Part 3 — The Brass Key
Mr. Albright turned the photograph over and read the name slowly: “Walter Coyle.” Nobody in the hall moved. The man in question was standing by the side exit with his hat in both hands, the same post commander who had put himself in front of the exit, a broad old man of seventy-three with white eyebrows and a Navy tattoo faded to blue smoke on his forearm. He looked at the photograph as if someone had handed him a letter from himself.
The picture showed a young woman laughing on the deck of a riverboat in Charleston, in a summer dress, with wind in her hair, and beside her a lean young man in uniform. On the back, below the name, Junie had written a date, June of 1993. Crystal looked at it and then at the old commander, and her mouth made the shape of a word, but the word never came.
Mr. Albright opened the second page of the letter and went on reading in the tired voice of a man who has read many last wishes. “Crystal, your father is a good man. I never told him about you, because I was a frightened girl who was married to somebody else that spring, and by the time I understood what I had done, he had gone to sea. He did not leave you. He never knew. I wrote this to be read by you, in front of the people who love you, so that you cannot hide from it.”
I watched the face of Crystal change. She was thirty years old when I married her mother, and in all the years since she had never called me anything but him. Now she looked less like a thief than like a child of nine standing in a doorway after the lights have gone out. She did not cry. She sat down in the folding chair that Dusty had left, and she put her hands flat on her knees.
Walt Coyle crossed the hall. He did not hurry. He took the photograph from Mr. Albright and held it up to the window, and when he finally spoke it was in the voice of a man who has stood many watches. “Crystal, I would like to say that I knew. I did not. But I would like to say that I would have come.” Nobody in the room doubted him for a moment.
The letter was a legal act, and the notary of Mr. Albright had witnessed it. The bank, which was called at once by the commander, confirmed that Crystal had been added to the account as an authorized signer and no more, and that the CD of $38,500, the Buick and the refund of $1,150 were the property of the estate of Junie, which by her will belonged to me. The bank froze what remained of the money. The Beckley police were already on the way, and two officers waited quietly by the coffee pot until the prayer was done.
Dusty left by the side exit without waiting for the prayer. He was stopped in the parking lot with my jumper cables still in the back of his truck. Crystal gave her statement in a calm, flat voice at the card table where she had set her pickle jar. She pleaded guilty in the winter to theft by deception, and the judge, who read the letter of Junie into the record, sentenced her to probation, full repayment and counseling. The jar of $600 was returned to the people who had put in their dollars.
The Buick was found on the lot on Robert C. Byrd Drive, and the dealer, who had thought the paperwork looked odd, sold it back to me for what he had paid. The pearl earrings Crystal returned to me in a velvet bag. I kept them in the bread box with the notebook of grocery lists. One Sunday I carried them to the grave of Junie and laid them on the stone, and then I took them home again, because she would have said that good pearls should never be wasted on a rock.
On a gray Tuesday in January I went to the bank with the brass key and the post commander at my side. Box 114 held a deed to our trailer in my name, a savings bond Junie had bought on the day Crystal was born, and a bundle of letters held with a rubber band. The letters were addressed to Walter Coyle. There were thirty-one of them, dated over thirty years, and not one had been mailed. He read them standing up, and then he sat down on the bench in the vault.
It was Walt who suggested lunch, and Crystal who said yes. They met at a diner in Beckley, a booth by the window, and I was told that she brought a photograph of her mother and he brought the one from the riverboat. I was not there. I heard later that he did most of the listening. After a year they were having Sunday dinner every other week, and she was calling him Walt, which was not nothing.
Junie loved her daughter enough to set a trap for her, and enough to leave the way out behind it. I keep the bronze vessel with the dogwood on the shelf over the television, and in April the real dogwood outside the window blooms in the same pink and white. Mr. Albright came for coffee and told me that in fifty years he had never read a letter that did so much good for so many people at once.
In the spring of the next year, when the ground softened, we buried the ashes of Junie in the cemetery on the hill above the town, the whole small family that was left: an old welder, a post commander, and a woman in a plain black dress who did not wear anything for show. Somebody said a prayer. I said only one thing, which was thank you, and the wind in the dogwoods answered.