by Dot Jackson
Directly, he said, “You talking about this place?”
“Yes indeed,” I said. I realized then he must know something about its circumstances. “That’s why I wanted to see you,” I said. “I wanted you to help me out a little bit. I want to buy this place.”
“Oh, Sophia won’t like that,” he said darkly. “Did you really think I could get her to sell The Birches? To you?”
I was looking into my lap. The flowers in the goods of my dress were beginning to swim about, a little. “In fact,” he went on, “this place is part of the package she plans to sell Intermont.”
“What?” I hollered.
“While you were up at the Forks you didn’t see them out here measuring your trees. Why, they liked to have gone wild. There might not be a big market right this day, but eh, law, honey, them birches, them walnuts, maples, big oaks, they just keep a-growin’.”
“Harmon!” I said.
“However…” he said, savoring the pause, “however, like I say, I have something interesting to talk with you about. The last thing I did for the Caney Forks Lumber Company, or more specifically, for the estate of Ben Aaron Steele, I had to inventory their holdings. Now, I want you to know, that was a job. I was in the courthouse for five weeks, checking over deeds and tax books. Do you have any idea how your cousin operated? He would ‘acquire’ a few acres in a card game somewhere, and forget to tell me, although I was supposed to be keeping up with his business. Sometimes he would buy something—pay real money—and stick the receipt down in his pocket and forget it. Oh, HE didn’t forget it; he just didn’t tell me. Now,” Harmon said, “there are serious questions on which the estate of Mr. Steele is in the dark.”
“It is not all settled?” I said.
“Nowhere near,” he said. “Because it is not, it has been taken out of my hands. Do you remember—did he ever say anything to you, or did your mother say anything, about your grandfather’s part of the mill?”
“Yes,” I said, “Ben Aaron told me about that. He said he had made some kind of settlement with my mother about it.”
“Do you know if she signed anything?”
“She never told me anything about it, at all,” I said. “She never mentioned selling this place, either. I never knew there was a house, or a mill, or my own people, until I came up here.”
“Well, it was a long time before I came into the business that some disposition must have been made. Or I assume it was made,” Harmon said. “The problem with the mill—Sophia’s problem—is that there was never any record of any payment to you—you would have been the heir, when Daisy Steele’s estate was settled. No, I shouldn’t say there was never any record. I don’t know that. All I can say is, when I went through Ben Aaron’s deeds and papers, there was no record of any such transaction.”
“What does that mean?” I said. I was not going to have it mean that Ben Aaron had lied. But I didn’t say it. I didn’t know what to say.
Harmon sat and studied. Finally, he said, “It could have been any one of several things. One thing it was not,” he said, looking straight at me, “he did not lie to you about it. It could have been,” he went on, “I think it might have been that the deal was made and nothing ever signed. You can ask your mother. Or,” he said, “and I know Ben Aaron…if something was signed, for some reason all his own he destroyed it.”
“What do you really think?” I said.
He paid no attention. “The thing is,” he said, with a satisfied sigh, “there is no record at the courthouse, either. There ought to have been a quit-claim filed. But I have had the books searched from the day your grandfather died to the day Ben Aaron died—twenty-one years—and there is no record.”
I wondered, did Harmon do all that because he loved me, or because he detested Sophia? Who’ll ever know? “Now you asked me what all this means,” he said. “Practically, it means that unless somebody can come forth with proof otherwise, you own two-thirds of the Caney Forks Lumber Company. Nam’s part, and what would have been your father’s.
“And I will tell you a little something else that’s kind of funny,” he said. “But not till you make me some good hot coffee.” He got me up, for I was weak in the knees, and we went into the house, and he made the fire in the stove and I put on the pot, and got out some fried pies left from breakfast. After a while I was able to stop shaking.
“If you are worried about Sophia coming to put you out, don’t,” he said happily. “The tax collector will probably dump you first.”
“How?” I said. “Did she not pay her taxes?”
