Chapter 3 - The Desk in the Cellar
A house has a smell when it belongs to you that it doesn't have when you’re just renting the air between the walls.
This one smelled of cured ham, three-in-one oil, and the dry, powdery lime that sloughs off the basement walls every time the ground freezes and thaws. I built it out of sixty-pound concrete blocks that I bought for forty-two cents a piece from the old plant behind the rail depot in Buena Vista. Every one of them went into the trench on my shoulder, two at a time, until my collarbones looked like two walnuts had been shoved under the skin.
Ethan had gone down the hall to the guest room—what Ashley called the flex office—to take a conference call with a junior partner from a legal firm in Charlotte. Through the six-panel door, I could hear that rapid, clipped cadence he used when he was talking about liquidity events and capital utilization.
Ashley was in the half-bath off the laundry room, scrubbing her fingernails with Linda’s lavender soap and complaining through the door that the well water had too much iron in it to use on natural silk.
"Tom," Linda said, her hand touching the sleeve of my denim jacket. "Where are we going to put the trunk?"
"What trunk?"
"My mother’s trunk. The one with the wedding quilts. If we have to be at the golf village by the first..."
"We're not going to the golf village, Lin."
"He had the seal, Tom. The red one. With the ribbon through the corner like they put on the tax foreclosures."
"Go sit in the parlor," I told her. "Turn on the small lamp with the green shade. Don't touch the thermostat. He’s got it set to seventy-four, and the heat pump will run all night if you don't drop the breaker on the second stage."
I didn't take the stairs from the hall.
There was a trapdoor under the rug in the back pantry—the old access we used before we built the split-entry in seventy-two. It had an iron ring that had been beaten out of a leaf spring by an uncle who died at Saint-Lô, flush with the heart-pine floorboards so you wouldn't stub your boot on it if you were carrying a bushel of Stayman apples down to the bins in the dark.
I pulled the ring. The oak had swollen with the late summer rain, but it came up with a dry, wooden huff that brought the smell of fifty years of cold soil straight into the kitchen.
The cellar wasn't finished.
Ethan had tried to convince me three summers back to let a franchise outfit out of Lynchburg spray the stone walls with that grey, lumpy foam that looks like dried oatmeal—said it’d give us an extra eight hundred square feet of recreational footprint. I told him that if a man needs eight hundred square feet of recreation, he ought to take an axe down to the cedar bottoms and clear three cords of post timber until his liver settles.
The floor was red shale, packed hard as paving brick by forty years of boots.
In the corner, behind the two-hundred-gallon galvanized water tank that we used for gravity feed when the power went, sat my father’s desk.
It wasn't walnut. It wasn't mahogany. It was three pieces of three-inch oak bridge planking laid across two stacks of red chimney brick that had been salvaged from the old schoolhouse when the county consolidated the districts in fifty-two. On top of it sat an old Remington standard typewriter that weighed thirty-eight pounds, its keys black as coal with the letters worn off the centers where my father’s thumbs had hit the space bar every Saturday night to type out the minutes of the cattlemen’s association.
Beside the typewriter sat the box.
It was an old lard tin from the Shenandoah Valley Packing Company, the red label faded until the pig on the side looked like a cloud over a hayfield. The lid was sealed with two wraps of black friction tape—the cloth kind that smells of coal tar when you pull it off the spool.
I took my pocketknife—a three-bladed Stockman with yellow bone handles that my brother gave me before he went into the Marine Corps in sixty-six—and slit the tape along the tin rim.
The lid came off with a thin, metallic squeal.
Inside, wrapped in an old flour sack that still had the faint blue outline of the Dixie Lily brand across the cotton, were three envelopes.
The first was yellow paper, eight inches long, addressed to The Commissioners of the Revenue, Rockbridge County, Commonwealth of Virginia.
The second was a small, square envelope made of grey parchment, sealed with red wax that had cracked into four pieces like an old penny dropped on an anvil.
The third wasn't an envelope at all.
It was an eight-page carbon copy of a general warranty deed dated October twelve, nineteen-hundred and seventy-one, bearing the signature of the circuit judge, the county surveyor, and four men who had been dead so long their headstones were sinking into the clover behind the Presbyterian church.
I didn't turn on the overhead bulb. I used the small brass flashlight I keep in the watch pocket of my overalls, the little circle of yellow light picking out the numbers on the margin:
...AND EXCEPTING THEREFROM that portion of the NW quadrant known historically as the Miller Mill-Seat, comprising four and three-quarters acres more or less, which said parcel is held under the perpetual and non-severable life tenancy of Thomas E. Miller and Linda S. Miller, with remainder to the lineal issue ONLY UPON THE EXPRESS AND RECORDED CERTIFICATION of the surviving tenant that no encumbrance, lien, corporate merger, or statutory cloud has been placed upon the agricultural heritage of the surrounding boundary...
I read it twice.
Then I reached into the lard tin and pulled out the second thing—the small piece of green cardboard that Ethan had never seen.
It was a certificate of incorporation from the State Corporation Commission in Richmond, dated March fourteenth, nineteen-hundred and ninety-eight.
The entity wasn't Highland Ridge LLC.
It was The Miller Family Trust, Unincorporated Association under the Common Law of Virginia.
May you like
And the sole trustee, with absolute power of revocation, conveyance, and eviction without notice or right of appeal, wasn't Ethan Thomas Miller.
It was the woman currently sitting in the parlor with two missing buttons on her sweater and a cold cup of water on her knee.
