Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [38]
CHAPTER 10
—HOW MANY ACRES? Stubblefield said.
After hearing the gloomy accounting of his new debt, which made the power pole in Mississippi look like nothing, it was the only question he could think to ask that might result in a happy answer
—In toto? the lawyer said.
—Yeah. One big pile of toto.
The lawyer, a bald buddy of his grandfather’s, gazed at Stubblefield as if some glum preconception had been confirmed. The lawyer adjusted his many papers, making new shapes of them on the green blotter covering most of his desktop. He wore a puckered seersucker suit, blue and white stripes. A square-bottom knit navy tie two fingers wide fixed tight to his wash-and-wear shirt with a gold clasp displaying the geared wheel of the Rotary club. His face was nothing but sags and wrinkles and brown patches, but up top, the skin stretched tight and shiny, and caught the reflection of the slowly turning ceiling fan. Stubblefield couldn’t take his eyes off the shapes of the fan blades circling the tanned pate like an outward expression of thinking. Or a little boy’s beanie with the propeller spinning.
The lawyer licked his thumb and paged through the stacks. He uncapped a tortoiseshell pen and made notes on a yellow tablet as he went, columns of numbers in a style of handwriting long obsolete. Big loops and whorls in blue ink flowing from the split gold nib. He was precise to the point of annoyance. All manner of fractions down to thirty-seconds.
Whereas Stubblefield always kept to whole numbers and rounded up and hoped for the best. Fifteen, Stubblefield thought. Or sixteen. Somewhere in there. It was just a flying fuck of a guess, but the riverside fields were good-sized.
The diddling with numbers went on so long Stubblefield asked for a magazine, and got another glum look.
But eventually, the lawyer said, Fifteen hundred fifty-six and seven-eighths, on the nose. He held his hands out flat, palms down, and then slowly spread them apart. A vestigial gesture. Some gambler move meant to indicate that the deal was unquestionably clean. Riverboat cardsharps in Mark Twain days spread their hands in such a manner, was Stubblefield’s take.
—A lot of rich bottomland, the lawyer said. And there’s the lakefront property and the farm. Pretty remote, though, and just thirty-nine and a quarter. Sad about the house and its contents.
—Uninsured, I’d bet, Stubblefield said.
—Yep. Too bad. Hate to see the historic structures go down. Our collective past, shallow though it is. Old wiring or lightning, one, got it. But what you do is divide that parcel for vacation building lots. It’s called progress.
—I thought progress meant things getting better, Stubblefield said.
The lawyer made a fluttery motion in front of his face with his right hand like shooing gnats. He said, There’s also the Lodge and the Roadhouse. But the thing to get in mind is that the taxes are your most pressing matter.
—Sixteen hundred acres is not nothing.
—No. Nobody said it was. And because it’s not nothing, the county has been running a tab for longer than usual.
Stubblefield might have raised an eyebrow a sixteenth, or a mouth corner. Some slightest twitch interpretable as smugness concerning his new holdings.
The lawyer paused and lifted one knobby-jointed forefinger to indicate that he was thinking. Then he said, That last statement of mine calls for revision. It could lead to a misinterpretation of how things stand around