Old Joe Grady as Executor
When his dad died, Old Joe Grady became executor of the estate. That meant he had to see to a proper funeral, settle all Will Grady's debts, pay Uncle Sam his father's taxes, and divide up what was left to the beneficiaries. It's how America recognizes a deceased ancestor. Instead of passing down the ancestor's spirit or information about the ancestor, the executor passes down the ancestor's assets.
Old Joe knew that many traditional cultures had griots or poets whose job it was to pass on the legacy of one generation to the next. Old Joe felt like he needed someone like this to help him understand who his father was and tell his father's story. Maybe the newspaper would do that, he thought. But when Old Joe read his dad's obituary, there wasn't much of a story. It just told who his father's late wife had been and how Old Joe and his sister were something called survivors, as though living with his dad had been an ordeal they had somehow managed to muddle through alive.
Old Joe wanted to be involved in his dad's burial, to scurry about making arrangements of one sort or another. But that was all taken care of by Hayworth and Sons Mortuary. Hayworth did say Old Joe would need to hire an organist and buy a tombstone. As it turned out, the organist was Hayworth's sister-in-law and the company that supplied the tombstone was owned by the undertaker's uncle. Old Joe had seen his dad's death as a call for the Grady clan to gather around in honor of a member's passing on. But Will's contemporaries were mostly dead, and the younger Gradys showed up in the form of flowers wired from Raleigh and Atlanta and San Antonio. The only family that seemed to pull together around his father's death was Sam Hayworth's.
So Old Joe put his energy into tying up the financial affairs. He went to the bank to get the will out of his dad's lockbox, but they wouldn't let him open it without an official document naming him executor. But the only document that did that was the will, which was in the lockbox. So Old Joe hired a lawyer to get him started. No sooner had they gotten into the lockbox and read the will than the lawyer said Old Joe had to file a 90-day inventory.
"What's that?" Old Joe asked.
"It's pretty complicated," the lawyer said. "I can fill it out for you; you just need to sign it."
No sooner was that job completed than the lawyer said death and inheritance taxes needed to be paid. The form is so involved even professional tax preparers can't handle it, said the lawyer. I'll take care of it, and send it over for your signature.
When that was done, Old Joe asked if he could divide up the estate now. "Not yet," said the lawyer. "We need to file a final accounting. It's a lot of paper work and haggling with the clerk of the court, but I can do it for you."
"And all I need to do is sign it?" Old Joe said.
"That's right," said the attorney.
When all that was done, the lawyer explained that after his fees were paid, Old Joe could close out the estate. But when he got the lawyer's bill, Old Joe realized there weren't going to be many assets to divide. His dad might as well have taken his money, as well as his life's story, and jumped off a ship.
One evening closing down the hardware store as his dad had done for forty-five years before him, Old Joe shared these thoughts with one of his father's regular customers. "Yep," the man said. "It's a durn shame." Then after Joe had locked up, the two of them sat on the porch steps talking, talking about nothing in particular and anything that came to mind. They talked about the times back when the hardware store had been a general store. They recalled the depression, when Old Joe was just a kid--how Will Grady had kept his store open, losing money every year, giving credit to people who could never pay him back. They talked past the time talk had turned into silence. As they got up to leave, Old Joe stumbled over a loose plank. He would fix it in the morning.