We drove through the mill village just as people was going to work. The mill hands carried lunch pails with them. They looked like prisoners lined up to go through the bars. At the same time the night shift was leaving. The lint on their shoulders and hair looked like frost. They slumped in the cold morning.
The depot was on the hill past the village. We drove by the lake and Crossroads Church. Tom stopped at the platform and give me a twenty-dollar gold piece. “Pay what the lawyer asks,” he said. “I’ll be here when the train comes at five-thirty.”
I saw I had to do this for Tom, as well as for Pa and the children. The place meant more to Tom maybe than anybody else. I had never gone to talk to a lawyer before, but I was going to make this trip count, whatever had to be done.
There was half a dozen people waiting on the platform. One of the Jenkins boys had a crate of chickens he was taking to market. Tildy Tankersley stood there with a bandage around her jaw. I guess she was going to the dentist. “I hear you’re having some trouble,” she said, talking from the side of her mouth.
“If it’s not one thing it’s another,” I said.
“The Lord lets his own be tested,” she said. She talked slow, as though in terrible pain.
Everybody was watching Pa and me, and I felt like they knowed exactly why we was going to town. Bad luck is made even worse when everybody knows about it.
I was glad when the train come grunting and groaning up the mountain. There was a steep grade above Saluda, and every time the train arrived at the depot it looked tired-out and covered with sweat. The pant of the locomotive was fast as a dog on a hot day. When the cars come to a stop I started to climb up but the conductor stood on the steps and yelled, “Stand aside. I say stand aside!” I jumped back and he handed a mailbag to Wiley Waters. I had forgot how rude conductors would talk to you.
When we finally got on and set down I was shaky with anger. The seats looked smaller and dirtier than I remembered. Maybe it was an old car. “We could have drove the wagon,” I said to Pa.
“That would have took half a day just to get there,” Pa said.
Once the train started I felt better. It always lifts my spirits to move. The train creaked and squealed at first and then begun to pick up speed. I could hear the thud of the puffing engine. We pulled through the big cut beyond the depot where the tracks curve across the divide and down into the valley of the French Broad. There was houses above the cut, and a few hickories that still had yellow leaves. As we come out above Flat Rock I saw men butchering a hog hoisted on a walnut limb. The scalding water boiled up to the clouds.
The fields along Mud Creek was level as an ironing board. Water from October rain stood in low spots. The soil looked sooty.
“This land never was no count,” Pa said. “Just fit for a town.”
Beyond the creek we passed sheds and shacks and lots covered with scrap metal. There was a sawmill, lumberyard, brickyard. Warehouses echoed each other across the tracks. A gravel heap was held by pilings. As we come alongside the platform men with hand trucks and pushcarts moved toward the back of the train.
Women in fine dresses and velvet hats, and men in fancy coats, was getting off the forward cars. Carriages lined up to meet them. I saw a woman in a lavender coat and hat that could have been Mrs. Vanderbilt. She looked slim and beautiful.
The main part of the town was on the hill above the depot. I took Pa’s arm and we hurried up Seventh Avenue toward Main. There was pawnshops and secondhand stores along the avenue.
“Do you want to see my new shipment of cloth?” a man shouted from the doorway of a dry goods store.
“Let’s go right to the lawyer’s office,” I said.
Most of the lawyers in town had offices at the south end near the courthouse. We walked almost the length of town to get there. A trolley clanged down the middle of Main, and there was horses going every which way. My head buzzed with all the movement. It was hard to remember what I was doing among the confusion.
Lawyer Gibbs’s office was on the second floor of a building just beyond Drake’s Store. We climbed the dark carpeted stairs to a waiting room. A young man set at a desk piled with papers and bundles tied in red ribbons. “How may I serve you?” he said. He had garters above his elbows.
“We want to see Lawyer Gibbs,” I said.
“And what is the nature of your business?” the clerk said.
“It’s about our boundary line,” I said.
“I see, a land dispute,” he said, and raised his eyebrows.
