Chapter Thirty-Four · Wrench
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
WRENCH
I want to put in what the county did about the four acres between April and September, because a stone did not put itself up and because it is the last piece of work in this account.
Denny Puckett and Cody Sifers cleared the foundation.
Nine Saturdays. Cody had been back at the yard six weeks and he could not lift over forty pounds and he came anyway and did what he could, and Denny worked next to him and did not once do a thing for him without being asked, which took more out of Denny than the work did.
The mason came out of Buchanan and did the chimney in July for the price of the lime and his fuel.
Trip and his boy built the fence. Farrow moved eleven ton of rock with the lowboy for nothing. Rae Tillman fed everybody every Saturday for two months. Scout laid the gravel and Wyatt Stallard counted the loads and the number is nine and he will tell you.
Alma Ambrose drove up from Charlotte four of them nine Saturdays and worked, and on the third one she stood at the east end of that flat place for about twenty minutes by herself and nobody went and got her.
And Lorna Farrow sat in a chair at the edge of it every single Saturday, eighty-three years old, and did not do one thing but be there, and I asked her about it in August, and she said, “Somebody from this county ought to set here while it gets fixed. Ain’t nobody set here in ninety-one year.”
Meade Cardwell come back one time.
It was the twenty-second of September, ten days after the stone, and he did not tell anybody he was coming and he did not come to the fire hall or the courthouse or my shop.
He went to the school.
Lorna Farrow is eighty-three now and she has a telephone by her chair and she called me at ten in the morning and said, “There’s a car at the Gap and I believe I know whose it is,” because Lorna has driven up there about a dozen times since April and I do not know why and have never asked.
I called Grace before I went, because we have a rule now and the rule is that neither one of us meets that man alone without the other one knowing where we are.
She said, “Do you want me there?”
“No.”
“All right.” Not one second of argument. “Tell me after.”
“I’ll tell you all of it.”
“The middle too?”
“The middle too,” I said, and I did, that night, at our own table, and it took me about forty minutes and she did not write down one word of it until I said she could.
I drove up.
He had been there a while. There were two cigarette ends in the gravel by the car and he does not smoke now and told me later he has not since 1991 and bought a pack in Fincastle that morning.
He was standing on the foundation in a gray overcoat with his hands behind his back, reading the stone, and there was nobody else there and it was a Tuesday morning in September and the light was coming down through what is left of that hollow the way it does.
I parked and got out and did not walk up.
He turned around after a while.
“Mr. Sullivan.”
“Mr. Cardwell.”
He came down off the foundation, which took him a second because he is seventy-two now and the ground is broke up, and he stopped about six feet away.
“I’m sorry about your brother,” he said.
“Appreciate it.”
“I have written that sentence a dozen times and thrown all of them away, and I am aware that saying it in a field is not better.” He had his hat in his hand.
“I would have come in December. My counsel advised me that it would be understood as something other than what it was, and I took the advice, and I have regretted it since about the fourth of January.”
I gave him nothing.
“May I ask you a question,” he said.
“You can ask.”
“Did you believe me? In the deposition.”
And I gave him the true answer, meaning the one I have got in this book already, and it did not cost me anything to say it and I could see it hit him.
“Yes, sir. I did.”
Meade Cardwell stood in a broke-up field and looked at the ground for a while.
“That is not what I expected to hear,” he said, “and I am not going to pretend it does not matter to me, and I would like to say something back that is worth having and I do not think I have got one.”
“Then don’t.”
“Then don’t.”
He nodded and did not argue, and I have thought since that a man who takes then don’t without pushing is not a man used to being told no, and that he has spent a year finding out what that is like.
“I’ll ask you one instead,” I said.
“Go ahead.”
“What did Lorna Farrow say to you on that foundation the morning after the meeting?”
Meade Cardwell looked at me for a second.
“She has not told you.”
“She ain’t told nobody, and I ain’t asked her, and I’m asking you because you ain’t from here and you might answer.”
He thought about it a good while.
“She asked me how old I was,” he said. “I told her seventy-one. She said she was eighty-two, and that she had lived four miles from that Gap her entire life and it had never once occurred to her to ask where those people went.” He turned his hat over.
“And then she said: So there’s two of us stood here that had ninety-one year to ask and didn’t. Difference is you got paid for it.”
I let it stand.
“It is the most accurate sentence anybody has said to me in my life,” Cardwell said, “and she said it kindly, and she took my arm going back to the truck because the ground is broke up.”
He asked me to walk it with him and I did.
Four acres. The foundation, and that’s river rock and about nine courses of it standing on the north side.
The chimney, which the mason out of Buchanan re-pointed in July with lime mortar because Ada found out that is what you have got to use.
The stone. And a flat place at the east end that Charity says was the yard, because there is a packed layer under the grass that Wrench Sullivan can feel through his boots and a forty-four-year-old title examiner from Charlotte cannot, and I have got about nine people who will not let that go.
He asked me about the mortar. He asked what the trust could do with the ground and I told him it could do everything but sell it.
Then he stopped at the east end and said the thing he had driven three hours to say.
“Mr. Sullivan, I have been through my grandfather’s files.”
“All right.”
“There is a memorandum from 1938. It is one page. It is from a lawyer in Roanoke to my grandfather and it concerns the purchase of a printing press, and it explains, in four sentences, why the purchase is advisable.” He was looking at the chimney.
