The third man who had signed the bill of sale as a witness was the Reverend Moses Pickett, pastor of our church for thirty one years and the man who had buried half of Luling. When I read his careful signature, I put my knife down and sat on the bench beside Abel Rountree, because my knees would not hold me. I had known the Reverend all my life. I had thought I knew everything he knew. Darius stood behind us in his good shoes, holding the paper by its corners, as if it might burn him.
“I did not come to take anything, Mrs. Mabry,” Abel said. He was eighty years old, a tall stooped man with big gentle hands, and his voice was very soft. “I came because my daddy never came home, and for thirty six years I have wanted to know why. I looked in every record I could find. The name of your husband was on the last piece of paper he ever signed. I thought maybe you had it.” I told him I did not know about the paper, but I knew the man. I said I would help him look. I said to give me until Sunday.
That night I took the leather apron of Cleotis down from the hook on the side of the smoker. It was stiff as a board and smelled of post oak and thirty seven years of Saturdays. I had never put my hand in the big front pocket, because it felt like his pocket. I put my hand in now. At the bottom, folded in thirds and soft as flannel, lay a single sheet of lined paper. At the top, in the heavy block letters of Cleotis, it said, IF THE ROUNTREES EVER COME, GIVE THIS TO THEM AND THEN GIVE THEM EVERYTHING.
A man who says little all his life will leave his whole heart in the pocket of his work apron, where only his wife will think to look.
I read it by the light of the kitchen lamp. It said that on the night of the poker game in 1989, he had won the land and the smoker from Silas Rountree on a bluff, and had been sick about it every day since. He had never wanted a church deacon to lose his church. He had gone to the Reverend Pickett to ask what to do, and the Reverend had said to hold the paper safe until Silas had time to cool down and come back for it. But Silas never came. Cleotis wrote that he had looked for him in San Antonio, in Austin, in Houston, for ten years.
And then he wrote the rest. In the fall of 1999, he had finally found a record at the highway patrol office. On the night of the poker game, a week after, a man had been killed in a car wreck on the road to San Antonio. The car was a green Ford, burned out, with no wallet in it. The county had buried the man as unknown. Cleotis had known right away who it was. He wrote that he drove down to the county office with his hat in his hand and paid, out of his oil field money, for a headstone in the Luling cemetery, with a name.
The following Sunday, after church, I drove Abel to the Luling cemetery. I did not tell him anything on the way. The grave was in the old corner under the live oaks, a plain gray stone with fresh flowers, because Cleotis had made me promise years ago to put flowers on a certain grave on the Fourth of July, which I had always done without knowing why. The stone said, Silas Rountree, Deacon, Beloved Father, 1989. Abel stood in front of it with his hat held against his chest and his shoulders shaking, and he did not make a sound.
I stood a little behind him with my hand on his sleeve. After a long time, he said, “He has been here the whole time. Thirty six years, a mile from the church, and somebody kept his flowers.” I said, “That was the work of my husband.” He nodded. He knelt down in the grass in his good suit, which at eighty is not a small thing, and he ran his fingers over the carved letters, one by one. Then he said, very quietly, “Tell Cleotis that Silas forgives the card game.”
The deed to the two acres on Pecan Street went to the church on the first Sunday in July. Abel insisted. He said his father had helped build that church with his own hands, and he would not take away a single board. He stood at the front of the sanctuary in a borrowed tie, and the whole congregation stood with him, and the son of Reverend Pickett, who now leads us, read the bill of sale aloud while the clerk of the court stamped it. When it was done, the old man looked at the steeple through the window and said, “Now it is where it belongs.”
That afternoon I served brisket on the lawn of the church. The line ran all the way down Pecan Street, hundreds of people, and Abel sat beside me on a folding chair with a plate on his knee. Darius worked the slicing board next to me, with his sleeves rolled up. He was quiet for a long time. Finally he said, low, “Mama, I was wrong to give the smoker of Pop to Jarvis. I was wrong about all of it.” I said, “I know, baby.” I handed him the bag from the freezer, the one marked with his name, and he held it to his chest like a boy.
We placed second at the Lockhart cook off the next March, behind a man from Austin who had been at it forty years. Abel judged the beans, though he is not allowed to say how he voted. Darius flew in from Houston to work the fire with me, and the baby sat on a blanket in the shade of the trailer, chewing on a burnt end. The apron of Cleotis hangs on the same hook on the side of the firebox, stiff as ever. When the wind is right and the post oak is burning, I swear I can hear the old man hum.