“Oh, she never did a menial thing like paying bills. She left that to Mr. Steele. Mr. Steele tended to be meticulous about those matters. His debts were paid. His taxes were paid. He even was quick to pay the taxes of others—that was not one of the things that made people love him. He watched the tax sales like a vulture. Not to disposess people, or anything like that, but just to get a lien on their land; a foot in the door, so to speak. Mr. Steele was a most acquisitive fellow. That is why it was so odd that the taxes on The Birches are two years in arrears.”
“Do you think he simply forgot it?”
Harmon looked at me like I had asked if roosters lay brown eggs. “Your cousin, and forgive me for saying so, could be petty as a piss ant when he was of a mind,” he said. “I don’t think he thought he could get this place back from Sophia with a tax deed but I do expect he wanted it to come up for sale, to needle her. He probably figured to ship her off to Europe one spring, at tax sale time, and when she came back he’d have at least a tax lien on The Birches. I think he thought of everything, some time, to try to get it back.”
He went out and brought in more stove wood. The sun was getting very low. “How do you feel about being here by yourself?” he said.
It would be the first night I had spent here by myself since Ben Aaron died. I had thought about it. “I’ll be all right,” I said.
“I don’t like it,” he said.
“No, don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll be fine. I have a lot to think about.” And then I told him how I didn’t feel so much alone. Harmon was my friend. I told him what Rose and I had done. I didn’t expect him to be so undone by it. He looked at me with his eyes this big. In spite of himself he shuddered and groaned out loud. And then he said, when he had caught up with himself, “If you had asked me, I would have helped you.”
“I knew you would,” I said. “I think you have helped me fairly well as it is.”
“You won’t let me stay with you?” he said.
“No,” I said. “You need to get over that road out there before it gets good dark.” I helped him get his coat on, and kissed him, and he made me bolt the door behind him. Part of me terribly wanted him to stay. I nearly cried when I heard the motor crank and the car go off up the hill. But there was a part of me that rejoiced right then in that sort of morbid solitude. I made a fire in Daisy’s sitting room. I had got the time from Harmon’s watch and had set and wound Ive’s clock. I sat and rocked and ran things through my mind. It was perfectly still, except for the clock, and the fire, and the creaks and rustles an old house makes in its sleep. When I listened I could hear the river. What a year it had been since Ben Aaron Steele had held me, there in front of that fire. And it melted away, like nothing, and I closed my eyes and was wrapped up, again, in the warmth of him, and the strength of him, in the depth of love that doesn’t die. And I slept.
Early as the larks, I got up and washed and got dressed as best as was prudent, considering I was going to ride a mule down to Red Bank. When I got down there I went by Harmon’s office to let him know I had come to town. He went over to the courthouse with me, then. We went down in the basement where all the little cubicles of welfare and crop advice and records of birth and marriage and vice and death shared a dungeon-like placidity, and the smell of wet tobacco.
We passed the door marked TAX COLLECTOR and went into one marked REGISTER OF DEEDS. They opened into the same dim, brown-and-mustard room. Arvil
Hatcher, who Registered, was leaning over the counter talking to Philo Spivey, who Collected. Philo was sitting by the coal heater, thoughtfully whittling his fingernails with his barlow. The courthouse dog lay asleep at his feet.
“I want to show my client, here, something that is not in the deedbook. We want S through V,” Harmon said, straightening the knot of his tie. Arvil produced the book dutifully and went back to his conference. The dog startled and bit at a flea. Harmon leafed through the pages, holding it for me to look. There were pages and pages of transactions, inscribed in careful, confident penmanship, between this Steele and that, between Steeles and everybody in the valley, going back more than a hundred years. A lot of them involved the Caney Forks Lumber Company. Of course I was interested in every word. But none seemed to apply, in our immediate situation. And then a matter entered on record in March of 1912 grabbed me: “Steele to Steele; Natalie T. Steele, trustee for Mary Seneca Steele, to Benjamin A. Steele…”
“That was The Birches,” Harmon said quietly. “Do you see?” My eyes clouded. But there was nothing else to do with my mother, or me, on that page, or the next, or anywhere. Harmon turned back to the beginning and we went through again. That time I noticed something and showed Harmon. A page had been torn out. He didn’t seem at all surprised.
