The Kinship Report

Denzil Casteel died at home at eighty-one. Never married, no children, no will. A house on Ash Street, an account at the one bank in town, and a truck — a hundred and forty-one thousand dollars a cousin cannot distribute until a court is told who the heirs are.

The statute goes up and out without end. Half to the father's side, half to the mother's side, and if one side is empty the other takes the whole thing. Two searches, two families, courthouses that have never heard of each other. The determination of heirs is set for the twenty-sixth of June. Eleven weeks.

Alvie Frazee died at home at eighty-nine and a neighbor found him. No wife, no children, no will, and nobody at the counter with a claim on anything, so the court made a lawyer the administrator. A house outside town, a truck, an account at the corner bank — eighty-three thousand dollars, enough to have to be settled properly and not enough to enjoy.

Half goes to the father's side and half to the mother's, and his mother was born across the river where nobody registered a birth in her generation. What she has instead is a delayed certificate, sworn to decades after the fact on one man's word. The determination is the eighteenth of December.

A woman has been sitting at the counter since about half past ten with one hand flat on the folder. She asked at the clerk's office in Fordyce where a man named Haskin eats, and a woman there told her. She did not telephone and she did not knock on his door, and she wants that said out loud before anything else, because it is going to look like she was sneaking up on him and she wasn't.

Calvin Haskin sets his bag on the floor beside the stool instead of on the counter, because the counter is where people eat.

By half past nine the next morning a lawyer telephones, who would rather do this now than owe it to him.

Weston Whitledge is sixty-eight and holding a probate form up at arm's length at the counter, because it says list all persons known to be entitled and the only name he could put on it was his own. His first cousin Volney Womack died at home in February at seventy-nine — no wife, no children, no will, half of a rented double, a truck that is a formality, and a hundred and nine thousand dollars that cannot go anywhere until somebody swears to a list.

The statute climbs to the grandparents and comes back down, and the two halves it makes never mix. The mother's half takes an afternoon, a morning and a telephone, and comes back nine living people who never heard the man's name spoken in a room. The father's half is four children, and three of them are already dead.

A clerk of thirty-one years carries the office telephone down her counter with the cord gathered on her forearm, and sets it on the public side. There is a lawyer holding on the line from West Virginia. Ollen Tippens died at home at seventy-four in the county he was born in, never married, no child on any file, no will. A genealogist in another state has already filed nineteen pages naming two men in order.

That report is right. Calvin Haskin goes behind every line and cannot find a loose board, and that is not what he was hired for. *I'm not hiring you to find anybody, Mr. Haskin. I'm hiring you to prove there's nobody.* Eight weeks, by the hour, out of a fifty-two-thousand-dollar estate. In thirty years in the trade nobody has been paid for that half of it.