Chapter 4 - The Sound of the Law
The clock in the hall struck eight. It had a brass pendulum that had been swung by three generations of men who didn't like to be kept waiting for their breakfast, and it had a deep, dry dong-dong that vibrated through the floor joists like an axe hitting an old cedar post.
Ashley had come out of the bathroom. She was wearing a grey cashmere wrap over her linen shirt now, her hands tucked into the pockets, smelling of expensive cold cream and impatience.
"Tom," she said, leaning against the door frame of the parlor where Linda sat under the small green lamp. "We have to leave the keys on the counter. The appraisers are coming from the bank in Roanoke at nine tomorrow to do the interior photos for the secondary mortgage. If the personal effects are still on the walls, it reduces the staging score by three to five percent."
"The staging score," Linda said. She was looking at the oval picture of her mother that hung between the windows—a charcoal drawing made from a tin-type in nineteen-twenty-two, showing an old woman with her hair pulled back so tight her ears stuck out like small dried apples.
"It’s an algorithm, Linda," Ashley said, her voice dropping into that small, rhythmic sigh she used when the grocery girl didn't pack the asparagus with the tips pointing up. "The bank uses an automated valuation model. They don't want to see primitive portraits and doilies. They want neutral spaces that suggest transitional luxury."
"Transitional luxury," I said, coming through the pantry door with the flour sack under my arm.
Ethan came out of the back room. He had his laptop under his arm, the screen still glowing blue with an Excel spreadsheet that had twenty columns of numbers running down into a red total at the bottom.
"Dad, I just talked to Vance down at the firm," Ethan said. He had his shoes on now—those brown suede ones with the thick white rubber soles that look like orthopedic sneakers for old men with bad arches. "He says the county clerk had the deed indexed by four-thirty. It’s on the state portal. You can pull it up on a phone right now. You’re legally non-resident as of midnight."
"Is that what Vance told you?" I asked.
"He’s a senior partner, Dad. He clerked for the fourth circuit."
"Vance’s grandfather used to run three bootleg stills behind the lime kiln on the river," I said, laying the flour sack on the parlor table right beside Linda’s wicker sewing basket. "He was thirty-eight hundred dollars behind on his seed bill when he died, and his boys had to sell their mother’s cedar chest on the courthouse steps to pay for the pine box they dropped him in."
"That has nothing to do with this," Ethan said, his face getting that dark, congested look he’d had since he was six years old and got caught taking the copper pennies out of the church plate. "This is a corporate transaction. The signatures were verified by a notary public in Roanoke."
"Whose signature, Ethan?"
"Yours, Dad. You signed the management assignment at the kitchen table on the fourth of July."
"I signed an application for a five-hundred-dollar cost-share on three rolls of woven-wire fencing from the soil conservation district," I said. "I signed it with a green ballpoint pen that had the name of the Southern States coop on the barrel."
"The paperwork was revised before filing," Ashley said. She took three steps into the room, her voice rising half an octave, clear and sharp as a garden spade hitting limestone. "It’s called an administrative correction. Every commercial developer in the state uses them to clean up the chain of title. You can’t leave seventy-five acres of prime development land in the hands of an eighty-year-old man who doesn't even have an email address, Tom. It’s irresponsible. Ethan has an obligation to his family to protect the equity."
"His family?" I looked at her.
"Our children," she said, her chin coming up until the tendons in her throat looked like two lengths of butcher’s twine. "When we have them. They’re not going to grow up in a house with wood-stove soot on the ceilings and a gravel lane that ruins the alignment on an eighty-thousand-dollar automobile every three weeks."
"You don't have children, Ashley," Linda said from her chair.
The room went so quiet you could hear the oil heater in the basement clicking its points as the pressure rose.
"What did you say?" Ashley hissed.
"You don't have children," Linda repeated. She wasn't looking at Ashley; she was looking at the little gold ring on her own left hand—a three-millimeter band of yellow gold that had been worn down until the edge was as sharp as a tin-can lid. "You’ve been married five years, and the only thing you’ve brought into this house is three little white dogs that have to wear coats when it sprinkles and a stack of magazines that show people who don't work for a living sitting on white chairs by a pool."
"Linda!" Ethan barked.
"Don't you shout at your mother in this house," I said.
The sound of my voice didn't rise. It didn't have to. It had the weight of fifty years of telling three-year-old bulls to get back into the catch-pen, and it stopped Ethan’s foot three inches off the braided rug.
"I’m calling the sheriff," Ethan said. He reached for his phone—the big black one with the three camera lenses on the back. "I’m having Deputy Miller come out here and explain the trespass statute to you. Maybe you’ll listen to a man with a badge."
"Call him," I said.
"Dad—"
"Call Bobby Miller," I told him. "His grandfather was my first cousin. His daddy owes me nine hundred dollars on an engine swap we did on his combine back in ninety-four. Use the landline on the wall, Ethan. The cellular tower on the ridge has three bad batteries in the backup bank, and every time the frost hits the transformer, the signal drops into the hollow."
May you like
Ethan’s thumb hovered over the glass. He didn't dial.
"Go on," I said. "Dial nine-one-one. Tell the girl in the basement at the courthouse that your daddy won't let you have the key to the cellar where the deed is."
