“Roy Tillery!” Earnest shouted through the door, and the whole hallway of the cardiac unit went still. “It was Roy Tillery! I never touched her! Tell Sue Ellen it was Roy!” A nurse had her hands on my shoulders and was guiding me away, but the name went through me like a bell. Roy Tillery, who sang bass beside me in the choir of Calvary Baptist. Roy, who had passed me the hymnal every Sunday for twenty years, and held my elbow on the icy steps, and brought a casserole when Orbin died.
I stood in the hallway with my back against the wall. The monitor in the room quieted. A doctor came out and said Earnest was stable, that it had been only a scare, that the stent was holding. Wanda came out behind him with her face the color of ashes. She sat down on a bench and put her pocketbook on her knees. She said, in a flat voice, “He has carried that for forty six years. He told me last night. I did not believe him.”
I called the sheriff from the hospital parking lot. His name was Dwayne Hollis, and he had been a boy of ten the night Patty died. He listened to me for twenty minutes without interrupting. He said that the file was thin, that it had been closed by a deputy long retired, and that he had always wondered about the guardrail. Then he said something I will remember all my life. “Mrs. Godsey, I will come to the hospital myself. Do not say a word to anyone in your church until I get there.”
A guilty man who has hidden in a church choir for forty six years may sing his loudest on the very day the truth comes up behind him.
Earnest told the sheriff everything that afternoon, in a hospital bed, with Wanda holding his hand and a tape recorder on the tray table. He had been twenty four, a drinker, and Roy Tillery had been his friend from the feed store. On the night of April 14, 1979, the two of them were driving back from a bar in Smyrna when they saw a little blue Pinto going slowly in the rain. Roy knew the car. He had asked Patty to the spring dance, and she had told him no.
Roy had told Earnest to follow her. Just to scare her, he said. He leaned out the window and shouted. He told Earnest to come up close behind, closer, so close that the headlights lit up the inside of the Pinto. Patty had sped up, panicking, and the wet road took the wheel out of her hands. Earnest said he never touched her bumper, and the sheriff said later that the investigators had always believed it. But he had seen the car go over the guardrail and into the river, and he had not stopped.
“I drove home,” Earnest said, in a thick voice. “Roy told me that if I said anything, I would go to prison for murder. So I said nothing. I went to church. I got married. I prayed every night for her, and I never had one night of peace.” He turned his head on the pillow and looked at me. “Sue Ellen, I should have run to that river. I should have jumped in. I should have been the one to pull her out. I have wished it every day.”
I did not forgive him that afternoon. I did not curse him either. I sat beside the bed, holding my pocketbook in both hands, and I said what was true. I said I was glad he told me, and that the telling did not return my sister. I said I would be at the courthouse when it was time. Then I stood up and walked to the window. A cardinal sat on the sill of the hospital, red as a berry, and I thought of Patty, who loved them, and who had been nineteen.
They arrested Roy Tillery at choir practice on Wednesday night, in the sanctuary of Calvary Baptist, standing in the bass section with his folder open to the second verse. The sheriff and two deputies walked down the center aisle in the quiet, and the organist stopped playing. Roy turned. He saw the sheriff. He looked at me in the alto row. Then he closed the folder, very gently, and laid it on the pew, and said, “I wondered when,” and went with them without a word.
The trial took four days in the spring. Roy, seventy six years old, pleaded guilty on the second morning, because Earnest took the stand and told the same story, and because the sheriff had located the old tow truck driver who remembered a gray pickup at the river. The judge gave Roy twenty years for second degree murder. Earnest, who cooperated, received five years of probation. The judge said the law could not return forty six years but that it could, at least, name them.
The following October, on the anniversary, I drove to the Old Nashville Highway with Wanda beside me and a pot of yellow chrysanthemums on my lap. We stopped at the guardrail above Stones River, which the county had replaced. Wanda said a prayer. I knelt and set the flowers on the grass. Then, for the first time since 1979, I sang the song Patty loved most, the one about the Savior in the garden, in a voice that wobbled but did not break. The river kept the time.