The man who brought the papers was named Burl Tackett, and I had never seen him in my life, but my mother had known his face for twenty years. She stood on the porch steps in her coat with one hand on the rail and told me the rest in a soft, level voice, the voice she used to read the Psalms. “Your daddy was sick the winter of 2004, Carla. A man came to the house at night with a briefcase. He wanted your daddy to sign over the mineral rights. Your daddy said no. He said that holler was for his children, and that no company would take the coal out from under his grandchildren.”
“That night your father had the worst spell of his life,” Mama went on. “The man left in a hurry. I thought nothing of it. Your daddy died the next morning, at six, in my arms. And this July, I opened the door to the same man, older, with gray in his hair. He said his name was Burl Tackett and that he represented a land company. I looked him in the eye. I said, I know who you are. He said, Mrs. Napier, I am only here to help your son.” She pressed her lips together. “I signed because I was afraid for Dwight.”
I put my arms around her. She smelled of woodsmoke and Ivory soap, and she felt so small that I was frightened. Behind me Dwight had climbed down out of his truck and was standing in the gravel with his hands hanging at his sides. He looked fifteen years old. “Carla,” he said, “I owed them forty one thousand dollars. They said if I did not get her to sign, they would burn the house. I did not know what else to do.” I did not answer him. I walked my mother into the dark kitchen, sat her in the good chair, and took out my phone.
A father who plans carefully for his children can protect them from his own grave, and from one another.
I did what I know how to do. I stayed calm and made a list. First I called a friend from the hospital whose sister was a lawyer at the legal aid office in Hazard. Her name was Teresa Combs, and she met us at the house that evening with a briefcase and a flashlight, and she went through the papers on the kitchen table. The deed that Mama had signed was dated the fourteenth of July. The notary was a man in Pikeville who, as it turned out, had never been licensed.
“Mrs. Jessup,” Teresa said, “I do not want to raise your hopes, but listen. In 2003, your father put this land in a trust. I found it in the county records this afternoon. Your mother has the right to live here, but she cannot sell it. The trustee is the Reverend Gary Stamper. When your father died, the land was to pass in five equal parts to his children, and there was one more condition.” She put her finger on a line. “If any child ever sells or leases the mineral rights to a coal company, that child loses his share to the church.” Dwight made a sound like a man hit in the stomach.
I will not pretend that I was gentle with my brother that night. I said what a sister says. But when I was done, he sat down on the porch step, put his head on his knees, and wept like a boy. “Tell me what to do,” he whispered. “I will do anything.” Teresa looked at me. I looked at my mother, who was watching from the window in her coat. “You are going to wear a wire, Dwight,” I said. “And you are going to take the men from Pikeville down to the boat ramp, and you are going to get them to say it all out loud.”
It took six days. On Tuesday evening, at the gravel lot by the river, with the red and silver bass boat on its trailer glinting under the lamp, Burl Tackett climbed into the truck of Dwight and said, laughing, that the old lady had been easy, that the old man had been harder, that the company in Charleston had paid him twelve thousand dollars a year for twenty years to get a signature on that holler. “Your daddy died of his lungs,” he said. “I only helped him breathe easier.” In a van behind the church, two state investigators wrote down every word.
They arrested Tackett and two of his men that night. The Kentucky Attorney General charged them with forgery, extortion, and elder exploitation. Tackett pleaded guilty and is serving sixteen years. The company in Charleston paid a fine of nine million dollars and was barred from buying a single acre in Perry County. The deed of July was voided by a judge in Hazard in a hearing that took ten minutes. Dwight, who had cooperated from the first hour, was given probation and a stern lecture from the same judge, which he accepted with his hat in his hands.
The boat was sold for forty four thousand dollars. It paid the electric, the water, a new well, a metal roof, and the loans Dwight had taken out against the name of my mother. He went back to work, at fifty nine, at a garage in Hazard, changing oil and tires. He gave me his first paycheck, folded in half, and I handed it back and told him to give it to Mama. He did. She hung it on the refrigerator, under a magnet shaped like a cardinal, and she said, “That is the best check I ever got.”
On the Fourth of July, all five of us gathered at the house, the first time in eleven years. Every light in the old white frame house was on. Mama sat on the porch in her rocker, in a clean blue dress, with a glass of sweet tea, watching her children and grandchildren run through the yard, and the ridge, forty acres of it, glowed green behind them in the evening sun. Dwight fixed the screen door. I carried out the coconut cake. When the fireflies came up out of the grass, my mother laughed and said, “Your daddy always said the holler was lit by something better than coal.”
