Sycamore Row - John Grisham

to play blackjack, at a dime a hand. After half an hour or so, Lucien said, “I called Jake
Brigance, the lawyer I work for in Mississippi, and I asked him to check out this
Sylvester Rinds guy you mentioned. He found something.”
Lonny put his cards down and gave Lucien a curious look. Deliberately, he said,
“What?”
“Well, according to the land records in Ford County, Sylvester Rinds owned eighty
acres of land in the northeast part of the county, land he had inherited from his father, a
man named Solomon Rinds, who was born about the time the Civil War started. Though
the records are not clear, there’s a good chance the Rinds family came to own the land
just after the war, during Reconstruction, when freed slaves were able to obtain land
with the help of carpetbaggers and federal governors and other scum that flooded our
land back then. It looks as though this eighty acres was in dispute for some time. The
Hubbard family owned another eighty acres that adjoined the Rinds property, and
evidently they contested this property. The lawsuit I mentioned this morning, the one
filed in 1928 by Cleon Hubbard, was a dispute over the Rinds property. My grandfather,
who was the finest lawyer in the county and well connected, lost the case for Cleon. I
gotta figure that if my grandfather lost the case then the Rinds family must have had a
pretty strong claim to the land. So Sylvester managed to hang on to his property for a
few more years, but then he died in 1930. After he died, Cleon Hubbard obtained the
land from Sylvester’s widow.”
Lonny had picked up his cards and he studied them without seeing them. He was
listening and recalling images from another lifetime.
“Pretty interesting, huh?” Lucien said.
“It was a long time ago,” Lonny said, grimacing as pain rippled through his skull.
Lucien plowed ahead. With nothing to lose, he was not about to relax. “The strangest
part of this entire story is that there is no record of Sylvester’s death. There’s not a
single Rinds now living in Ford County, and it appears as though they all left about the
time Cleon Hubbard got his hands on the property. They all vanished; most fled to the
North, to Chicago, where they found jobs, but this was not uncommon in the Depression.
A lot of starving blacks fled the Deep South. According to Mr. Brigance, they found a
distant relative over in Alabama, a man named Boaz Rinds, who claims that some white
men took Sylvester and killed him.”
“What does this have to do with anything?” Lonny asked.
Lucien stood and walked to the window where he gazed at a parking lot below. He
debated telling the truth now, telling Lonny about the will and Lettie Lang and her
ancestry: that she was almost certainly a Rinds instead of a Tayber; that her people
were from Ford County and had once lived on the land owned by Sylvester; that it was
highly probable Sylvester was in fact her grandfather.
But he sat back down and said, “Nothing really. Just some old history involving my
kinfolks, Seth Hubbard’s, and maybe Sylvester Rinds’s.”
There was a moment of silence in which neither man touched his cards. Neither made
eye contact. As Lonny seemed to drift away, Lucien jolted him with “You knew Ancil,
didn’t you?”