Hog Wild

by Cathy Pickens

  Once I forced myself to start reading, it all appeared straightforward. My great-grandfather—Aletha’s, Hattie’s, Vinnia’s, and Granddad’s father—had bequeathed his various properties to his children. The house on Main Street—the family homeplace—was given to my grandfather as the “oldest and only surviving son.” That wording gave me pause for a moment Had there been another son? I’d never heard of one. The three sisters had been given some farm property and stocks and money. Granddad had been the residual legatee, the one who received anything left over after a few small gifts to charitable organizations, which included the Dacus First Baptist Church.

  All pretty predictable. The boy gets the house. Great-granddad must have been a bit progressive. Not only had all my great-aunts attended college, they’d also received income-producing property at a time not far removed from when women were treated as property themselves.

  I next opened the last will and testament of Avery Hampton Howe, my grandfather, which detailed his specific bequests. The cabin to his only child, my mother—which surprised me. Everyone in the family used it, and I’d never thought about who owned it. The house on Main Street had gone to Aletha, Vinnia, and Hattie in equal shares. The deed registered the house according to his wishes: The three sisters owned the house as joint tenants with right of survivorship. Each held an equal share which, upon the death of one, would pass to the survivors.

  All very straightforward. Not like the wills we’d studied in class. No violations of the rule against perpetuities, no defective witnesses. Simple and clean and valid.

  The textbook wills that, over the centuries, had presented dramatic courtroom clashes held no real passion. Holding these wills, I realized a last testament is only an intellectual exercise when the transfer involves property you’ve never spent the night in and people you’ve never eaten Christmas dinner with. This one, for me, was difficult to critique, and quite powerful. Too close to home.

  My grandfather—my idol and the reason I’d gone to law school—had done what his father had done: passed the family homestead down to those in the best position to use and care for it. Both men had relied on familial feeling and good sense to dictate how their heirs chose to live—and die. All had worked predictably well, right up until Ava whatever-her-name-was moved into a cute little retirement village apartment.

  In order not to complicate the situation for his sisters, much younger than he was, my grandfather had left other property to my mother and had not included her as one of the joint owners of the home place. The three great-aunts could dispose of their house as they saw fit—as long as they all agreed.

  How should I counsel Vinnia and Hattie? Technically, they shared ownership of the house equally with Aletha, but that didn’t offer an easy solution. Aletha could buy them out, but I doubted she could pay enough to buy them a cute little retirement-village condo. Also, as the oldest of the three, Aletha was the one most likely to need nursing care first. A mean thought flashed to mind: Maybe that’s why Hattie and Vinnia are thinking about clearing out. Nobody would relish caring for Aunt Letha.

  I really wanted to talk to Mom or Dad, but I had to keep this family issue to myself.

  One thing I couldn’t bring myself to contemplate was my family no longer living in that house. I needed somewhere to live. If somebody had to buy out Aunt Hattie and Aunt Vinnia, maybe I could. I shuddered as the reality of that dawned. Roomies with Aunt Letha?

  To distract myself from that thought, I unearthed my laptop. Between baking cookies with Emma tonight and rafting tomorrow with Melvin, my social calendar seriously cut in on my work time. Even with scant few paying clients, I still had a lot on my to-do list.

  I started with Dot Downing’s file. Despite several attempts using different search words, I couldn’t turn up a South Carolina case that dealt directly with setting aside a land transfer because of fraud by a buyer. I clicked through plenty of case summaries in which sellers defrauded purchasers, but I couldn’t find even one in which the buyer had done the defrauding.

  Surely other swindlers and shysters had used similar schemes to filch valuables from unsuspecting, good hearted people like Dot Downing. Once they were caught, was the legal outcome so predictable the cases were never appealed? That would explain why my South Carolina case search wasn’t turning up any appellate reports.

  If half of what I understood about Dot Downing’s case was true, we could easily prove fraud in the inducement. Fraud typically means proving a willful deceit or “guilty mind,” which described nicely what I’d seen of Lionel Shoal’s dealings. Proving fraud should entitle Dot to set aside the contract; she would return anything she’d received and Shoal’s estate would return anything he’d taken.

