第3章 The Paper With Three Copies

The lockbox was a Chesty Bond case under the bed in Loretta's bedroom, and Loretta had owned it since 1974 and had opened it maybe forty times in fifty years, and Corrine knew it was a Chesty Bond case and knew where it was and had never once been invited to look inside, because being the eldest had never turned out to carry any particular authority in the house where she grew up. "You'll want the chair," Loretta said. "It's long." The 1947 tenancy came out on a kitchen table on a Sunday in April, and it came out in three copies, one to the lessor, one to the lessee, one retained, exactly as it had been typed on a machine with a missing e in a government office in a town forty miles over, in the spring when Loretta's mother was a girl of six years old. It was on onionskin the color of weak tea. The typing was faint enough in places that Corrine had to bring the sheet up to the window and tilt it, and the creases had gone through the carbon so that on the retained copy a word was legible and on the lessee's copy the same word was a gray bruise. Corrine had a pen and a legal pad and she read it out loud, which was not what Loretta had offered and was more than anyone had done with the document in the fifty-four months since she had been told it existed. "Lessor: Clovis Ransome, of Dunnage Center. Lessees: Levon Tarbell and Ona Lee Tarbell, his wife, of Fetterling Township." She stopped. "I didn't know her name was Ona Lee." "You'd have been four," said Loretta. "She died before you could hold it up. The year after the flood." Corrine read on. Item one: the demised premises, described as the southeast quarter of section eight, township six north, range four west, being one hundred and sixty acres, more or less, and the barn and the yard and the orchard on the north end. Item two: term. The demised premises for the term of the life of the Lessee and one year thereafter, the tenancy to hold over from year to year thereafter upon like terms unless terminated as herein provided. Item three: rent, sixty dollars the year, payable in produce or in cash at the election of the Lessee, the first year to be credited. Item four: the Lessee to keep the premises in repair, to destroy no timber, and not to sublet without written consent. Item five: the Lessee to leave the mown lane, the ditch and the tree rows as found, and to keep the ditches clean. Item six was the one her grandfather had cared about, and Corrine read it twice. Item six: the Lessee may keep swine and poultry upon the premises and may build and maintain such fences, hog yards and buildings upon the ground back of the hog lane as he shall require for the keeping of said animals, the cost of the same to be his own. She stopped on that one. Loretta was looking at her hands. "That's the hog lane," Corrine said. "That's the hog lane," Loretta said. "That's why we got the hogs. That clause is the only reason there was ever a reason to keep this place. Three dollars a hundred more on the hogs than anybody else could offer, because there was a man in Dunnage Center who owed your grandfather forty years of rent and wanted the whole place quiet." Item seven: the Lessor covenants to keep the ditches, tile mains and waterways on the premises in repair. "Loretta," Corrine said. "That is the clause." "That is the clause," said Loretta Ambrose, and did not look up from her hands, and Corrine read the rest of it in a voice that had begun to go somewhere she had not intended. Item eight: straw, manure and the residue of the crops grown on the demised premises may be removed or used by the Lessee. Item nine: the Lessor agrees to pay for lime and phosphorus delivered at the schoolhouse. Item ten: in case the demised premises are abandoned or quit by the Lessee, the improvements remaining shall remain the property of the Lessor. Then item eleven, which had a great deal of typing above it, and item twelve, which was two lines, and item thirteen, which was the closing. Item eleven: should the Lessee at any time desire to purchase the demised premises, he shall have the option so to do at a valuation to be fixed by three disinterested freeholders of the township, whose certificate of valuation, made in writing and signed by them, shall be delivered to the Lessor, who shall within thirty days either convey the premises to the Lessee upon the terms herein set forth, or permit the Lessee to remove his improvements. Item twelve: if the Lessor shall at any time desire to sell, re-lease or mortgage the demised premises, he shall first offer the same to the Lessee at the same price and upon the same terms, such offer to be made in writing and to stand for thirty days from the making of it. Item thirteen: in witness whereof the parties have set their hands, the day and year first above written, at the schoolhouse in Fetterling Township. It was signed by Clovis Ransome, and by Levon Tarbell, and there were two witnesses in a hand Corrine had never seen before and never saw again: Oran Yoder and Bessie Kimball, both of whom had lived within a mile of that kitchen table, and both of whom were buried in the churchyard a quarter of a mile from where Corrine had been raised. She sat back in the chair. The paper went on smelling of the tin. "There's nothing in here about a hundred and sixty acres being sold in three and a half dollars," she said. "No," said Loretta. "There's nothing in here that says anything about the low field separately at all. It's one quarter. One hundred and sixty acres. The Hollow is thirty-one acres of it and the rest of it is good ground and the house sits on it." "No." "So if we sign anything, we are signing a piece of the bottom half of a quarter section with a house on it, and the buyer is going to take a deed to thirty-one acres out of the middle of it, which cannot be done without a plat, and a plat needs a soil classification, which is why they need my signature on line four, and why they cannot get it without it, which is why you have been sitting on this paper since the fifteenth of March." Loretta's hands had stopped. She was looking at Corrine with the particular steadiness that Corrine had inherited and had spent her whole life trying to talk people out of before they got close enough to hear it. "Read the back of it," Loretta said. "There's nothing on the back of it," Corrine said, turning the sheet. There were pencil marks, old and shallow, where somebody had made a figure and rubbed it out. She tilted it to the window. "There's a farm name at the top in a typewriter font that nobody ever used, it says Sewell Bottom. That's the old name for it. That's the only thing on here about —" "Read the bottom," Loretta said. "The one with the lighter carbon. Turn the whole sheet over." Corrine turned the whole sheet over. There was a second set of carbon marks bleeding through from the face side, which is what happens with three copies run at once on a machine with a hard platen, and it made a grey mirror of the type you could read if you held the paper up against a window with the sun behind it. She did that. She stood at the window with the onionskin against the glass and the winter coming back at the yard, and read the reversed text of item eleven from the back, and it said exactly what the front had said, and she lowered the paper, and looked at her mother. "There is nothing on the back of this," she said. "Mom. There is nothing on the back of this paper." "Yes there is," said Loretta Ambrose, "and you will not see it standing up. Sit down at that table and hold it flat and put the lamp low and you will see it, because I have known since about 1994 that there is a line on the back of that paper that I have never been able to read, and I have never once been able to get anybody else to read it either, and I am not going into that house up to the nursing place without somebody having read it first." She said it evenly. She did not cry. Corrine had watched her mother handle four funerals and two diagnoses and the dissolution of a marriage, and the thing she always did when the ground came up was to get practical, which was how Corrine had learned to do it too. They sat down at the table. Corrine put the lamp low on its ring and slid the paper flat and pressed her thumbs along the fold and looked, and looked, and at the third pass down she saw it: a pencil line, very faint, running the whole width of the back in the band where the fold would be, a line of hand that had been pressed so lightly that it lived in the paper's grain and not on its face. It was not a signature. It was not a date. It was a set of figures, and it began with a dollar mark, and it was the reason Loretta Ambrose had spent thirty years not sleeping well on the subject of a piece of ground nobody else in the family thought was worth the lamp oil. ---