Hog Wild

by Cathy Pickens

  I swung open the front door, delighted to see my Luna Lake neighbor. “Sadie Waynes! How nice to see you! And Ms. Downing.” Sadie lives on the other side of the hill behind the cabin, which is a long drive around by car, but up there, that counts as a neighbor. From a long affection for my grandfather begun in her childhood, she keeps an eye on me.

  She looked out of place in my Victorian entry hall in her baggy work jeans and plaid flannel shirt, her gray hair hanging in a thick braid.

  “Hope you don’t mind us stopping in. You know Dot”

  “Sure.” The lady who’d once owned Golden Cove. “We’re very sorry to barge in unannounced,” said Dot, “but we just left the courthouse and we didn’t want to wait.”

  “Come in, come in. Things are still a jumble. I’m sorry. We can clear off a couple of chairs.”

  I pulled the French doors closed—the ones I’d dressed up with locks and new latches on Friday. Not that visitors would notice the new hardware as quickly as they noticed I was sitting on a stack of book boxes while they sat in the only two uncluttered chairs. I needed to get this office finished and get down to business.

  “A’vry, I made Dot come,” Sadie said, taking the lead. “What’s been done needs to be put right.”

  Dot, dainty in her slacks and windbreaker, was almost a foot shorter than Sadie. Both had the same tough, nut-brown gardener’s tan and both spoke with the same hill-country twang, though Dot had a bit more polish and didn’t tend to parcel out her words as sparingly as Sadie.

  “That Lionel Shoal pulled a fast one, and I fell for it” Dot said. “Sadie here and Maggy Avinger had a talk with me, made me see the light. With Shoal, what got said and what got done aren’t atall the same. But what can I do now?”

  “Horsewhippin’ would be a start,” Sadie offered. Dot barely paused, doubtless having heard Sadie’s extreme views repeated often. “Maggy took us to the courthouse, showed us how to look up deeds and such. She had to learn things, probating her parents’ estate—and for her husband. Sadie’s seen it, too. Right there. What’s on those papers don’t read like what he told me.”

  “Give her the copies.” Sadie waved her hand at Dot as if shooing a cat

  Maggy pulled a folded sheaf of papers from her coat pocket.

  “We copied these at the courthouse.”

  She handed me a registered deed of trust for a parcel of land, transferred from one Dorothy Brandt Downing to Lionel Shoal, d/b/a The Shoal Company Properties.

  “This is the deed for what Shoal’s calling Golden Cove?”

  “And it’s one fat lie.” The anger built in Dot the longer she sat, as though walking from the courthouse to my office had dissipated it some and inaction allowed it to build strength.

  “What do you mean?” I skimmed over the deed. The only real estate closings I’d been in were when I bought my condo in Columbia and when I sold it. Based on my book learning and limited experience, the deed looked standard.

  “For one, he promised it would keep a sizable section in what he called a conservancy, so nobody could ever build on it. He said he’d have to pay me less because of that, because he couldn’t build on it and he’d make less money on his development. Said he thought it was the right thing to do. Said it would attract the right kind of people to live there. People who would care about the land and preserving it. It’s all lies.” Her voice spit with disgust.

  “How do—”

  “Maggy said it should be in that deed, in something called a covenant. Like God’s covenant. God keeps his covenants. Lionel Shoal ought to roast over his broken ones for eternity.”

  Remind me not to make little Dot Downing mad.

  I turned through the pages, scanning the traditional boilerplate language.

  “There is something about a conservancy,” I said.

  They both stirred, surprised.

  “It also mentions mineral rights. What was your understanding about that?” I asked as I read, trying to make sense of this unusual provision.

  “Mineral rights? We never talked atall about that.”

  “Shoal as the grantee retains all mineral rights, in both the conserved property and fee simple—the non-reserved property.”

  I looked up from the handful of papers.

  Sadie’s eyes narrowed.

  “What’s that mean?” asked Dot, her fingers twining and untwining.

