Chapter Thirty-Six · Wrench
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
WRENCH
They put me in the chair on the ninth of November, which is a Tuesday, at the table, with sixteen men in the room and the stove going.
Diesel Harrow nominated me and I asked him not to and he done it anyway.
Here is what he said, and Grace has it word for word because she was not in the room and Amos Boyle wrote it on the back of an envelope for her afterward, which tells you what this county is.
“We have had four presidents. Pike weren’t never president and run it anyhow for thirty year.
Diesel had it thirteen. Cinder had it two and it cost him everything he had.
” He put his hand on the wood. “And every one of them was a man that talked. I have watched this club get run by talkers my whole life and it has been all right, and I am sixty-two years old and I would like to see what it does with a man that don’t. ”
Then he said, “And there ain’t a soul at this table that don’t know he’d have stood in that door for any one of us. He already done it. Twice, if you count 2003.”
Cutter Reeves seconded it, which he had no standing to do because he is Vice President and it was not his to second, and Diesel let it stand and nobody objected, and I have decided that’s the closest this club has ever come to breaking its own rules on purpose.
The vote was sixteen ayes. I asked for it to be by voice and one at a time and it was.
I want the four seconds before that in here.
Trip said, “Hold up. I got a question for him and I’d like it answered before I vote.”
“Ask it.”
“You want it?” Trip had his arms on the table.
“Not can you do it. Not ought you to. Do you want it, Marcus, because I have set at this table eleven years and I have watched two men take that chair and one of them wanted it and one of them took it because there weren’t nobody else, and I ain’t voting for another one of them. ”
The room waited.
“No,” I said.
Trip nodded once.
“Then say what you do want.”
And I gave him the true answer, which took me about four seconds and which I had not known until he asked it.
“I want there to be somebody at this table in thirty years,” I said, “that knows what my brother give up on the eighth of December and never got to say.”
Trip said, “Aye,” before Diesel ever called it.
I am going to put down what I said, because it was seventy-one words and I counted them in the truck afterward.
“I’ll take it. I want three things said first.
“One. I ain’t him. Don’t none of you wait on me to be him, and if you’re waiting on it, you’re going to be disappointed in about a month and I’d rather you was disappointed tonight.
“Two. I don’t talk. That ain’t going to change at forty-five. So I’m going to have to do it another way, and I’ve thought about it, and here’s the way.
“Three.”
And then I opened the book.
The practice started because Rook Walsh done it once in 2026 and it stuck, and Cinder made it a thing when he took the chair, meaning that the book stays open on that table during chapel and any man can write in it. Not minutes. His own page.
Nine men have used it. Rook, Scout, Trip, Petey, Cinder, and four since.
Mine has been blank for seventeen years.
I turned to it and I set down the thing I brought, which was eleven pages, and I said the only other thing I said that night.
“I can’t hardly read and I never could, and every one of you has knowed something was wrong for twenty year and been decent enough not to say it, and I’d rather you knowed the actual thing than kept guessing.
“So this is mine and I didn’t write it. I said it and Grace wrote it down and I checked every page back four times, and it’s true, and it’s all of it, and it’s going in the book.
“And if any man at this table thinks that ain’t writing it down, say so now, because I’d like to know.”
Nobody said anything.
Then Amos Boyle, sixty-six years old, said, “Read it out.”
“Amos.”
“You said you’d do it another way. This is the way.” He had his arms folded. “Read it out or have somebody read it out. I don’t care which. But it goes in that book where it could be heard or it’s just paper.”
So I read it out.
It took an hour and forty minutes and I stumbled about nine times and nobody helped me and nobody looked away.
The fourteenth of March, 2003. The kitchen on the thirteenth.
The parts room and the eleven feet I could not get past. My brother coming in through a bay door.
Two pages in a nineteen-year-old’s hand and a sentence about a kitchen.
Four years at Coffeewood. Twenty-five years of never once asking how it happened.
A panel with the main on and the cover off that I found on the eighth day and told nobody until I was forty-four.
A note portfolio sold in 2002 to a lender part-owned by a man who is dead.
A lawyer who asked me one question on a tailgate that I could not answer.
And then this year.
Forty-one letters. A room over a shop. A woman who moved a chair four feet.
Nine thousand pages in a vault and four hundred and six of them at four times the cost. A line in a 1936 land book.
Twenty-six bound volumes behind a compressor.
Four hundred and eleven people on a set of stone steps.
An eighty-eight-year-old woman in Bluefield who was in a phone book for sixty-seven years.
The thirtieth of November. All of it. The four words I said on a telephone and the rest of them that I did not say.
And the first of December, in a room in Roanoke, when my brother told me I was right to, and asked me for the last thing he ever asked anybody for, and made me put in the book that he asked.
It is in the book. It is on page nine of mine and it says: He asked. E.S., 1 Dec.
Sixteen men knocked the table once, soft, all together, the old sound, and that was the end of it and nobody made a speech.
Diesel Harrow got his coat and stopped by my chair on the way out and put two fingers on the wood and did not say anything at all, which from Diesel is about four hundred words.
And Amos Boyle went out last, the way he does, and stopped in the door.
“Marcus.”
“Yeah.”
“There’s eight men at that table ain’t got a page.” He put his hat on. “You reckon any of them can read?”
Then he went home.
I set in that chapel by myself for about an hour after, with the stove going down and the book open on the table in front of me and my own eleven pages in it for the first time in seventeen years.