“Tell the lawyer Ben Peace wants to see him,” Pa said.
But we had to set in that dark room near an hour before talking to Lawyer Gibbs. I don’t know if he was at court and come in a back way, or if he was just working with his papers. It was almost dinnertime when the young man admitted us to see him.
“Good to see you, Ben,” the lawyer said when we finally walked in. He rose and shook hands vigorously with Pa. “And this is Ginny? Why I’ve not seen Ginny since she was a button.”
Gibbs’s desk was also covered with folders and bundles of papers in red tape. It was hard to believe people had wrote so many thousands of pages. There was stacks of papers on the floor, and books piled in corners and spilling out of bookcases. The room smelled of paper and dust and some kind of cologne.
I explained to Mr. Gibbs why we had come, and he listened, turned in his chair toward the window. I described the boundary line and how long it had been where it was.
“Have you had the line surveyed?” the lawyer said.
“The line was run about thirty years ago,” Pa said, “the last time Johnson made trouble.”
“And the boundary was marked?” Gibbs said.
“It was marked,” I said. “But Johnson took up the markers.”
“How was it marked?”
“With iron pins at the corners and a right-of-way cut along the line,” Pa said.
“And the pins are gone now?” Gibbs said.
“Every one of them.”
“And I suppose the right-of-way has grown up?”
“It had till Johnson started cutting timber there,” Pa said.
The window of Gibbs’s office looked out over rooftops. There was false fronts and walls of brick and sooty chimneys. A clothesline stretched from poles. Birds set on telephone wires and a cat crouched on the edge of a wall watching them. It seemed strange to be looking over people’s roofs. Some roofs was covered with tar paper and had puddles on them. Smoke leaned from chimneys. It was the drabbest thing I had ever seen. But way beyond the smoke and wires I could see the line of mountains. Overcast covered the tops of ridges, but the blue slopes looked clear and fresh compared to the clutter and soot of rooftops.
“Do you have a deed?” Lawyer Gibbs said.
“We sure do,” I said. I got the paper from my purse. I had took it from Pa’s trunk that morning. It was yellow with age.
“This is not a deed,” Gibbs said as he turned the document over and read it on both sides. “This is just a bill of sale.”
“It specifies where the land is,” I said, and how much there is. It has always served as a deed before.”
“This is not a legal document,” Gibbs said.
“It says the tract corners at the mouth of Cabin Creek and at the mouth of Schoolhouse Branch,” I said. “And it runs straight to the top of Olivet Ridge. It has the compass readings on it.”
“Readings that old don’t mean a thing,” the lawyer said.
“What are you saying?” Pa said.
“I’m saying it don’t look like you have a valid documentation of boundaries,” Gibbs said.
“This land has been in the family almost a century,” I said. I felt my face getting hot. “And it’s registered in the courthouse. And besides, everybody knows where our land is.”
“Except Johnson?” Gibbs said.
“Johnson knows too,” Pa said. “He’s trying to get back at me.”
“For what?” Lawyer Gibbs said.
“Don’t know,” Pa said. “I just know he wants to get back at me.”
“So you’re not going to help us?” I said. A flock of pigeons flew by the windows. They looked like flakes of paint that had peeled off the gray sky.
“It’s hard to make a case without a valid deed,” Gibbs said.
“Our deed has always been valid before,” I said. I wanted to get up and leave that office. And I wanted to get away from town. But if I up and left our trip would be wasted.
“Times are different now,” Gibbs said. “The courts have got tougher and the laws are tighter.”
“We can pay you,” I said, and lifted the purse from my lap.
Gibbs paused, then turned toward Pa, like he wasn’t talking to me. “I’d like to help you, Ben. Maybe if I check to see what they have at the courthouse I can have a deed made as the basis of a suit. At least you would have a valid document then.”
“I’d be mighty obliged,” Pa said.