  “I don’t really know.” I didn’t want to tell them what was on the tip of my tongue—that I wasn’t sure what good a covenant to protect land was if somebody had the right to tear up parts of it looking for minerals. I also doubted the tax shelter offered by the conservancy would hold up if the grant didn’t effectively protect the land. I wasn’t fluent in the language of South Carolina land conservancy, but from a practical point of view, this didn’t seem to offer much protection.

  “Can you leave this with me? Let me study it some more? I’d like to check a few things.”

  The two friends looked at each other for confirmation, then Dot nodded.

  She leaned forward. I thought she was about to impart an important bit of information, but she whispered, “Do you mind if I use your restroom before we go?”

  “Not at all. It’s down the hall, tucked behind the stairs.”

  Yet another thing I needed to be more businesslike about. Was the bathroom clean? Did it have paper and towels? For Pete’s sake. I’d never had to worry about such things in a big law firm with a downtown city office.

  After Dot left the room, I said to Sadie, “I didn’t realize you and Ms. Downing were friends.”

  She nodded. “We go a long ways back. She’s older, but we kinda grew up together.”

  I had no way of knowing how old Sadie was, with her weathered face and her sturdy, hard build.

  “Hate I missed you at the plant rescue,” I said. “Wadn’t there.”

  I must have looked surprised.

  “Didn’t really see any point. Plants don’t much live except where they choose for theirselves. No need to go moving ‘em around.”

  “The nursery lady in charge of it all, she helped flag particular plants and told us how to handle them.” I’m sure my voice carried my hopefulness.

  Sadie shrugged. “Just haven’t seen it myself. Guess if you make money moving plants into people’s yards, you must know.” She sounded skeptical.

  Sadie stood with her hands in her pockets, looking around the two large rooms and through the French doors into the entry hall. In the front room where we were, a bay window opened onto the generous front porch. I planned on using this as the reception area, though I had no plan about who would be here to do the receiving. On the opposite side from the bay window, wide pocket doors led into the bookcase-lined study that was becoming my office.

  Melvin’s offices were a mirror image of mine, also with a bay-windowed parlor in front. His back office occupied the old dining room and boasted a breathtaking crystal chandelier heavily iced with prisms. His rooms lacked the massive bookcases that his grandfather had built into what was now my office. Fortunately for me, investment gurus don’t need as many books as lawyers do—and maybe the crystal prisms could serve as multiple little crystal balls for Melvin’s financial forecasts. So we were both happy.

  “Nice place,” Sadie pronounced over my two rooms.

  “Thanks. I really like it here. Moving in is taking longer than I’d planned. Lots of work to do in a place like this.”

  “I remember the funeral parlor,” she said, surveying the rich wainscoting and the trimwork on the bookcases.

  I’d never stood here imagining these rooms as a funeral parlor. They had probably held viewings in these rooms. I shivered a bit.

  Sadie walked over to examine the molding around the floor-to-ceiling windows, then craned her neck to take in the plaster medallion around the ceiling fixture.

  “This has a good feel,” she said with finality. “A good place.” She turned to face me, her black eyes piercing. “Your grandfather would be pleased. Very
happy. This is a good place. You belong here.”

  I was surprised—and oddly comforted.

  “Thank you.” It was as if she had pronounced a benediction, blessed me on my way.

  Dot bustled in from the hallway. “A’vry, I don’t know how to thank you. I hate to burden you with my problems, but Sadie insisted, and I know how very wise she is about such.”

  I walked them to the front door, making what I hoped were reassuring sounds. From the porch, I watched as they strode down the short walk to Main Street, Sadie towering protectively over her friend.

  Here it was, late on Monday afternoon, the start of another week, and I didn’t have a paying case in sight. True, living could be done with remarkable frugality in Dacus—no house payment, no car payment. I had my savings, the proceeds from the sale of my condo in Columbia, and the generous sum Jake Baker had paid me for helping him with a case in February.

