Part 3 — The Missing Cans
The driver license on the phone of Buck Tisdale showed a smiling woman with frosted hair and a sparkle in her eye. Starla Ashby, of Ada, Oklahoma, wife of Royce. The sale record under it said that she had sold five coffee cans of gold and silver coins on the fifth of July to a dealer in Oklahoma City and had been paid $104,000. Royce looked at it, and he said, in a voice like an old hinge, “She told me she was at her sister in Durant.”
There are things you cannot make up, and one of them is the look of a man who learns that the one person he trusted most has been robbing the robber. Royce had dug up the cans in June. He had taken them home and put them in his gun safe, and Starla, who knew the combination, had been taking a can or two at a time and carrying them to the city while he was at the casino.
The deputy, a young man named Teague with a tired face, called the county attorney from the hay wagon. Two hundred people stood in the yard and pretended not to listen. I counted eleven who did not pretend. The answer was clear: the coins were property of the estate, and anyone who sold them had sold what was not theirs. The dealer in Oklahoma City, an honest man named Fenner, would be asked to hold whatever remained and not to resell it.
And Fenner had. When the deputy telephoned him that afternoon, he said he had been uneasy about the sale since July, because the woman had held the coins so tightly and refused to give her phone number. He had kept every piece in a case in his back room. Not one had been resold. By Monday morning, five coffee cans of Double Eagles and Morgan dollars were on their way back to Pontotoc County in the trunk of a cruiser, sealed with evidence tape.
Starla came out of the truck only when her name was called. She did not make a scene. She said, “Wendell, I am sorry,” and then she said it again, to the whole yard, and I believed her a little. “I got tired of being married to a man who played cards and told me every week that next week would be the one.” She was not angry. She looked like someone who had put down something heavy after a long walk.
The legal part was neat. The probate judge, a woman I had known since high school, removed Royce as executor and appointed an attorney from Ada to finish the job. All fourteen cans were inventoried, counted twice, and valued at $263,400, which was close to what the coin man had promised. The claim of $47,000 in debts, which Royce had invented to get my $15,000, was struck from the record as false, and the judge said so in writing in the first paragraph.
Royce pleaded guilty to fraud against the estate and to theft by deception, and the judge sentenced him to supervised probation, repayment of the $15,000 with interest, and the loss of his share. It was a hard sentence, but it was not the hardest. The hardest was the one he gave himself, sitting in the front row of the courtroom with his cap in both hands while the clerk read the inventory aloud. He cried when she reached the Double Eagle that Daddy had carried in his pocket on his wedding day.
Starla was charged with theft, and because she had cooperated and given back every coin that remained in her purse, the court allowed her to plead to a lesser count. She received a year of probation and a fine. Their house in Ada was sold to pay the costs. When it was done I drove over with Joanne, and the three of us sat on the porch for an hour, mostly without speaking. It is a strange thing to forgive a brother and not forgive him at once.
The estate was divided as Daddy would have wanted. Because Royce had forfeited his share, the money that would have been his went to the hospital and the propane company, and to a scholarship for welding students at the cement plant, with the name of Daddy on it. The rest was split between me and the grandchildren, with one of the Double Eagles set aside in a velvet box for my grandson Colt, who had left the walkie-talkie on the workbench.
In November I drove out to the home place with Colt. We took the flag down from the high shelf in the old building where it had been folded since March. It was a small flag, with thirteen stripes and a faded triangle of stars, and it still smelled of cedar. Colt held the other end, the way the Scouts had taught him, and together we folded it into a triangle and carried it to the car.
My father did not trust banks, but he trusted dirt, and in the end it was the dirt that kept the truth. I said that to Colt on the drive home, and he asked if he could keep the walkie-talkie, the one that had started everything. I told him he could keep both.
The old tool house was torn down in the spring, board by board, by the men from the church. We found the nails Daddy had straightened and saved in a jar. The third floorboard, the one Buck had pried up with the claw hammer, I kept. It hangs now in my own garage over the workbench, with a brass plate that says, in letters I cut myself: As Is, Where Is. Honest work, honestly done.