Chapter 9 - The Anatomy of a Sale
The sign went up on the first of August—a simple white board with black lettering that sat at the junction of the county blacktop and the gravel lane:
BARROWS HOMESTEAD
62 ACRES — TIMBER, WATER, DWELLING
BY SEALED BID ONLY
OFFICE OF DAVID VANCE, EXECUTOR
The family didn't call me. They knew better than to call the dispatch center where every line was recorded on the state reel.
They called David.
Uncle Robert called from his tractor shed to say that selling the home-place to strangers was a sin against Arthur Barrows’s grave.
David told him that Arthur Barrows had been buried in the churchyard five miles away, and that the only thing currently on the home-place was sixty-two acres of unworked clover and three hundred dollars in delinquent weed-cutting assessments that Robert had failed to pay while he was grazing his steers on the lower flat.
Aunt Diane called to say that Lauren was living in a two-room trailer behind the propane plant in Oakhaven, washing sheets at the motel to pay for Evan’s court-ordered anger management classes.
David told her that the motel paid eight dollars and fifty cents an hour, which was three dollars more than June Barrows had ever earned in her life, and that if Lauren needed more hours, the laundry at the county hospital was hiring for the night shift.
On the fifteenth of August, the bids were opened in David’s office.
There were four:
One from a lumber syndicate in Richmond that wanted the oak ridge for pulp.
One from a developer who wanted to cut the sixty-two acres into three-acre "ranchettes" with names like Whispering Pines and Fox Hollow.
One from the county school board, which wanted seven acres along the blacktop for a bus maintenance depot.
And one from the North Carolina Coastal Land Trust.
I sat in David’s high-backed chair while he read the figures through his half-moon spectacles.
The Trust’s bid was twenty thousand dollars lower than the developer’s. It had four conditions:
The timber on the north ridge could never be clear-cut.
The creek corridor was to be fenced against cattle forever.
The stone terrace and the Dutch colonial were to be preserved as a regional agricultural heritage site, with the lower pasture leased to the community college for their soil science apprentices.
And the dwelling house was to be named The June Barrows Center.
"You're giving up twenty thousand dollars," David said, his pen hovering over the probate seal.
"I don't need twenty thousand dollars, David."
"The developer would pay cash in thirty days. You could buy that little brick house near the hospital in Wilmington."
"I don't want to live near the hospital in Wilmington," I said. "The air smells of sulfur from the paper mills."
"Where are you going to go, Claire?"
I looked at the window. On the square below, a young woman was walking two small boys across the grass toward the library. She had a bag of groceries in one arm and a library book under the other. She looked tired—that specific, five-o'clock tired that comes from standing on concrete all day in shoes that cost fourteen dollars.
"I bought the old keeper’s cottage at the mouth of the sound," I said. "The one with the slate roof that the lighthouse board sold off in the nineties."
David stopped his pen. He looked at me over his glasses. "That place doesn't have a road, Claire. You have to walk in across the marsh on a three-plank boardwalk."
"I know," I said.
"There’s no town within ten miles. Just the gulls and the men who pull the crab pots."
"I know," I said again. "The planks are narrow. You can't get a truck down them. You can't even get an ice cooler down them unless you carry it with both hands."
David’s old mouth twitched at the left corner—the nearest he ever came to an actual laugh.
"He won't walk three planks," David said.
"No," I said. "He won't."
He brought the brass seal down onto the trust contract with a heavy, final thwack that shook the inkwell.
"The check will clear by Friday," he said. "After the liens, the back school taxes, and my commission, you’ll have four hundred and twelve thousand dollars in the state bank."
"Send eight hundred of it to the propane company in Oakhaven," I said.
David froze, his spectacles halfway down his nose. "To who?"
"To the propane company. Lauren’s trailer has a tank behind the kitchen. It’s sixty gallons. That will keep the heater running through February."
May you like
"Claire—"
"I don't want her freezing," I said, standing up and buttoning my linen jacket over the place where my ribs had stopped aching three weeks ago. "When a woman is cold, she remembers who has the wood. I want her warm enough to forget my name entirely."
