The man behind the wheel of the black pickup was Danny Guidroz himself. He was sixty years old, bald and brown as a saddle, with a red cap that said TOLEDO BEND BAIT AND TACKLE, and I had seen his face in a hundred lines at the courthouse. He rolled down his window. He did not smile and he did not scowl. “Mrs. Sonnier,” he said, “I would like to talk to you. Alone, if that is all right. I will not leave my truck. I will say what I came to say through this window.”
I put on my robe and my rubber boots and walked down the gravel in the dark, because I am sixty eight years old and I have been afraid of men in pickups before. He sat with both hands on the wheel where I could see them. “My father was Tee Guidroz,” he said. “He went out on that lake on the fourteenth of April, nineteen ninety one, in a red boat with his friend Alton Pitre, to fish the tournament. They never came back. I was twenty six. I have looked at that water every day since.”
Then he asked me the question that I had known he would ask since I read the paper. “Did Boo kill them?” I looked at the old man for a long time. I thought of the man I had been married to for forty four years, who cried at weddings and carried spiders out of the house on a paper plate. I said, “Mr. Guidroz, I do not know what happened that night, but I know my husband. If he had done a wicked thing, he would not have been able to live.” He nodded slowly. He said, “That is what I told myself.”
A man who carries a secret for thirty four years often hides the key in the one place he is sure a faithful wife will finally look.
I went back to the house at sunrise, and I did what I had not done since February. I took the lucky cap of Boo off its nail by the door, where it hung after every morning on the lake. It was gray with sweat and sun. Something inside the band was stiff. I turned it inside out with my thumbnail, and between the lining and the cloth, folded very small and sealed in a plastic bag, was a sheet of paper in the loopy hand of my husband. It was dated the day he died. It began, Claudette, forgive me. I should have told you thirty years ago.
The letter was short. On the night of the tournament, a storm had come down from the north with no warning, and his own boat had struck a stump and gone down at the mouth of the cove. Swimming for the bank, he found another boat lying swamped and turned sideways with no one aboard, a red bass boat just like his. He searched the water for an hour with a flashlight, calling. He found a life vest and nothing more. Near dawn, he towed the empty boat home, telling himself he was only borrowing it, and the borrowing grew into a habit, and the habit grew into a lie.
He wrote that he had searched for the men for years with a rake and a sonar borrowed from a friend. He had never found them. He wrote that every Saturday on the lake he had said a prayer for them. And at the bottom, in a hand that shook, he had put the place near the old cypress line where he believed the boat had gone over. He wrote that the boat belonged to the family of Tee Guidroz, and that he had meant to give it back. He wrote that he did not know how, and so he just kept loving me, and fishing, and waiting for courage.
I took the letter to the end of the driveway, still in my robe, and handed it through the window of the black pickup. Danny read it with his reading glasses on his nose and his lips moving. He read it twice. Then he put his forehead against the steering wheel, and his big shoulders shook, and a sound came out of him that I have heard only once before, at the grave of my own husband. I put my hand on the door of his truck. After a while, he said, “Thirty four years, Mrs. Sonnier. And he was out there looking for him.”
The sheriff sent a dive team and a boat with sonar on the following Monday, and they found what the letter said they would find, forty feet down in a bed of cypress roots, in the exact place that Boo had written. The remains of two men were brought up on a Thursday, in the rain, while Danny stood on the dock with his hat in his hands and his son beside him. The priest from Many said the words. Nobody spoke. The parish had waited a very long time to bury its dead, and the whole town came, standing in rain gear, in a line that ran back to the road.
Afterward, I did the thing I had decided to do on the morning of the letter. I went to Mr. Landry at the marina with eleven thousand two hundred dollars, in cash, in a bread bag, and asked to buy back the boat of Boo. He took the money and gave me the boat, and then he gave me back half the money, and said he was glad to have been part of it. The clerk of court, my old friend, issued a corrected title that afternoon in the name of Guidroz. I took it to the funeral. I laid it in the hands of Danny.
Danny tore up the paper of Corey that same night, in front of everybody, at the fish fry after the funeral. “Nine thousand dollars,” he said, loud enough for the whole room. “There is no such debt.” And he closed the books of his bait shop that fall and started a scholarship for the children of the lake. Corey stood next to me with tears on his face and went to a meeting in Alexandria that very week. On Sunday, he came to my kitchen door at noon with the grandbabies, and I put on the gumbo, and he said, “Mama, I am here.” I said, “I know you are, baby.”