  Also true, I’d only been back for a while, didn’t even have my office set up. But the cases wandering in my door thus far weren’t going to buy many meals at Maylene’s or whatever rent Melvin decided to charge me for this office. I had left behind my courtroom life. Now I needed to master the bread-and-butter work of lawyers: title searches, real estate closings, and wills. Things people expected to pay for when they walked in a lawyer’s office. The boring stuff.

  I looked back at the top of the box where I’d laid Dot’s sheaf of papers. Too many puzzles. And too many things taxing the limits of my knowledge. Give me a courtroom with a complicated lawsuit involving a drug company or a knotty business fraud. Let me immerse myself in that, learning unimaginably arcane bits about processes and problems I never knew existed. Oh—and include the resources for sophisticated computer searches, for flying around doing research, for hiring experts, and for support staff. Don’t leave me here with clients who couldn’t pay, problems that didn’t have solutions, and me worrying about soap and toilet paper in the bathroom. What had I gotten myself into?

  This is a good place. You belong here. My benediction.

  I picked up the pages of the deed. No mention of an attached trust. What did Lionel Shoal want with the mineral rights? Had he been fooled into thinking an abandoned gold mine might have potential? I faintly remembered something about an old mine reopening in South Carolina, but nowhere near here.

  I couldn’t afford the time, but I needed to walk. I went out back to my car and, from the rear floorboard, dug out some sweats and tennis shoes. I’d taken to carrying my worldly possessions with me—or at least comfortable clothes and shoes and a book to read—since I never know where I’ll end up for the night.

  The five-mile trek I’d measured out took in parts of Dacus twice, as well as some country roads. The whole hour I walked, gold mines and mineral rights kept tumbling around in my head. I decided to make a detour to the library.

  I always think of it as the “new” library, though it had celebrated its fifteenth anniversary in its quietly carpeted building with vaulted ceiling and tinted-window walls. I still fondly remembered the creaky, bright library I’d grown up in, housed in a former community-center basketball court, outfitted with peeling floor tiles and scarred maple tables. This one was nice, but the old one would remain “the” library in my mind.

  The librarian unlocked the Carolina Collection room and showed me more on gold mining than I could read at one sitting. Large-scale strip mines on reopened veins in Lancaster and Kershaw counties and a new operation in Fairfield County had been operating in South Carolina for at least two decades. Other than a few roadside operations farther into the North Carolina mountains where tourists panned for gold or gem-stones, no commercial gold-mining activity had existed in these mountains since the Civil War.

  Gemstone deposits were more common in North Carolina. Even day-trippers had unearthed rubies, sapphires, quartz, and emeralds of news-reportable size. A magazine article detailed one man’s zealous search, farther east around the North Carolina Piedmont town of Hiddenite, a particularly rich mineral region. His persistence had paid off when he discovered an eighty carat emerald, the first of many lush finds on his property. But again, no articles mentioned any major gemstone veins or finds in the mountains around Dacus.

  After the 1799 discovery of a seventeen-pound gold nugget on the Reed farm near Charlotte, the whole region went crazy. A United States mint had to be built in Charlotte to handle the gold that was carried out of North and South Carolina, but the mint didn’t last long after the California strike proved richer. Historically, gemstone and gold mining here had been small stuff, from small veins—as Rudy had said, mostly farmers supplementing their crops and filling in time with a pickax along a quartz vein or, more often, a pan in a stream.

  When the librarian—a young woman with rich, waist-length brown hair—politely shoved me out the door at closing time, I still didn’t know why Lionel Shoal was so bent on obtaining those mineral rights. He either knew something several hundred years’ worth of hill folks hadn’t found, or he was an idiot who thought that shallow crack in the rock hid the Lost Treasury of the Confederacy and the locals had been too stupid to find it.

  I strolled the few blocks back to the office. The lights were on upstairs in Melvin’s apartment. I had no reason to go back in my office, so I headed up the mountain to my little cabin.

  The winding road was fun, though I didn’t push it too fast—hitting a deer, or a whole herd of them, was a real risk this time of year. Cars and people don’t always survive those meetings. Not too good for the deer, either.

