the fire hall, and that they are not the same kind of work at all, and that the second one is the only case in her career where the origin was so plain that the entire question was who.
She wrote a paragraph in that report that has no business being in a fire marshal’s report and that nobody has ever asked her to take out.
It says: The structure performed as designed. The fire did not enter the block wall assembly. The occupants had been trained in evacuation and mass-casualty response and performed accordingly. The two most serious injuries were sustained by persons moving toward the point of origin.
Cody Sifers has a plate in his skull and works at the yard.
I have a rod in my left forearm and I set off the thing at the courthouse.
My brother lived four days.
He died at Roanoke on the fourth of December at ten past six in the morning, twenty-five years and eight months after our father died in the same hospital, of the same thing, in the same city, and I was in the room for both.
He was awake for a while on the first.
He asked about Cody. He asked whether anybody else was hurt. He asked whether the volumes came out, and I told him Mrs. Absher went back for them and he laughed, which he should not have been able to do, and it cost him.
Then he sent everybody else out of the room and he said the thing he told me in August was coming.
I am not going to put all of it in this book.
I will put this much, because it is the whole reason there is a book.
He said, “Marcus, you was right to.”
And I said, “I know it,” which was a lie, and he knew it was a lie, and he said the rest anyway, and the rest took him about four minutes and it cost him more than he had.
Then he said, “You’ll have to write it down now.”
And I said, “I ain’t going to.”
And my brother, forty-seven years old, with four days left and both hands wrapped for the second time in his life, said:
“Then it’s the last thing I’m going to ask anybody for, and I’d like it wrote in the book that I asked.”