第20章 The Back of the Lease

The tin came out of the bedroom on the sixth of January, in the cold, in a car parked on the shoulder on the county road at the top of the lane, because Corrine had realized in November that she had been carrying a piece of paper in her glovebox for seven years without ever once turning it over, and that no amount of reading the front of it was ever going to tell her anything. The onionskin was still onionskin. The fold down the middle had gone soft and white and given about a quarter of an inch in each direction, and the typing had faded further, and the carbon bleed through from the face had spread the whole of it into a grey wash that was legible only where the machine had been pressed hardest. She did it properly, because she was a person who had spent seventeen years being careful about exactly this. She laid the sheet flat on the hood of the truck with the sun behind her, and she worked it with a pencil lead rubbed onto the back, which is the oldest trick in the trade and gets a carbon impression off a sheet that no eye can read, and she worked the whole length of it from the top margin to the bottom, and she got the header and the parties and the description and the rent and the term. Then she worked items four through nine and they came up clean. Item ten came up clean. And at the bottom, in the band where the fold is, in the place that Loretta Ambrose had been telling her since 1994 that there was something she could not read, the pencil came up with four lines that were not on the front at all, and that were not part of the tenancy, and that had been pressed into the paper from a different sheet by a different hand on a different day. Corrine sat down on the running board of her truck on the sixth of January with a leafless lane in front of her and a whole hard winter coming, and made herself read it exactly, and then made herself read it again with a pen so that she would have the words in her own hand and not in a graphite ghost, and it came out like this. Lease dated 6 April 1947, Ransome to Tarbell, this ground held one year after the death of the lessee and no longer, the tenancy ends 14 April 1962, this is not to be disputed. Witness my hand this 14th day of April 1962, at the schoolhouse, E. R. And under it, in the same hand, which was not her grandfather's hand and was not her grandmother's hand and was a small upright hand with the letters pressed hard enough to write on the second sheet: Second copy retained by the lessee. Third copy retained by Clovis Ransome and not by his heirs. If the second copy is read against the first, the first is to stand. If the third is produced, the first is not to stand. She read it a fourth time and then she got out her phone and photographed it from four angles, and then she got out her notebook and copied it out in ink, and while she was doing that a car came up the county road and slowed, and she looked up, and it was a car she had not seen before, a county car, and a man got out of it and stood by the open door for a while in the way a man does when he is not sure whether the person he is looking for is the person he came to see. They had a record request with her name on it, dated the thirtieth of December, eleven requests in the queue in front of it, and a line at the bottom in a typist's hand that said DELIVER ON RETENTION REVIEW, which meant that the number-one or the number-two sheet of a 1947 tenancy of a quarter section of section eight was not going to be pulled by an ordinary person on an ordinary Tuesday, and that somebody in an office with a door had decided that it mattered. Corrine put the onionskin flat against the hood of her truck, out of the wind, and got up, and went to the back of the hood, and turned it over, and there was a great deal more pencil on the back of it than she had been reading, because she had been working from the top, and the fold had taken most of a line, and the line under the fold ran the whole width of the paper and had been sitting under a crease since a Thursday in April of 1962, in a county with no name on it in this story, in a schoolhouse with a stove in it. The man by the county car had gotten back in without saying anything, and the car was still standing at the shoulder with its lights on and its exhaust going up white in the cold, and he had not come over and asked her for anything, and had not driven off, and had not waved her down, which meant that whatever he had come to tell her he was content to tell her at a standstill, in the frozen time it took a woman to read four lines of pencil at the tailgate of a truck in a wind off the quarter. She had four words and a name to read, and the light was going, and the car with the county seal on the door was still standing at the shoulder. Loretta was in Dunnage Center at that hour, buying thread, and would be home by half five, and would put the truck away in the shed behind the shop and would look at the kitchen window and see the lane and see that it was empty. Boone was forty minutes off in the shop and would not look out of the window at all. Ida Roegner was four miles north with a lamp on and one ear and a winter evening and no expectation of anybody. The line under the crease was very short. It was four words and a name, pressed so lightly that it had been the least thing anybody put on that paper in 1962 and the last thing anybody had thought to look for since. The county car's driver's door opened again.