“Of course that won’t solve your problem with Johnson,” Gibbs said. “After getting a solid deed you will have to charge him with trespass and ask the court for an injunction against him. The court would then authorize a survey before it would listen to arguments or go to trial. That could take months, even longer.”
“I know that,” Pa said.
“Is there no way to hurry it up?” I said. “Johnson has cut a lot of timber on us.”
“No legal way,” Gibbs said.
“Johnson has to be stopped,” I said.
“I will need a retaining fee for my services,” Gibbs said.
“How much?” I said.
“Say a hundred dollars,” Gibbs said. “But it may require more as the case proceeds. This kind of suit can take time.”
“I have only fifty,” I said.
“I have fifty,” Pa said.
We counted out the money in gold pieces and silver dollars. It was more than I had ever paid for anything. “Ain’t there nothing we can do now to stop Johnson?” I said.
“I can send him a letter saying proceedings will be instituted against him unless he desists,” Gibbs said. “Sometimes such a letter will have the desired effect.”
“Then please send it,” I said.
By the time we left Gibbs’s office I was exhausted. The air outside was cold but refreshing. I wanted to hurry out of town.
“Do you need to do some shopping?” Pa said.
“I have spent all my money except for change,” I said. “Let’s buy something for the kids and go back to the depot.”
It was exactly a week later that we got the letter from Johnson’s lawyer, answering the one Gibbs had sent to Johnson. It was a long letter on crisp paper and Pa read it on the way back from the mailbox. He handed it to me without saying a thing. I wiped my hands and set down to skim the shiny pages.
Insofar as you have trespassed for decades on Johnson land and had the use of the mountaintop property where the peach and apple orchard is located, and have cut firewood and timber inside the said Johnson boundary, you are hereby asked to cease and desist from further intrusion. Unless my clients are satisfied your trespass and usurpation are at an end they will have no recourse but to institute proceedings in court to restrain and punish the infringement.
“What does it really mean?” I said.
“It means Thurman is answering Gibbs’s letter with his own threatening letter,” Pa said.
“That’s all it is?” I said.
“Just a bluff,” Pa said. “I’ve gone through this before.”
The letter made me feel dirty. I went to wash my hands. It was a terrible thing to touch, some lawyer’s fancy words of warning about our own property. We almost never got an official type letter. The talk of lawyers was calculated to make you feel stupid and guilty. Just reading those sentences made you feel hopeless. The letter laid on the table like a sentence of doom.
When Tom come back to the house for supper I read the letter to him. He listened with his head down looking at the floor. It was the way he always set when he was worried. His cheeks reddened as I quoted the lawyer’s bleak words. Once he started to slam the table with his fist, but stopped hisself.
“Ain’t this a pretty come-off?” Pa said. “After all the work you’ve done to improve that orchard.”
“Are you going to shoot Johnson?” Moody said.
“Be quiet,” I said.
Tom studied for a while without touching his supper. “I don’t even know where the lines are myself,” he said. “The first thing to do is find all the boundary lines and mark them again.”
“Nobody but Pa knows where all the lines are,” I said.
“Then we’ll walk the lines and mark them,” Tom said. “It’s the first thing to do.”
I couldn’t see that just walking the boundaries and driving stakes and trimming brush would solve the dispute with Johnson, but at least it was something to do. If Pa showed where the lines was we could mark them for the future. Tom and me needed to know. Iron pins would have to be drove into the corners again.
“Can I come?” Moody said.
“Me too,” Muir said.
“You will stay here with Jewel,” I said.
“Oh goody,” Jewel said.
Next morning was clear and cool. I put on a coat and scarf. Tom got an ax and four pipes from the shed. He cut stakes from sourwood saplings. Pa carried an ax also, and his walking stick.
I took my little notebook and a pencil from the mantel. I wanted to record all the boundaries Pa showed us. Putting it down in writing would make the effort more worthwhile.
“What are you going to do with that?” Tom said.
“I’m going to write down everything Pa points out,” I said. “That way we will have a document of what he knows.”
