Part 3 — The Fingerprints
Agent Dietz did not raise his voice. “The prints on the stock of the Savage belong to Jolene Hutchins,” he said. “They were matched against the set she gave when she applied for her daycare license in 2016.” Jolene had been looking at the pickle on her paper plate. Now she looked up at me, and I saw something I had not expected: relief.
What had happened in Wadena County, the agent explained, was less terrible than the hall had feared. A conservation officer had come upon a pickup stopped on a gravel road at two in the morning, with a spotlight on the cab and a young man in the bed holding a rifle on a doe. Out of season, at night, on private land. Nobody had been hurt, and the doe had gotten away. The young man had been arrested, the rifle taken, and the serial number run. It had led to the list that Bev had taped inside the cabinet door.
The young man was Travis, a cousin of Jolene, twenty-three years old, who worked at the elevator in Perham. He told the officer that the rifle had been loaned to him by his cousin, the wife of Corey. When the officer called the agent, the agent called the buyer in Moorhead, who admitted that after the lot behind the Rusty Tap, a woman had come to his house and paid him $3,000 to get back the best of the guns. She had said she wanted to keep them in the family. She had not said which family.
Jolene set down her paper plate. She spoke slowly, to the tabletop. “Dale, I did it. I knew Corey would sell them for drinks. I went to the man and bought back eight. I was going to sell them for a lot more and pay the arrears on the house. I did not tell Corey because he would have told the bar. And I did not tell you because I did not know how.” She wiped her eyes with a napkin. “I told them you were forgetting things because it was the only way to keep you away from the basement.”
I felt sorry for her, which I had not planned on. But feeling sorry is not the same as being fooled. I said, “Jolene, you sat in my kitchen and let me think I was going mad.” She said, “I know.” Corey, who had been standing frozen behind the bar, put the pitcher down and said, in a very small voice, “You took them from me?” “I took them from you,” she said, “before you could lose them in a card game.”
The Legion boys at the back table stood up, not to threaten anybody but to make a polite wall of caps and suspenders. Agent Dietz asked the bartender for a quiet room, and he took Corey and Jolene to the back office of the hall, where he read them their rights with the courtesy of a man opening a door. A Becker County deputy took the statement. It was nine pages long. The agent told me later that he had never seen two people so eager to confess to each other.
The law is orderly, and it is generous to the people it has wronged. All nine rifles were found, and the buyer in Moorhead, who had cooperated, returned the ones he still held. The prosecutor in Otter Tail County charged Corey with theft by swindle and Jolene with receiving stolen property and conspiracy, and both pleaded guilty. The sentences were probation, restitution for the value of the guns, which the court set at $14,200, and no firearms for either of them for ten years.
Travis, the cousin, was fined and lost his hunting license for three years. He wrote me a letter of apology in careful block capitals. He said he was sorry for the doe. I wrote back that I was sorry for the doe too, and that I hoped he would learn to shoot her with a camera. He sent me a photograph the following fall of a buck in the snow. I put it on the refrigerator.
Corey went back to work at the beet plant, on the night shift. He is not a bad man, and I have said that to nobody but myself. He is a man who was slowly buying his own ruin a twelve-pack at a time, and a judge finally made him stop. In the winter he went into a program in Fargo, thirty days, and came out with a medallion in his pocket and a different handshake. He did not pour for the Legion again.
The guns came home in March, in the long black case and then in several smaller ones, all wrapped in newspaper. I carried them to the basement myself, one at a time, and set each one in the oak cabinet in front of its serial number in the careful handwriting of Bev. The Model 12 went in last, in the slot that had held it since my father bought it new. I stood with my hand on the barrel for a long time.
My wife taped a list of numbers inside a cabinet door, and with a pencil she put the whole family back together. I made a new copy of the list at the library, for ten cents, and put it in the Folgers can in the chest freezer, under the walleye.
The first Saturday in October, my grandson and I drove out to Pelican Lake before sunrise. We sat in a blind of cattails with a thermos, and the geese came in over the water in long, loud lines. He held the Model 12 with both hands, as I showed him, and I laid my hand over his. I told him how my father had stood in the same place in 1948. A single goose went over, high and wide, and neither of us fired. We watched it all the way across the sky.