And in the meantime, it appointed a receiver to protect the estate from waste. And the receiver, on Wilkins Renfro's recommendation, hired an overseer to manage the place until the matter was decided. The overseer's name was Doc Yarro. He rode into the yard at Tallow Creek on the 2nd of December on a rangy gray horse. A lean, sunburned man of about 60, with a soft voice and a habit of smiling with his mouth closed.
He had been overseer at Tallow Creek from 1830 to 1841, and he had gone from there to Ivywild, and he had been out of a place since the spring, Orura Renfruit stood on the gallery, and watched him come and felt the last 11 months of her life close over her head like water. Because Doc Yarro had put the boy in the cart. She knew it from the ledger's own margins, where the same three initials stood 11 times over in Barnabas's hand. Dy attending. Doc Yarro had driven the cart to the forks of the road on the 4th of November 1838.
Doc Yarro had come back and told the quarter the boy had taken the egg on the road to Nachees and had died in a shed at Washington and been buried quick for fear of contagion. Doc Yarro had nailed up the box. Doc Yarro had carried one end of it into the low field. He dismounted. He took off his hat to her, which was worse than not.
“Mrs. Renfruit.” “Mr. Yarro.”
“I am sorry it's like this,” he said. And the awful thing was that he half meant it. “It ain't personal, ma'am. It's the court.”
It's the court. Then he turned and looked down the row at the man splitting wood by the kitchen. and Orura watched Doc Yarro's face over the space of about 4 seconds, and she saw him do the arithmetic, and she saw the answer arrive. He knew him at once. Of course, he did. Doc Yarro had not spent 11 years making a boy dead inside himself.
Doc Yarro had spent 11 years not thinking about it at all, which leaves the memory in perfect condition. He put his hat back on. “That's a big buck,” he said pleasantly.
“That the seven-cent one? That is Obed, is it?” He smiled with his mouth closed. Well, he'll bring more in seven cents at a sheriff's sale, I'd say.
Estate’s got debts. Within a week, he had written to the receiver recommending the sale of the negro man called Goliath, of no value to this place, being unsound and dangerous, but of some value at Natchez. Within 2 weeks he had moved into the overseer's house and put the place on a 6-day week and taken the corn allowance down. Within three he had begun coming up to the office in the evenings to go through the papers because the receiver's man was entitled to the papers and Orura Renfruit sat in the parlor and listened to the drawers of her husband's desk open and shut one after another night after night and she knew what he was hunting.
On the night of the 19th of December, she came out of the house at 11:00 because she smelled smoke, and she saw Doc Yarro in the yard by the ash pit, feeding a marbled ledger into a fire, page by page, patiently, the way a careful man burns a thing. And from the black shadow of the kitchen wall, 6 feet away from Orura, and unseen, Cressy watched too, with her hand over her own mouth, and did not make one sound.
She did not sleep.
By morning she had decided, and by noon she had sent Anil for Squire Olivant, and Olivant came out from the crossroads store with his son and six neighbors he had collected on the road. Because a widow sending for a magistrate in a rainstorm is the best news a county gets in December. By 3:00 there were nine white men and every soul on the place standing in the low field in a cold rain. She had no authority to do it. That is the truth, and she knew it standing there.
A woman under a lunacy petition with the receiver's man on the place has no authority to do anything. What she had was a thing Doc Yarro wanted more than he wanted his dignity and she used it. “Mr. Yarro,” she said, “you burned a book last night.” The rain came down. Doc Yarro's face did not move.
“I know what was in it,” she said, “because I have copied it out entire in my own hand twice, and one copy is not on this place. That was a lie. She would think about that lie later, too. Your name is in it, not as a buyer.” You had no money.
You are in it as the man who drove the cart. 11 times, Mr. Yarro. 11 times over 11 years. And each time you came back and stood in that quarter and gave an account.
Squire Olivant said, “Mrs. Renfruit, what in God’s name?”