I read it into the record in my mind, the way I have read ten thousand documents in my life, line by line with my finger under the type. Act of sale, Parish of Evangeline, the nineteenth day of June, 1968. Jules Fontenot, vendor, to Armand Labiche, purchaser, the lake road tract. And then the paragraph that the clerk, bless her, was reading over my shoulder. Excepting and reserving unto the vendor, his heirs and assigns, a tract of 3.2 acres lying south of the canal, described by metes and bounds, the said tract not being conveyed herein.
“Remy,” I said, “come read this with me.” He put his cap back on, and I said, “Cap.” He took it off again. I put my finger on the red circle in the margin. Someone long ago had marked that exception with a pen, and it had not been Jules. It had been a clerk who knew trouble when she saw it. I turned to the girl at the counter. “Honey, do you still have the survey plat for the lake road?” She smiled. “It is in the vault,” she said. “Nobody has asked for it in fifty years.”
We spread it on the big table in the back, a yellowed sheet as long as my arm, and I traced the lines with a pencil. From a cypress stump, south two hundred fourteen feet to the canal, then east, then north along the old fence. I did it twice. Then I laid a sheet of tracing paper from the clerk over the modern plat of the Labiche house and held them up to the window together. The outline of the big house, the foyer, the cypress staircase, the very front steps, lay squarely inside the 3.2 acres that Jules Fontenot never sold.
Remy sat down on the floor of the records room with his back against the shelves. “Mama,” he said, “I framed that house. I set the forms for the foundation with my own hands. I did not know.” I told him of course he did not. Nobody knew. Mr. Preston Labiche had inherited a paper from his daddy, read the first page, and built on whatever looked like his. “He sent me with the plane and the act of sale,” Remy said slowly, “because he thought it showed Papa owed him money. He told me, once Papa reads this, Papa will be paying me.” He gave a short laugh. “He never read page two.”
A man who cannot be bothered to read the whole page will sooner or later pay for the part he skipped.
I telephoned the shop, and in half an hour Alcide came through the courthouse door in his sawdusty boots with his old straw hat in his hands. He looked small in the marble hall, small and square and gray. Remy stood up and gave him the hand plane without a word. The plane of his daddy, with the cypress handle and the initials cut in the side. Alcide turned it over. The blade had been shoved in upside down, and he drew it out with his thumb, flipped it, and set it back with a click. “There now,” he said softly. “She wants to be put in right.”
We drove out to the lake road together in the truck, the three of us, with the plat rolled in a tube on the seat and the certified copy in my purse. Mr. Labiche met us in the foyer in his golf shirt, with his wife on the landing above him. I took a breath, a long one, and I spoke in the voice I used for thirty one years at the Thirteenth Judicial District. “Let the record reflect,” I said, “that we are standing on the property of my husband.” I unrolled the plat on his marble table and held it flat with his own crystal bowl.
He read it. His face changed three times. He asked to see the second page of the act, and I handed it to him, and he read the exception aloud in a voice that cracked on the word reserved. Then he sat down on his own cypress staircase, on the third tread, the one that squeaks, and put his head in his hands. His wife came halfway down the stairs and stopped. For a long time nobody spoke. A clock chimed somewhere in the great house. I thought, as I have thought in many a courtroom, that the truth is a very quiet thing when it arrives.
By four in the afternoon Mr. Labiche had written a check for twenty three thousand seven hundred fifty dollars, with the cost of the lien filing added on in his own hand. He did not argue. He asked, in a small voice, what it would take for the Fontenot family to part with the 3.2 acres. Alcide did not hurry. He turned his hat once in his hands. “A fair price,” he said, “by an appraiser we both pick. And a new roof for the church at Saint Ann.” The two men shook on it at the foot of the stairs.
Remy gave notice at Labiche Construction on Monday. He did it politely, with his cap in his hands, and drove straight to the shop on the bayou and walked in under the sign. He and his father hung a new one by the end of the week. Fontenot and Son, Fine Cypress. Alcide stood under it with a ladder and a level and a look on his face that I had not seen since our wedding. When Remy hung the last screw, his father said, “Now we need a bigger stove for the shop.” They both laughed until they coughed.
The craft fair at the civic center was the best we had ever had. Eleven rocking chairs sold by noon, and a line out the door for the next batch, and on the second day Mrs. Labiche appeared at our table in a plain blue dress and asked, softly, whether a chair could be made in a color she could live with. Alcide told her cypress has no color but its own. She bought two. A week later he went to the big house on the lake road, alone, with a small can of beeswax, and fixed the squeaky tread on the staircase. It took ten minutes. He charged nothing.
At night now I hear him whistling in the shop, over the whisper of the plane. I keep the books for the chairs and the church roof fund and the orders from three parishes, and I enter every figure in ink. On the wall of the shop, over the bench, hangs the old act of sale in a plain oak frame, with the red circle and the handwriting of the clerk plainly visible. Remy put it there. Under it he tacked a small card in the neat block print of his father. Always read page two.
