On the back of that old ticket, in the careful print of my husband, was a short note, and I read it by the lamp at my kitchen table with my glasses pushed up on my forehead. Rosie, if you ever find this, I am sorry. I traded two million dollars for you. I could not risk losing you. Forty years of Fridays are worth more than any money. D. I laid it down and put both hands flat on the oilcloth. The old refrigerator hummed. Somewhere down the hollow, a dog barked twice and quit.
I did not sleep. In the morning I called Mr. Bhatt and asked him to bring the man in the camel coat to my house, if he came back, and to bring the deputy from the county as well. I had made up my mind. For forty years I had been married to a man who feared something so badly he gave up a fortune to avoid it, and I intended to know what it was. Mr. Bhatt said the white haired man had left a card. He would call.
He came that Saturday at noon, in a long gray car, with Mr. Bhatt and a young deputy named Harlan Mullins behind him. He was in his late seventies, with silver hair and a courtly manner, and he took off his hat on my porch. “Mrs. Cantrell,” he said, “my name is Walter Haskell. I was the sheriff of McDowell County for twenty six years. I believe I owe you a long explanation and an apology, and I am afraid I am forty years late.”
We sat in my front room, and Mr. Haskell took the photograph from his pocket. It showed a boy of twenty, thin and frightened, in handcuffs beside a patrol car. “That is your husband,” he said gently. “His name then was Delmer Ray Tackett. In 1971 he was convicted of stealing from a feed store where he worked, and sentenced to three years. He did not do it. His older brother did, and he took the blame to protect their mother. He served eleven months, and then he walked off a road crew in the rain and disappeared.”
A man who walks away from a lie may spend his whole life afraid of the truth, when the truth had long ago been set free.
I put my hand over my mouth. All those years, I thought. All those years Delmer had been looking over his shoulder, and never told me why. “I was the deputy who drove him to the road crew,” Mr. Haskell went on. “I knew he was innocent. In 1974 the brother confessed on his deathbed to a preacher, and the record was cleared. Your husband was pardoned in writing. But no one could find him. I looked for him for thirty years, Mrs. Cantrell. I put his name in every database. He had simply become Delmer Cantrell.”
He opened a leather folder and laid a document on my table. It was a pardon, signed by the governor in 1975, with a seal. Beside it lay a letter from the state, stamped and notarized, declaring that the conviction of Delmer Ray Tackett had been vacated and expunged. “He was a free man for forty nine years,” said Mr. Haskell, “and he never knew. If he had claimed the lottery prize in 1998, his name would have been in the paper, and the first person who saw it would have been me. I would have driven up your hollow and told him the day I saw it.”
I read the pardon three times. Then I started to laugh, and the laugh turned into crying, and Mr. Bhatt, who had been standing quietly by the door, handed me a clean handkerchief from his pocket. I laughed because it was exactly like Delmer to give up two million dollars out of fear of a debt that had been paid off before our wedding. I cried because he had died believing that he was still running. “He had nothing to run from,” I said. “Nothing at all.”
Mr. Haskell then told me the last part, and it was the kindest. He had retired in 2001, he said, and had never stopped wondering about the missing boy. Last month he saw a news story about a ticket that sold in West Virginia in 1998 and never was claimed, and the number sequence was familiar. Years earlier, a deputy had written down the numbers a young prisoner tapped on his cell wall every night. They were four, nine, seventeen, twenty two, thirty one, and forty. The days of the month that his mother had visited.
They meant Fridays, I realized. They meant visiting days. Every ticket Delmer bought for twenty nine years was a prayer for the mother he had saved, and then lost, who died before he could go home. I took down the Bible from the shelf and ran my hand along its fat spine. I took out one ticket at random, an ordinary Friday, and I turned it over, and there on the back, in his tiny print, was a date and two words. Mama, Friday.
We did not become rich. The prize had expired long ago, and there was no appeal. But I did not feel poor. That evening, at the church supper, I stood up and told the whole story to the Free Will Baptist congregation, with the pardon in my hand, and they stood and clapped for my husband, who was forty nine years too late to hear it. Mr. Haskell sat in the back pew and wept. Afterward the preacher hugged him and said the Lord keeps good records.
I still go to the Mountain Mart on Fridays. Mr. Bhatt greets me at the door with a chair and a cup of coffee, and I buy a single ticket, with the same six numbers, and I tuck it into the back of the Bible when I get home. I do not check it. A woman named Peggy who works the register once asked me what I would do if I ever won. I told her that I already had, forty years ago, on a Friday, in a hollow near Bluefield, and that I knew exactly what the numbers meant.