“The four sentences are the clearest thing I have ever read. They do not say a single false word. They simply set out that the tax sale notice was published in a paper that had suspended, that the only complete file of that paper is held by the paper, and that acquisition of the plant and files would place the matter beyond convenient examination.”
“Beyond convenient examination.”
“That is the phrase.”
“Who wrote it?”
“A man named Emory Falwell, of Roanoke, who died in 1971 and whose firm no longer exists and whose grandson is a pediatrician in Lynchburg.” Cardwell said it like he had said it to himself a good many times.
“I have looked him up. I have looked all of them up. There are ten men between my great-grandfather and me who touched this and every one of them did his part correctly and none of them did the whole of it, and I have spent nine months trying to find the one who is to blame and there is not one.”
“There’s you.”
“Yes,” Meade Cardwell said. “There is me. I am the first one who had the entire file on one desk, and that’s the only distinction I have got, and it is enough.”
“I have it in front of me most days now.” He turned around.
“My grandfather bought a press for four hundred and eleven dollars and put the bound files in a barn in Bedford County and they burned in 1954 in an ordinary barn fire that nobody arranged. And every man in my family since has managed a very large and very careful position without ever having to know what the first move was, and I have known since 2019, and I did nothing, because there was nothing to do that did not cost me everything.”
He put his hat on.
“I told six hundred people in November that not knowing is not the same as not being responsible,” he said. “I had known for nine years when I said it.”
Then he said, “I have given that memorandum to Mrs. Ambrose’s attorney and to the Commonwealth’s Attorney and to the newspaper, on the ninth of September, before this stone went up, and I did not tell anybody I had done it, and I am telling you now because you are the only person I have met in Blackthorn County who does not appear to want anything from me. ”
Here is what I said, and I have been asked about it, and this is all of it.
“Mr. Cardwell, I ain’t going to forgive you.”
“I have not asked you to.”
“No, sir, and I want to say why anyhow, because you drove three hours.” I put my hands in my coat.
“It ain’t about my brother. There ain’t a court and there ain’t a jury and there ain’t nine investigators that has put my brother on you, and I have read every word of it and it don’t reach you and I believe it don’t reach you. ”
“Then what is it about?”
“It’s about a hundred and forty thousand dollars in a kitchen in Bluefield,” I said.
He did not answer that.
“You had that memorandum in your pocket in 2019 and you set at a eighty-eight-year-old woman’s table in September and offered her a hundred and forty thousand dollars for a piece of paper and never told her what was under it.
” I looked at that stone. “That weren’t your grandaddy.
That was you, last fall, in a kitchen, and don’t nobody go to jail for it and it ain’t a crime and there ain’t a element in it. ”
Meade Cardwell stood there for a long moment.
“No,” he said. “There is not.”
“So I ain’t forgiving you. I’m just telling you true what it is, because near everybody you have ever met has told you what it is worth.”
He took that standing up and did not flinch from it, and that gets recorded too.
“Is there anything I can do,” he said.
“No, sir.”
“That is not an answer people give me.”
“It’s the true one.” I looked at him. “Mr. Cardwell, you have got about nine hundred million dollars and there ain’t one thing you can buy that county.
We got a fire hall on a ninety-nine-year lease and a stone and four hundred and forty people that’ll come when you call them, and every bit of that come out of us and it don’t take a check. ”
“And the school?”
“It’s done. The mason took his cost and the rock come off Farrow’s lowboy and Lorna set in a chair nine Saturdays.”
Meade Cardwell looked at that foundation for a while.
“That’s the first time in my life,” he said, “that somebody has described a completed project to me and I have understood that I was not part of it.”
And that man looked at me and did a thing with his mouth that was not a smile.
“That’s the single most valuable thing anybody has said to me in fifty years of business,” he said, “and I am aware of what it cost you to say it, and that’s nothing, and that is why it is worth having.”
Then he went to his car.
He stopped with one hand on the door.
“The trust cannot sell,” he said. “Not to anyone. Not ever.”
“That’s right.”
“Do you know what that means about the position my family has held since 1903?”
“It means it’s over.”
“It means it is over and it can never be reassembled by anybody,” Meade Cardwell said, “including by my children, who are not like me, and who would have tried.”
He got in.
“That woman did that in eleven pages,” he said. “I could not have stopped it with any amount of money on this earth, and I have thought about it every day since August, and Mr. Sullivan, I would like you to tell her something for me, and I would like it said exactly.”
“Say it.”
“Tell Mrs. Pratt that she is the only person in a hundred and twenty-six years who has ever taken something off my family,” he said, “and that she did it by giving it away.”
I told her.
I drove to Bluefield on the fourth of October by myself and set in that kitchen for about forty minutes and told her exactly, word for word, because he asked for it exact and because I do not soften things.
She listened to the whole of it with her hands in her lap.
Then she said, “Is that supposed to be a compliment?”
“I believe he meant it as one.”
“I expect he did.” She turned her cup a quarter turn, and that’s a thing about half the people in this account do and which I have quit remarking on. “Well. You can tell him I said thank you and that I ain’t studied him.”
“She’s said that to about forty people.”
“I know it,” Odessa Ambrose Pratt said. “And it’s going to be true a while longer. I have got a hundred and twenty-six years of a family to think about first and he can wait his turn.”
That is the last thing I ever heard her say about Meade Cardwell, and she died five months later, and I did not tell him what she said until this book, and he is going to read it here the same as everybody else.