Part 3 — Doyle Down The Hill
That shiny copper wire led us down the hill through the laurel for about three hundred yards, and it did not go to the power line. It went straight to a small tin-roofed cabin tucked into the hollow, so well hidden by rhododendron that I could have walked past it a hundred times. A thin thread of wood smoke came out of the chimney.
Deputy Caudill knocked and called out his name. A long minute went by. Then the door opened, and a tall, thin old man stood there in a flannel shirt with a coffee mug in his hand. He looked at the three of us and said, I reckon you found my camera. I am Doyle Slone, and I am sorry about the trouble.
He was alive, and in fairly good health for seventy-nine. He had lived at the little cabin below the hill for two years, ever since the county took the upper place at the tax sale. He had been drawing a small pension, hunting what he needed, and hiding out of plain embarrassment. He said he could not bear for folks up the holler to see him lose the home his father built.
The wire ran from his generator to the camera, which he had set to see who came to the old place. The coffee can was his savings. He had planned to pay the back taxes in cash, but the county clerk had refused to take the money without a notarized form, and the nearest notary was forty miles away. So he waited, and the sale came first.
The notebook was no mystery either. Doyle wrote down the plate of every vehicle that turned up the old logging road, because folks had been poaching ginseng and breaking into empty cabins. My truck was in there because I was the new owner, and he wanted to know whether I was a decent man. Wade had waved at the camera by accident on our second trip, he said.
Sometimes the thing hidden in the wall is not a crime at all, only an old mans last attempt to keep his dignity.
I did not sleep well that night. In the morning, I called the county tax office and asked for the file. The deputy came with me. We found that Doyle had in fact paid his taxes in cash, six years ago, at the counter, and the clerk who took the money, a man named Burl Tackett, had never deposited it. The county had recorded the property as delinquent on his word.
Burl was charged with embezzlement and records tampering, and he resigned the same week. Kentucky law lets a court void a tax sale when the delinquency was caused by the countys own error. The judge voided mine. The county refunded my fourteen thousand five hundred dollars with interest and apologized in writing, which Tammy framed.
Doyle got his upper place back, with the deed cleared and the taxes forgiven. I did not argue. I helped him carry his stove up the hill, and Wade and I spent the next three Saturdays rewiring the porch. We took out that old fuse box and put in a proper panel. Tammy brought her holler moss paint and did the porch rail herself.
Doyle gave Wade permission to hunt deer on the back forty every November. Wade brings him a quarter of the first buck, and Doyle brings us a jar of molasses. On the porch last fall, he looked at the green railing for a good while, scratched his chin, and said, Boy, that is the prettiest color I ever saw on a tired old house.