Up Jumps the Devil

The wind was blowing steadily from the north now, the temperature had dropped at least five degrees, and Adam was shivering in Zach’s cotton knit shirt. Daddy slammed the truck door and held the fronts of his thin denim jacket together as he headed for the house.

“Time to put a match to the fire,” he said.

Adam and I followed him inside and found the kitchen already warm and cozy. Maidie and Cletus were waiting for us and had lit the old wood heater and put a fresh pot of coffee on. Vegetable soup simmered on the range and an iron skillet waited till it was time to cook cornbread nice and crusty for supper. Daddy never expects Maidie to cook on the weekends, but Adam was spending a couple of nights out here and whenever there’s company, she feels obliged to step in.

Now she took Daddy’s jacket and handed him a thick wool cardigan that Seth and Minnie’s children gave him two Christmases ago. There was a time when he would have scorned wearing an extra layer indoors, and sorrow brushed my heart as I realized that the cold bothered him more than it used to.

“Time was,” whispered the preacher. “Time is.”

And time will BE! I thought defiantly.

The pragmatist nodded. “And time will be,” he said quietly. It was neither promise nor threat, only simple acknowledgment.

The five of us sat with warm mugs of coffee in our hands while Daddy and Adam and I took turns telling Maidie and Cletus what had happened.

Cletus never says much, especially when Maidie’s there to do the talking, but when he does speak, he always goes straight to the point. “Reckon that shiftless Allen Stancil’s gonna be a rich man now.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Depends on whether or not Cherry Lou signed her interest in the farm back over to Mr. Jap this week.”

Adam shrugged. “I don’t see why that makes any real difference. If she didn’t do it yet, he just has to wait till the trial’s over. He is Mr. Jap’s only kin, isn’t he?”

“There’s Miss Elsie’s niece,” said Maidie. “She’s Dallas’s first cousin.”

“But no real blood kin to Mr. Jap,” I said. “The Yadkins and the Stancils both come down from a common Pleasant ancestor—G. Hooks Talbert does too, for that matter—but that’s too far back to count. No, the laws of inheritance are pretty clear. When Dallas died without children or a will, half of his real property—the land— automatically went to his surviving parent and the other half to his wife. Cherry Lou. But since she can’t benefit under the Slayer Statute, and, assuming a jury convicts her, her half of Dallas’s estate would automatically pass to his closest next of kin, which was his father. Now that Mr. Jap’s dead, it goes to his blood kin, and that’s Allen Stancil.”

“But Cherry Lou’s not been tried yet,” Maidie argued, “and if Mr. Jap died ’fore he could get it, seems like to me it’ll have to start all over again back with Dallas, and Miss Merrilee and Allen will share and share alike since they’re both first cousins to Dallas.”

Daddy agreed. “Sounds like the fairest way to me.”

“What’s fair and what’s legal are two different things,” said Adam.

He spoke with such bitterness that Maidie immediately gave him a worried look.

“ ‘Get out of the way of Justice. She’s blind,’” I quoted lightly.

“Then maybe we better get that lady a white walking stick,” Cletus chuckled.

“What happens if Allen’s the one that did it?” asked Maidie.

“It would be up to the Clerk of the Court,” I said. “Ellis Glover might decide Merrilee has a legitimate claim after all. On the other hand, Allen does have a couple of children and they’d be within the five degrees of consanguinity required by North Carolina law, which has to be closer than Merrilee.”

Daddy frowned. “Con-sang-what?”

“Consanguinity—blood kinship. You count the degrees by counting generations up to the common ancestor and then back down to the related person.” I ticked them off on my fingers. “One up to Mr. Jap’s father, one down to his brother, another to his brother’s son—Allen, and then down to Allen’s children. That’s four degrees. If somebody related to you dies without a will or any immediate heirs, you can put in a claim if you’re within five degrees of blood kin.”

Another thought occurred to me. “On the other hand, if Allen is involved, Merrilee could argue that the Slayer Statute blocks his kids from inheriting. It’d be a pretty little legal battle.”

Daddy dismissed consanguinity as irrelevant legalistic gobbledegook since he couldn’t see that Allen had any call to hurt Mr. Jap.

“Jap was ready to give him everything he had to get him a real car shop. Y’all know how he always liked messing with cars better’n working the land. Land ain’t never meant nothing to Jap Stancil except a place to stay, something to take money out of, never put none back in. He’s clear-cut his woods twice and never planted a single tree. Why, Billy Wall’s been a better steward of that land than he ever thought to be.”

Proximity since childhood might have made Daddy and Mr. Jap friends and cohorts, but I realized now that Jap Stancil had never shared Daddy’s values.

“Ever since the government closed down his shop, Jap’s been wanting to get another one,” he said. “That’s why he kept all them old cars setting around when they was fools out in Charlotte or down in Wilmington that’d give him three times what they was worth. ‘Money in my pocket, Kezzie,’ he told me. Bad as he hated losing Dallas, he was happy to get Allen. Only this time, he won’t going to fix people’s transmissions and carburetors. Him and Allen was going into pure restoration big-time, he said. Going to take them old heaps and make ’em look like they just rolled off the assembly line in Detroit.”

“Using what to buy their tools and equipment?” I asked, hoping to goad him into telling what he knew about Jap’s plans to sell land. “Billy Wall’s corn money?”

“It was a start,” he said mildly and shifted over to reminiscences of his and Jap’s boyhood days along Possum Creek. He told us again about Mr. Jap’s courtship of Elsie Yadkin, him a braggedy, drinking, cussing roughneck, her a