  The problem lay with those splintered ruins at Golden Cove—and the ruins Shoal had left of his private life, especially Alex Shoal. If the transaction was reversed and Dot got her land back, Shoal’s company or his estate—whoever had ownership of the development—could claim Dot owed them for improvements made on the land. Not that I personally would call road cuts, grading, and bombed-out buildings “improvements.” Would damage such as loss of native plants and destruction of wetlands count as a set-aside, a counterbalance to any claimed “improvements”? It certainly should. Questionable improvements versus irreversible damage. Easy calculation, to my way of thinking. I’d have to make a Columbia law library visit; my database access here was limited.

  The other complication was where had Shoal gotten the money to pay for the construction? That would also take more digging.

  I decided to work on a problem that felt closer to a solution. If I hurried, I could see Innis Barker before he closed. First, I dialed Carlton Barner’s number and was a bit surprised when Lou Wray asked if I could hold a few minutes while he finished with a client. Sure, I’d wait on hold. Much better than waiting for an unlikely callback on a question he didn’t really feel comfortable answering.

  I moved papers from one stack to another on my desk until I heard Carlton’s familiar deep drawl.

  “A’vry? How are you?”

  We exchanged some obligatory pleasantries before I asked what we both knew was coming.

  “Carlton, can I tell Innis Barker to go ahead with the monument, with the alterations I suggested?”

  I could hear the hesitation in his voice before he drawled a long, slow, “We-ell.” I should have gone to see Carlton in person. It’s too easy to say no on the phone.

  “Carlton.” I rolled his name out smooth and thick and sweet. “You know it’s the only right thing to do. Harden Avinger’s wife did nothing but nurse him patiently through an awful illness. The whole town knows Maggy Avinger for her good spirit and how she cares for people. She deserves to be protected, and his memory doesn’t need to be tainted by one crazy joke he didn’t think through. All of us have pulled harebrained stunts in our lives. None of us—not even Harden Avinger—would want to be remembered for a stunt just because we had the misfortune of making it the last and most permanent thing we ever did.”

  Carlton was quiet a moment, either to make sure I was finished with my speech to the jury or to think through his reply. “You’ve got a point there, A’vry. We bend over backward to honor dying wishes. But if he didn’t have time to rethink it. . . you’ve got a point there.”

  “Any reason we can’t honor the letter, if not the spirit of his request?”

  “No-o. No, I suppose there isn’t.”

  Whew. “How about I bring something by for your signature, so I can take it over to Innis? Or you just want to call him?”

  “I’ll just call him. That’d be easiest.”

  “I’m sure you’ll want to okay whatever epitaph goes on top of the old one, as the executor. I’ll talk to Miz Avinger about what she suggests. This’ll let a couple of people rest in peace, don’t you think?”

  “I’m sure it will.” He sounded convinced. He would probably rest easier, too.

  Good thing I didn’t have to go by Innis Barker’s. I was c
utting it close picking up Emma at school, and I didn’t need a lecture from my punctilious six-year-old niece about the importance of keeping to a schedule.

  Before I left, I called Maggy Avinger’s number. When she didn’t answer, I simply told her answering machine I had some good news and I’d talk to her later. I wanted her to draft what she wanted on her jerk of a husband’s tombstone, but an answering machine message wouldn’t be the best way to convince her to accept the angel. That was a conversation we really needed to have in person.

  Emma climbed into my car, her thick red-gold hair in two braids and her knobby knees poking out from under her denim skirt. She had to struggle to pull the long, heavy car door shut, and she was too short to see comfortably out the windows, but she seemed as delighted as I’d been, when I was her age, to take a spin in the Mustang.

  “Too cold to put the roof down today, Short Stuff.” I pulled into the line of traffic leaving the grammar school. Lord love the moms who did this every day.

  “No time for pleasure riding,” Emma said, unzipping a giant binder. “I have a list for the grocery store. We need to stop there first.”

