Part 3 — The Witness Line
My sister Constance did not get up from the floor of the council chambers. She sat with her good dress spread around her and both hands in her lap, and the woman from the elections office let the silence stand before she read the line aloud. “Witness: Constance Ruiz, activities coordinator, Sunrise Gardens Care Home.” The hall made a sound like a long breath going out.
“Connie,” I said. “Fourteen of them?” She nodded without lifting her eyes. “Dominic brought the envelopes on a Sunday, Glo. He said the residents wanted to take part but their hands shook too much to fill in the forms. He said I only had to sign as the witness. He said the registration of Sal had never been removed, that it was a harmless clerical thing, and that you would be proud.”
The woman from the elections office told the room how the matter came to light. A young aide at the care home named Marisol had called the county hotline in October because residents who could not name the month were being told they had already cast a ballot. A clerk compared the signatures that same week. Thirteen were shaky and uncertain, as the honest signature of an old person often is. The one on the envelope of Sal was far too neat, a perfect copy traced from an old fishing license.
None of the thirteen residents had been harmed, she was careful to say. They had been asked to sign what they did not understand, and their ballots were set aside so that no one would be penalized for it. The county would visit each one in person, with a nurse and a cup of coffee, and offer to help them take part in the next election the right way.
Dominic tried a speech. It started with “Tía” and ended with “family,” and somewhere in the middle it lost its footing. “I was going to pay you back,” he said to me. “You were going to pay me back the way you reported the money,” I said. “As your own.” The council president rose from her chair and said that no oath would be administered in this chamber tonight, and the judge lowered her hand for the last time and set her Bible on the table.
A county investigator walked him to a side room to give a statement. Nobody touched him. Nobody needed to. The mariachis in the lobby, who had been told to wait, put their guitars back in their cases without a note, and the television crews turned their lights toward the empty podium.
The law is plain about these things, and I was glad of that. A false report of campaign funds is a violation in Colorado, and the fine is large. Signing ballots for people who cannot understand them is a felony. The second-place candidate, a retired schoolteacher named Pat Archuleta, asked the court to set aside the result, and the court did. A special election was called for District 2 in the spring.
Connie came to my kitchen the next Saturday with a pan of tamales and no excuses. She had agreed to tell the district attorney everything, and she did. Because she had been used and had said so first, she was given a fine and a hundred hours of service at the very care home where she had worked. I did not forgive her all at once. I let her stay for supper, and that was the beginning of it.
Dominic pleaded guilty in the winter. The judge ordered him to repay every cent, with the costs of the investigation, and to hold no public office for ten years. He sold the navy suit, the campaign signs and a truck he could not afford, and in the first week of January a cashier check for $27,500 arrived at my door. Inside the envelope was a note in his own handwriting, three plain lines. It was the first thank-you card I ever received from him, and I kept it.
Pat Archuleta won the special election by a margin that had no asterisk beside it. At her swearing-in, which I attended in the third row with my purse on my lap, she asked me to stand and be thanked. A few weeks later the county asked if I would serve as an election judge, since I had spent thirty-three years remembering every address on Route 14.
An honest signature is the only thing a person truly owns, and my husband finally had his back. I said that to Sal at Lake Pueblo the following Sunday, standing at the edge of the water with his old fishing rod in my hands.
I still keep the thawed Ziploc bag in a kitchen drawer, next to the tamale pan. I take it out sometimes, only to look at the teller stamp, which is small and blue and a little crooked. The water was cold and the sun was coming up. I cast the line the way he taught me, and for the first time in a year, nobody was waiting for me to be quiet.