The door of the little brick house in Denver was opened by a woman of fifty five in a gray cardigan, with short silver hair and a face I had seen somewhere, in the photographs on the wall of the parlor of my grandmother. The same pale eyes. The same square jaw. She stood in the doorway holding a dish towel in both hands. For a long moment neither of us spoke. I had driven four hundred miles through the night on a tank of gas and two cups of gas station coffee, and I could hardly stand. “You must be Shelby,” she said. “I have been waiting a very long time.”
Her name was Lorene Whitaker, and she was the half sister of my grandmother, born when Velma was thirty six. Their father, Judge Amos Stuckey, had remarried late. I had grown up hearing that Lorene had moved to Denver as a girl and become a bookkeeper, and I had never thought another thing about it. She led me into a tidy kitchen with yellow curtains and a pot of coffee on the stove. She poured two mugs. She sat across from me, folded her hands, and told me, in a voice she had obviously practiced, what she had never said aloud to anyone.
On the night of May 14th, 1988, she was seventeen years old. She had gone to the senior party at a lake east of McCook with a boy named Dale Pruitt, whom she loved, and who loved her. They both drank beer. Neither of them had meant to get drunk. Dale had gone to sleep in the passenger seat of his truck, and she had decided to drive them home, because she was the one who had been counting the cans. She was not sure how she missed the lights at the crossing. She remembered a horn, and a screaming, and nothing else.
“I woke up on the gravel with blood on my hands,” Lorene said. “The train was stopped far down the track. Someone was shouting. I looked at the truck, and I could not look again. I ran. I do not know how far. A man found me on the road. The signalman, Harlan. He took me to the house of my father.” She stopped. Her chin trembled. “My father put me in a hot bath and called the sheriff. By morning the paper said the crossing arms had malfunctioned, and that Dale had been driving alone. And I had been sent to Denver with a suitcase.”
The heaviest thing a person can carry is the truth she is not allowed to tell, and the lightest thing in the world is a flower planted quietly for her.
I put down my mug. I thought of Grandma Velma in the ditch with her trowel and her galvanized bucket, rain or snow, thirty six years in a row. “She knew,” I said. Lorene nodded, and the tears came then, running unchecked down her cheeks. “Velma found out that same week. She went to see the signalman. Then she drove to Denver, the first of many times, and sat on my bed and held my hand and said, Lorene, we will carry this together. She never once told me to confess. She never once told me I was guilty. She told me I was loved.”
Velma had planted the irises every spring, she said, because she could not bring the boy back and could not speak the truth. She had also brought flowers every April to the mother of Dale, a widow named Opal, who lived in a small house outside town and never knew why the older woman came. They had become friends. They drank coffee on the porch. Velma never confessed a word of it, because she had given her promise to Lorene, and because she believed it was not hers to tell. “She wanted me to find the courage,” said Lorene, “and I never did. Until she died.”
I looked at the woman across the table, small and tired, her hands scarred from years of ledger work. She had been seventeen. I knew too well what an old terror could do to a girl. I asked whether she wanted to go back to McCook. Her face went white. “I cannot,” she said. “I have been afraid for thirty six years.” I held out my hand. “Aunt Lorene,” I said, “I will drive.” She looked at my palm for a long moment, then closed her fingers around it, and for the first time since I came through her door, she let out a breath.
We arrived in McCook the next afternoon. I took her to the house of Opal Pruitt, a small, white frame farmhouse with a swing on the porch, where an old woman of eighty eight sat in a quilted jacket, shelling beans. Lorene stood at the foot of the steps and could not climb. I went up first. I told Opal who we were, in as few words as I could. Opal listened without moving. Then she set aside her bowl, stood up on her cane, and came down the steps one at a time, toward the woman at the bottom.
“You were the girl who loved my boy,” Opal said. “I saw you at his funeral, at the back, with your face in your hands.” Lorene fell to her knees on the gravel. She said, “I am so sorry. I am so sorry.” Opal put her hand on the gray head. She said she had known, in her heart, for many years. A mother always knows. And she had forgiven the girl long ago, the day Velma first brought her a pot of purple blossoms, and said, These are for somebody who is missed.
The sheriff reopened the case in May, and the state attorney, after hearing the testimony of Lorene and the old signalman, decided that no useful purpose would be served by prosecution after thirty seven years. The record was corrected. A new marker was placed at the crossing, beside the old white cross, with a name and a date and a verse. On the second Saturday of the next April, Lorene came back to McCook. She walked a mile down the gravel road with a trowel and a bucket of bulbs, beside me, and knelt in the ditch, and planted.
By May, the post was ringed in purple, a whole sea of it, bending in the wind. Opal came out in her wheelchair and sat in the grass. The three of us stayed there until the sun went down, and nobody said much. When the light turned gold over the wheat, Lorene took a single stem and laid it on the little white cross. “Dale,” she said, as clear as a bell. “I remember you.” Somewhere behind us, I swear, I heard my grandmother laughing.