My Cousin Read The Will Beside My Aunt's Empty Seed Chair

Quentin put the will on Aunt Lucille's seed table before the funeral flowers had wilted.

He moved her coffee cup to make room.

"You have until Sunday," he said. "The cabin needs to be empty."

It was Friday afternoon. Outside, rain ticked against the tin roof. Through the screen, I could see the cypress we called Button. A round scar on its trunk looked like a coat button sewn too low.

I knew that tree before I knew how to drive.

At thirty-eight, I was a lean, brown-skinned man with gray in my black curls, my white mother's narrow chin, and my Black father's broad nose.

My cousin had the same mix of Black and white family roots, but he wore his forty-two years like a fresh coat of paint.

Quentin was tall and light brown, with close-cut dark hair, a smooth jaw, and gold glasses that never seemed to slide down his nose.

My glasses slid all day. So did the knees of my work pants.

For fifteen years, I had worked as the caretaker of Bellamy Cypress Seed Orchard outside Natchitoches. I gathered cones, dried seed, fixed pumps, and kept hungry deer out of the young rows.

I could name most of our older trees by their bark scars. Quentin could not tell a cypress knee from a broken fence post.

"Sunday?" I asked.

"You heard me."

He tapped a line in the will.

"She left me her interest in Bellamy Orchard, along with the house in town and her remaining accounts. You got her tools. That was generous."

The will was dated nine years earlier. Aunt Lucille had shown it to me once.

"Did you read the rest?" I asked.

"My lawyer did."

"Has a court put you in charge yet?"

His mouth tightened.

"I'm named executor. Don't make this ugly."

I set a tray of empty seed envelopes on the shelf. Each had a tree number, a harvest date, and a blue pencil mark across its flap.

Aunt Lucille had liked blue pencil because rain blurred ink.

"What are you selling?" I asked.

He looked pleased that I had caught up.

"Land. Timber. Access. A buyer offered one million eight hundred thousand dollars for the package, subject to clear title."

"What package?"

"That isn't your concern."

I looked at the door frame. Her last flood mark sat eighteen inches above the floor. Beside it, higher than my shoulder, a length of sealed pipe rested in steel brackets.

Quentin followed my eyes.

"Take your fishing gear too."

"That's not fishing gear."

His phone buzzed. He checked it without asking what the pipe held.

That was Quentin. If a thing had no price on its face, he let someone else carry it.

"You made three hundred ninety dollars a week," he said. "You can't have much to pack. I'll give you five hundred for a motel."

The weekly pay had ended years ago. He had never asked why. He had never asked who paid the parish taxes, either.

"Keep it," I said.

He mistook that for pride.

"Family affection isn't a business plan, Adrian. She kept you here because she felt sorry for you."

I picked up Aunt Lucille's cup. A ring of dried coffee marked its bottom.

"She taught me to check a cone before I called it empty."

"Then check your bank account."

He left his copy of the will on the table and drove away.

I called Odette Landry.

At sixty-seven, Odette was a white Cajun woman who had retired from title work without losing her taste for trouble hidden behind staples. She came in muddy boots, carrying a sack of warm rice bread.

"He gave me the weekend," I told her.

"Men like that always pick a weekend. Clerk's office closes, and they think the whole world quits keeping records."

She read the will while I made coffee.

"It's a real will," she said.

"I know."

"Real doesn't mean it owns everything it names."

I took the pipe from its brackets. It had a screw cap, a rubber seal, and a strip of blue pencil lines on its white side.

Aunt Lucille had called it our floodproof deposit tube. I had tested it in a stock tank every spring.

"She made me keep my stamped copy here," I said. "Said people look in drawers before they look above water."

Odette wiped bread crumbs from her fingers.

"Open it carefully. I want every attachment."

I loosened the cap. Dry air sighed out. The packet inside still had the blue string I had tied around it seven years before.

For the first time since the hospital called, my hands stopped shaking.

Then tires crunched on the shell drive.

A gray pickup stopped beside Button. A man climbed out carrying a survey rod and a roll of orange flagging.

He knocked once on the screen.

"Mr. Bellamy? I'm here to mark your buyer's logging road."