  A certain amount of anal-retentive-obsessive-compulsiveness—or what used to be called fussiness—runs in my family. Two proud hereditary lines came together, culminating in the fifty-pound Attila the Hen sitting beside me.

  “Yes, ma’am.” What else could I do? I turned toward the grocery. “What’s on the list?”

  “Things to make cookies.” I could feel the eye roll, even though I didn’t turn to witness it. Did mild perturbation cause some disruption in the cosmos, or was I so conditioned to be a source of disappointment to Emma that I could sense it without seeing it?

  “So, how many packages of cookie dough you figure we need to get?”

  “Packages?”

  “You know, those sugar cookie rolls. You got something to decorate them—”

  “No, no. No rolls.” She had both hands up in a dramatic Halt, who goes there fashion. “No, no. We’re making something good. This is to raise money. Besides, the people who attend this thing will need something to look forward to, believe me.”

  Emma had a plan, so I just pushed the buggy as I was told. She filled it with oatmeal, walnuts, chocolate chips, and sugar, softly humming Ko-Ko’s “I’ve got a little list” refrain all the way to the checkout line.

  “I love that song.” Maggy Avinger’s cheerful voice startled both Emma and me from our reveries. “Are you in The Mikado? ” She smiled down at Emma’s serious face.

  “No, ma’am. My mother is. She’s Yum-Yum.”

  “Oh. How fun.”

  I knew from Emma’s solemn stare she was thinking, The cookies will be good, but not the performance. Fortunately, all Maggy would see was a quiet, polite child.

  “Are you going to the performance?” I asked.

  “It’s one of my favorites. I hope to make it this weekend, but I’m not sure yet.”

  “I left you a message on your machine. Maybe we can talk today?” I caught Emma reminding me with a glare that I had work to do today. “Or tomorrow?”

  “Sure. I’ll give you a call.” Maggy smiled down at Emma. “Bye, now.” She left us at the checkout line.

  I paid the cashier, hefted the sacks, and followed Her Imperiousness out to the car, marveling at how someone so short could be so much like my mother—or, horrors, like her Great-great-aunt Aletha. Baptists really should take another look at that reincarnation thing.

  We went to Mom’s house to bake the cookies because, as Emma explained to me, that kitchen had double ovens. About the time I began to believe she was a miniature adult instead of a kid barely out of kindergarten, she reminded me by dropping a glass measuring cup into a bowlful of sifted flour, leaving herself wide-eyed and powdery white.

  After some trials and errors, we got a system that worked. The timer binged, signaling another batch could go in, while another could be lifted off the sheets to cooling racks.

  “So what don’t you like about The MikadoT I asked as I slid a cookie sheet into the oven.

  “Who said I didn’t like it?”

  “You said the people would need something to look forward to.”

  “Yeah. Intermission. And these cookies. Have you heard these people sing? The men aren’t good at all.” She shook her head, solemn.

  I joined her, lifting cookies to the cooling racks.

  “It’s the least we can do,” she said, “to thank them for supporting the theater, by having some really good snacks. Don’t you think?”

  I couldn’t argue. If it was an act of gratitude and recompense we were engaged in, then I wouldn’t begrudge the small fortune I’d spent on top-grade cookie ingredients.

  “I’ve got a little list, I’ve got a little list, hm-hm-hm, who never will be missed,” she sang to herself in a bell-like voice, pitch-perfect. The mixture of her little-girl delicateness and the Aunt-Letha-like words of the song about settling scores made me shudder just a bit. One thing I could say about my family, they breed true.

  Our well-oiled and orchestrated cookie-baking machine churned out several dozen really good chocolate-oatmeal-walnut cookies. Under Emma’s watchful eye, I only managed to sneak a couple. I didn’t remind her, as I took her home, that I’d be back at her grandparents’ house later to spend the night and she wouldn’t be there to guard the cookies. I didn’t taunt her. She was, after all, a kid. A kid who would find some way to thwart me.

  “Emma, I was thinking you might like to spend the night up at the lake cabin with me sometime.”