“Mr. Hatcher,” I said, “what do you suppose went with this page? There is a page missing.”
Arvil looked sort of sidewise at it, over his glasses, casually. “Lost in a fire, I ’spect,” he said.
“Did you have a fire in here sometime?” I said. I wondered how the damage was held to one page.
“Got one about ever’ day, when it’s cool,” Arvil said. He looked at me like I didn’t have much sense. We searched through “Grantors” and “Grantees.” Nothing. I began to get the thrilling feeling it was hopeless.
“You satisfied?” Harmon said.
“I guess,” I said, bewildered.
“I want to be sure about the tax,” Harmon said. “Philo, has Mistress Sophier Sweetheart Steele paid her property tax this year on that boundary up in the cove?”
“Not as I know of,” said Philo. Reluctantly he got up and rubbed his back a couple of strokes and shuffled off to the shelves for the current ledger, and licked his thumb.
“No, she ain’t,” he said with obvious pleasure. “That’s two year runnin’. Hmm. Might put it on the courthouse steps this year,” said Philo.
“Could!” said Arvil.
“Have you notified the owner?” said Harmon, being officious.
“Oh, yeah,” said Philo.
“Might ort to again,” said Arvil, solicitiously.
Philo took out a printed form, from under the counter, and filled in the blanks with studious scrolls and flourishes, and put it in an official envelope.
“Where does the high and mighty Madam Steele live now?” he said. “I don’t even know where she’s at.”
“Send it to the Caney Forks Lumber Company. They’ll see that she gets it,” Harmon said. So Philo addressed the envelope and stamped it, and whistled through his teeth. The old dog rose and blinked and stretched and bit at a flea on his back.
“Here,” said Philo, sailing the letter to the floor. “Run ’nis over to the post office.” The dog nosed the envelope about, a little bit, and rolled its eyes. I could see how a slip-up could happen, time to time, in even this efficient operation. We thanked our hosts and took our leave.
“Harmon,” I said, while we were walking back to his office, “I don’t want to fight Sophia hand to hand. I don’t want to cheat her, nor hurt her in any way. She has suffered terribly. And I am sorry.” (I couldn’t believe my own ears, either.)
“I am not expecting to fight Sophia at all,” Harmon said. “I don’t even expect to fight her lawyers. I think they can be shown very simply where they stand. Where she stands is that she is going to have to do about whatever you want her to, if she wants to dispose of the company.”
“I want The Birches,” I said. “I want that house and those woods. I want that cemetery. She can have every inch and every dollar of the rest of it. I want her to have it.”
“You are my client—you said,” Harmon said. “I am not going to do that poorly by you. I promise we’ll be fair. But remember, my love, Ben Aaron was my client, too. In what I do with this, I represent him, above all.”
So I went home, and Harmon went to his office and wrote a letter. I never heard from Sophia. No cross words ever passed. There was no tax sale. On the same day the Caney Forks Lumber Company passed on to Intermont-Atlantic, The Birches passed quietly to me. When the violets uncurled their leaves among those fresh clods on the hill, this land was ours, again.
31.
HIATUS
SO WHAT I HAD TO DO THEN, I COULD DO WITH PEACE AND acceptance, and it would not break my heart. I went up to the Forks and spent an afternoon with Rose, telling her goodbye. I think it would have gone harder with us both except that when I came, she had a letter from Cole Sutherland in her hand and a dewy glow on her face. She read part of it to me, where he said he had saved the train fare and would be down for the weekend.
Part of it she did not read out loud, and while we talked she kept the letter folded in her hand, inside her apron pocket. She still had a little cough, but she looked much better, and when I kissed her and left I did not feel that I was forsaking her.
The next morning I went up on the hill to watch the sun come up. The jonquils were up. Little blue hepatica was blooming in the shade of the stones. Almost matter-of-factly I said goodbye to Ben Aaron. I heard myself say to him, like I was someone else, “Well, I have to go now. But only this once—when I come back I shan’t go again.” It was so strange. And then I turned and left them all and did not dare look back.