We walked through the cornfield down to the river. Tom had already picked the corn, and stalks rattled their dry leaves.
“The river is high,” Pa said. Rains had kept the water murky and sloshing into the bushes on the bank. The current was faster than I expected, as though hurried by the sunlight and wind.
“There goes a muskrat,” Pa said.
A whiskered head swum and disappeared under the far bank.
“There’ll be no traps set in water this high,” Pa said.
We crossed the pasture branch on the foot log. Minnows playing in the shallows shined like seeds. Sand had pushed up in cushions and fans where the branch entered the river. We had not tended all the lower bottom that year and goldenrod there was singed by frost and smoked thistledown across the blackened weeds.
“I cleared up this land when I married your mama,” Pa said. “It was nothing but a maple swamp, and still floods in a wet year.” Big puddles stretched under the weeds in places. The water was stained by leaves and dead stalks. A rabbit darted through the briars. It was an ugliness I loved.
When we reached the mouth of Schoolhouse Branch I saw the water was high over the foot log. Or maybe the foot log had been washed away. “Where does the marker go?” I asked Pa.
“The deed says the corner is the mouth of the branch,” Pa said. “But the branch has moved downriver a little in the past sixty years. The pin Johnson removed was right here.”
There was no dent where the pin had stuck for so long. Whoever pulled it out had smoothed the place over and piled leaves and trash on it. Tom drove a pipe so deep you wouldn’t notice unless you was looking for it. I wrote a sentence about the place in the notebook. It was odd to be writing outdoors, to put the mouth of the branch and the sand and trees into sentences.
As I watched Tom work I thought how the place meant more to me because it meant so much to him. I wished I could write down how I felt about him in the notebook, just like I was describing the corners and boundaries. I wished I could put down once and for all how he really was.
“If we had a compass we could run the line from here just by sighting to the top of the mountain,” Pa said.
“But we don’t have a compass,” I said.
“It’s best to set a transit by the North Star,” Tom said.
“That’s true,” Pa said. “But it’s daytime, and we don’t have a transit.” He chuckled, but I knowed he was as worried as I was.
The woods across the branch had overgrowed the bank. There was hazelnuts and shoemake bushes crowding there too.
“The line runs up this side of the bank,” Pa said, “right to the ridge yonder.” He pointed to the mountain with his cane. It was easy to look up there, but between the river and the corner on the ridge we had a mile of muddy branch and sinkholes, thickets and barbed wire, briar and rocks to get through.
“Can you walk that far?” I said to Pa.
“Huh!” he said with a snort. “I’ve walked fifty miles a day in my time, with a full pack on my back and a rifle in my hand.”
As we worked our way up the branch through pines Tom drove stakes and blazed trees. We passed a pit where Joe and Locke had dug for zircons years ago, filled with leaves and sticks. Pa showed us a rock below the schoolhouse two feet from the line. Florrie and me had played house there as girls. I hadn’t seen it for years. The rock was hid by ivies and there was still broke cups and saucers in leaves. The rock was white quartz with moss on its sides. Florrie and me had called it the Ice Cream Rock.
Children was playing in the yard of the school, even though the new term hadn’t started. “Hey, what are you doing?” one of the Waters boys called.
“We’re looking for something,” I called back.
The new session wouldn’t begin till after Christmas. I reckon the kids had just met there to play.
“Are you going to fight the Johnsons?” the Waters boy called.
“Nobody is going to fight,” I shouted back.
As we started climbing we slowed down for Pa’s sake. He showed us where the line crossed the road and run right up the holler adjoining the Jenkins yard. There was a pin on the roadbank under brush that Johnson had missed. It was right where Pa said the line was. I wrote down the place by the road.
I stayed with Pa on the higher ground while Tom went through the holler blazing trees and driving a stake every few yards. The trees there was strung with grapevines that looked like big cobwebs. It was a good place to pick foxgrapes in September. Pa used to gather enough there for Mama to make fifty jars of jelly.
The Truest Pleasure Page 23