  “Sure, Aunt Bree.” I smiled inside. She hadn’t used her toddler nickname for me in a while. She wrestled her backpack-on-wheels from the floorboard of my car to her driveway. “The cabin would be fun.”

  “Great. We can take the canoe out on the lake. Or go hiking.”

  “That would be fun. It’s too early for bugs. I hate bugs.” She gave the car door a mighty heave and waved goodbye. I watched as she rolled her backpack up the sidewalk and I waved at my sister Lydia when she opened the door for her.

  I’d gotten Emma home well before her bedtime, but I was pushing up on mine, if I planned to join Melvin tomorrow for a trip down the river.

  23

  Friday Morning

  On the way back to my parents’ house after taking Emma home, I picked up the voice mail message Melvin had left while I was playing chef’s assistant: “Be ready to leave from the office at 8:00 A.M. Wear clothes that dry easily. No cotton. They’ll provide wet-suits. Remember you’ll want a change of clothes, unless you plan to ride home wet. In which case, we’re taking your car. But you aren’t driving.”

  Did he think I’d never been rafting? Of course, I probably would have forgotten not to wear cotton or, I hated to admit it, that I’d need dry clothes.

  Melvin came out the back door at eight o’clock sharp, just as I climbed out of my car.

  “Whoa,” I said. He continually amazes me.

  “What?”

  “I’ve—just never seen you dressed like that.”

  “Because we’ve never gone to the river.” He wore baggy long shorts and a body-hugging mock turtle-neck made of some space-age fiber.

  “Guess I’m just used to your button-down look.” I didn’t want to let on, but what really surprised me was how buffed-out he looked in that shirt. When did he work out?

  “Don’t you have any sports sandals?”

  I wrinkled my nose and shook my head. “I hate sandals.” Then I noticed what he was wearing.

  “They’ll loan you some booties with your wetsuit, but you won’t like them. What kind of socks do you have on?”

  I looked down at my sneakers. “Athletic socks?” He shook his head, obviously disappointed in me from head to toe. He climbed the stairs, unlocked the back door, and disappeared inside. I pulled my gym bag from the backseat, wondering what else in there wouldn’t pass inspection. Admittedly, I hadn’t rafted in a while, but had there been this many rules?

&
nbsp; Before I began to wonder if he’d abandoned the adventure altogether, Melvin reemerged, locking the door behind him.

  “Here’s some wool socks, so your feet won’t freeze.”

  “Wool?” I accepted his offer. They didn’t feel as scratchy as I feared, but they were still scratchy.

  “Wicks away moisture. Unless you like getting hypothermia, your body heat slowly leached away by soggy cotton socks.”

  He threw our gym bags in the back of his Jeep wagon while I climbed in the passenger seat.

  Melvin’s not exactly a stodgy driver; he just drives like someone whose vehicle may flip over in a sharp curve, which is probably why he hates riding with me.

  A leisurely forty minutes later, he parked at the edge of a graveled lot and we climbed the weathered steps into the outfitters’ shop. I found myself swaggering a bit, Yea-uh, I know what I’m doing. I’ve got wool socks in the car.

  Melvin had asked, on the drive up the mountain, how much rafting I’d done.

  “Some,” I said. I didn’t confess that my only river excursions had been lazy floats down the French Broad with groups of high school or college friends.

  Those had been magical experiences. I’d tried to block out the chatter and squeals and pretend I was the only one there, suspended on a glistening river cut deep into hills dotted with more shades of green than the eye could consider.

  Once, I’d watched a hawk float on currents high overhead, suspended and circling with no more effort than it took to hold his wings ready to accept the air, a sense of isolated freedom. I still remember my irritation when the raucous horseplay from another raft broke the spell. An angry irritation. Odd how strong it still felt.

  “Okay, we’re checked in.” Melvin joined me on the porch. “We get a safety lecture and our gear back there.”

  We dutifully filed into a back room and took our seats on the wooden benches with others who would be in our group. More people than I expected in March. Not until the lead guide started her safety lecture did I realize what I’d signed on for.