I hitched the mule to the wagon, and put in my things. And I checked through the house, one last time, and went out and closed the door behind me. I put the key on a nail behind the steps where Rose knew where to find it. My ears were ringing, like I was in a vacuum or something. I got on the wagon and drove away. I could not have looked the old house in the face; I knew it looked resigned, and I would cry.
I turned off the road on the lane to Barz’s place. He had the oxen hitched, and we unhitched the mule and put it in the lot and transferred my stuff to the “taxi” and we trundled off to Red Bank, in the same vehicle, somewhat modified, that the kids and I had arrived in. On every rock and stump and tree, every bend and overlook along that road, some memory was pinned, of something said or something felt, full of private sweetness and yearning and pain. I passed them as casually that day as if I might have been going down to Trotter’s for a spool of thread.
Harmon came to the depot to tell me goodbye. He had one last bit of lawyerly advice to offer: “You know, as long as you are married to that girly-man down there, what you have here is in jeopardy, if he finds out you’ve got it. You don’t HAVE an ugly-sister partnership to stand between him and The Birches. Act poor. The less he knows the better.”
He brought me some magazines to read along the way, and helped me onto the train. I remember waving to him and wondering why he didn’t smile or didn’t even look, while the train pulled away. I settled back and listened to the whistle marking off the crossings. Directly the news butch came through, and I realized I hadn’t eaten anything all that day, and I bought a bar of that awful sticky coconut ribbon candy, and watched sort of blankly out the window as the hills slipped by, and away. And it was cotton land, and pine land, and swamp land and we were on trestles over dark water. And it was sundown, on liveoaks with beards of gray moss, and it was night.
Louise and Uncle Camp were at the station with the children; Uncle Camp had my mother’s touring car. It is awful to say, but I might not have known the kids right off, for Pet had grown so much taller, and slimmer and yet rounder. Female. And Hugh’s legs had grown so long, and his face was thin and serious. They both had an “indoors” look, not like the way I had sent them back, brown right out of th
e tobacco patch. There was a way Pet looked at me, up and down, quickly so as not to be noticed, that made me realize I wasn’t very stylish at the moment.
But Louise clasped me to her heart. She apologized for Foots not coming; “Hubert has a little touch of the grippe,” she said. His mama thought it best he not come out. Aunt Mit was home cooking a big supper, since she was sure I hadn’t eaten in two years. So we got in the car and started for home, Louise in front with Camp and I in the back seat, with the children. I felt like I was ready for anything, just to have my arms around the children again.
“Mama, it has been so awful,” Hugh said into my ear. “You don’t know. He talks about how bad you are, every time he can make us listen. He told us at Christmas that you never would come back, that you had just wanted to get rid of us. We thought about running away and going back to you, but then we didn’t know…”
“Hush, you dunce,” Pet hissed. “Don’t ruin things for Mama. He’s just a fool.” I guess a good wife and mother would have pinched her. I was neither. I gritted my teeth. I couldn’t wait to get to our happy home.
The night was sweet and warm and full of wisteria, and the ocean, and decay. It was the hundred-years-past-rotten smell of musty aristocracy, of old houses so close together the sun never shined between them, and old furniture, and old families, and old grudges and old prides. Oh, I loved it. I didn’t know I had missed it, until I smelled it. All those piazzas, lit up like Christmas. There was a ship coming up the inlet, as we went along, with its lights all on. The street lights shined in the crowns of the palmettoes. I had forgotten there could be so much light at night. Camp pulled up on the street, by the house, and helped us out before he put the car in the garage.
We went in the gate, and I stood on the steps of my father’s house, again. I said to the children, “Your grandfather died here on these steps, in my arms, when I was younger than you.” I had never told them that; I don’t know why. I think maybe I had never come to terms with it, myself. Under the light I noticed Louise looked awfully drawn and pale. “Have you been well?” I asked her.