  As I drove along the two ruts that lead through the woods, I realize that, somewhere in the last few months, I’d stopped constantly referring to the cabin as “my grandfather’s cabin.” He’d built it both as a retreat and as a gathering place. He’d come here to write and think, but also for picnics and barbecues when he called together his family: my parents, his younger sisters Aletha, Hattie, and Vinnia, various friends. He’d built it close enough to town that everyone could drive home after the festivities, and he’d built it small, so few people presumed they could stay. I’d often spent the night, after those picnics, tucked up in the loft under the eaves, listening through the soffit to the wind blow whispers through the evergreens and oaks outside.

  Now, with Emma the only child and most of the family too busy to spend time canoeing or fishing or playing horseshoes, we usually gathered at my parents’ or great-aunts’ houses in town rather than here. So it had returned to my grandfather’s original purpose, a retreat. Part of me would be content to stay here forever.

  As I unlocked the door, I glanced up at the loft, the ladder still propped in place. I needed to bring Emma here. I doubted she’d ever stayed in the loft, but she was the kind of kid who would appreciate it.

  To feed my nostalgia, I popped some popcorn in the unnostalgic but convenient microwave, settled on the cracked leather sofa, and started flipping through one of my grandfather’s thick bound journals. He’d kept several, and I kept finding them in odd places—tucked in his old desk or behind some dusty Reader’s Digest magazines in the cabin or in a dresser.

  At first, reading what he’d written had been guilt-tinged. But then I realized, Granddad was a deliberate man. He could have gathered his journals all in one place, or he could have destroyed them. Everyone could’ve found them, or no one. Instead, he’d scattered them about, not buried, just not displayed. Somehow it felt as though he’d left a trail of bread crumbs. For one particular bird?

  On occasion, in a ruminating mood, I would randomly pull one out. The faint odor of his pipe tobacco lingered in this volume, perhaps because some flecks had sifted into the seams. In this sofa, with dusk closed in, his words felt as though he’d come back for a visit.

  Had to get up in front of Judge Mabry today and argue with a straight face that the Grubie boys should be let out on bail and that they’d pledged to quit cooking liquor. The bail request wasn’t funny, but their pledge was, and the judge knew it

  They still ref
use to tell where their still is. Their story—to me and everybody else—is that they bought that truckload of corn liquor off “some ol’boys” up in Bear Wallow Cove. Can’t tell us who those ol’ boys are. Even the bailiff was grinning like a mule eating briars at the thought of a Grubie buying liquor off somebody when they got one of the proudest shine traditions in these hills. I don’t know what made Judge Mabry maddest, them refusing to tell about the still or the high-speed chase. As high speed as you can get in a Model A Ford truck rattling full of quart jars. Come to think of it, it was probably the part when they took off from the traffic light with the deputy riding the running board and clinging on for dear life that got to Judge Mabry. Wouldn’t have been as funny if somebody’d gotten hurt, but nobody did and what a picture that must have been. In the hallway later, the judge laughed until he had tears on his cheeks. Too little opportunity for such mirth in his job, I’m sure.

  Have been reading about a fellow—a lawyer—who came from Tennessee to log this part of the country around the turn of the century. He got tired of starving doing title searches. I almost laughed aloud. How many lawyers have relied on—and despised—title work? Most of the young fellows have assistants who do that now. But do any of them get to practice law in the way they thought they would when they set out on their course?

  The photos showed trees in the upper reaches of the Chattooga—immense beyond imagination. A man leaned back against an old-growth poplar, eclipsed by the trunk —gave me pause. I’d heard tales of logging throughout the Southern Appalachians. Needed lumber to feed growth —homes, factories, mansions in Charleston, ships, everything the post-Civil War wrought. I’d read about destructive clear-cutting, erosion—the reason they started planting that damnable kudzu vine that’s overtaken everything it can reach. I’d never somehow seen what we ‘d lost. Never really seen it. Massive trees, beyond imagination. Gone.

  We never know how to move by half measures. We’re watching a shell game, certain that we’ve got our eye on the thing we want until the shell is lifted, and we find what we want still hidden behind what we thought we had.