I did not feel anything I could name and I am not going to make one up.
What I did was read my brother’s page. All of it, at my own speed, which took me a hour and nine minutes, and I have read it four times since and it takes about the same.
He opened his the week he took the chair in November of 2026 and it is nine hundred words long and every man in this room has read it and I never had.
The last line of my brother’s page says: I am putting mine in first because I am going to ask every one of you for yours, and a man that asks first is a fella that wants something. A man that gives first is a fella you can check.
E. Sullivan. November 2026.
Four of them have opened one since. One of them is Trip’s boy, who is twenty-two and prospected in March, and who came to me in the shop in August and stood there about nine minutes before he got it out, and what he got out is that he cannot read either, and that he has been hiding it since the fourth grade, and that he had heard.
He heard because I said it out loud in a room.
That is the whole of what I have got to say about being president and I have been at it a year.
The other thing I done, and I am going to put it in because Grace says a man ought to record the thing he is proudest of even if it sounds small, is that in February I moved chapel.
Not the meeting. The book.
It used to live in a safe in the clubhouse and come out on Tuesdays.
It lives in the cabinet at the fire hall now, with the volumes and the ledger and the legal pad, and it comes to chapel and goes back after, and any person in Blackthorn County can read every page of it two nights a week without asking anybody.
Nine men voted against that. It carried eleven to nine and it is the only thing I have ever put to that table that did not carry unanimous, and every one of the nine was correct that it costs us something, and every one of them has since read a page in that cabinet that they would not have read in a safe.
I did not argue for it. I said one sentence, which is: We ain’t got a thing in there we ought to be scared of somebody reading, and if we ever do, I’d like it to be hard.
I am going to finish this the way Grace says I have to, and that’s at the table, on my own page, in my own words, and she is downstairs and she has typed every word I have said for a year and she is not going to type this last part.
She is going to read it after.
The book is at the fire hall two nights a week now, in the steel cabinet with the twenty-six volumes and Mrs. Absher’s ledger and Wyatt’s legal pad and Renata’s ticket and a framed page of nine lines that still has no card on it.
Evelyn Barnes set the hours before she left for Blacksburg and Ada keeps them now, and four hundred and forty people have signed the log this year.
Anybody here can read it. That’s the whole point and it always was, and it took me forty-five years and my brother’s life to work out that a record kept where nobody can read it is not a record, it is an inventory, and that Ellis Cauthen said that in a training room in June of last year and I did not understand it until December.
My mother kept two hundred and six letters in a cedar chest and never told either one of us.
My father kept a shop and a fuse box and a note he could not carry.
My brother kept a book open on a table so sixteen men would not have to trust him.
And Odessa Ambrose Pratt kept eleven hundred and forty acres for about four hours in August and then put it somewhere it can never be sold, and told a lawyer in a deposition that trust is just somebody telling you who is going to get hurt before you ask.
I have been Sergeant-at-Arms and I am president and my job has never once changed. It is to know where a thing fails.
Here is where it fails.
It fails at the place where somebody knows a true thing and there is nobody to say it to.
That’s the only failure point there is. Everything else here is block and steel and four hundred people who will come when you call them.
But a man alone with a true thing is a crack in a wall, and I was that crack for twenty-five years, and my brother was that crack for twenty-five years, and we sat across a table from each other the whole time.
So I am going to keep the door.
Not the one on the chapel. That one is just a door and Trip’s boy can have it in five years.
The other one.
My wife is downstairs and she has been writing down what this county says for fifteen years and she has a page of her own in that cabinet now, because I put it there in March and told her afterward.
There is a stone at the Gap with nine children’s names on it and a teacher who went with them.
There is a boy who is ten years old and counts everything and is going to be somebody in about twenty years, and he already knows that you write down what happened and not what you think about it.
And there is a book on a table in a room in Blackthorn County, Virginia, that stays open, and any man can write in it, and one of them can’t read.
He writes it down anyway.
Grace has read this now and she has typed the whole of it except this page and she has made one change, and that’s that she moved a comma.
She wanted a last line about the county and I told her no.
Here is the last line, and it ain’t about the county, and I have thought about it for eleven months.
My brother asked me for one thing in twenty-five years and I have done it, and it is done, and it is in a cabinet in a fire hall on ground that can never be sold, and any person in Blackthorn County can walk in there two nights a week and read every word of what the Sullivan brothers were.
I have got a wife who wrote it down and a table that has to be run and about forty year left if I am lucky.
And there is a book on it.
It is open.
Grace says that is not a last line, it is a stage direction, and that I have spent a year learning to say things and cannot be trusted to stop.
She is right. She is right about most of it and she has been since February of the year before last, and I have put her in this book about ninety times and every one of them is true and I checked them all.
So here is the last line, and it is hers, and she does not know I am doing this and she is going to find it on the page.
On the eleventh of April, two years ago, a woman laughed at something an old man said in the front of a repair shop, and a fella looked up from a parts counter, and he did not say one word about it for two hundred and forty days.
He wrote it in a margin instead.
That was the best he could do at the time, and it turned out to be enough, and I would like somebody in this county in forty years to read that and understand that it counts.
Writing it down counts.
That is the whole of what we ever had here and it is the whole of what we still have, and my brother died for it on the thirtieth of November, and there is a book on a table in Blackthorn County, Virginia, and it is open, and I keep it.