“Evening, Mama,” said Ray Allen, stepping out of the tall grass in his plain clothes with a flashlight pointed at the ground. Behind him, two deputies in dark jackets rose out of the reeds like herons, one on each side of the dock. And between them, stooped and dripping, with a bottle in one hand and a coil of rope in the other, stood my son in law Dustin, who had been lying in the cold mud at the edge of my pond for three hours, waiting for me to step out onto the last six boards.
I stood very still on the dock with my own flashlight in my hand. The boards under my feet were slick and gray in the dusk, and the post at the end wobbled in the wind. Ray Allen had asked me to walk down as always, to sit on the end as always, and to say nothing and do nothing but be myself. I had done it. I had walked with my heart in my throat and my knees like water, past the spot where my husband had stood for fifty years, and I had not slipped.
Dustin did not run. He looked at the deputies and at the bottle in his hand, which smelled of motor oil, and at the rope, and a kind of gray crumpled blankness spread over his face. Ray Allen took the flashlight from his own belt and lit it up, and everything was clear. “Dustin Pruett,” my son said, in the flat voice he used for work, “you are under arrest for the attempted murder of Myrtle Inman.” I will not forget the sound of the handcuffs in the quiet.
A woman who spends fifty years listening for herons learns to hear when something in the grass is not a bird.
The thing I had feared most was not Dustin. It was the car that pulled into the drive at that very moment, a white Chevy with a bad muffler, and the woman who got out of it in her salon smock with her hands over her mouth. Starla stood in the headlights. She had come home early. She had come because, she said later, she could not do it, because she had sat all day in the shop with a client under the dryer and had suddenly thrown down her tools and left.
She walked across the lawn toward the pond like someone walking into the sea. She saw the deputies. She saw Dustin on his knees. She saw me, standing on the dock in the barn coat of Lester, alive. And my daughter, who was thirty nine years old and had never once in her life apologized for anything, sat down in the wet grass and began to sob so hard that her whole body shook. “Mama,” she said. “Mama, I could not. I was going to call you. I was going to call you tonight.”
I came off the dock slowly and sat in the grass beside her. I did not touch her at first. I let her cry until the sobs became hiccups. Then I told her what I knew. I told her that I had heard six minutes and fourteen seconds, and that I had listened to every one of them, and that I knew exactly which of the voices was which. “You said make it Saturday,” I said. “You said you would be at work.” She nodded against her knees. “And you were not.”
The story that came out in the weeks that followed was a sad and ordinary one. Dustin had owed money to a man in Birmingham, a great deal of it, and the developer had offered a signing bonus that would clear it. Starla had been pushed and pushed. She had said yes in the truck, at midnight, in a moment of fear and rage, and had spent every hour since sick with it. The prosecutor believed her. The deputy who took her statement said it was the most honest account he had heard in years.
Dustin pleaded guilty in July to attempted murder and conspiracy, and the judge gave him twelve years. Starla pleaded to conspiracy and received five years of probation, a fine, and an order to attend counseling every week. At her sentencing, she turned in her seat and found me in the second row, and mouthed something that I could not hear. I nodded anyway. I have forgiven my daughter. It took all summer. It took many nights in the dark with the photograph of Lester on my chest.
Ray Allen came back from Huntsville on the first Saturday of September with a trailer of fresh cedar posts and a new set of oak planks. He and his sister spent four days together rebuilding the dock, hammering in the sun, saying very little. When they finished, the new boards smelled of sawdust. The post at the end was set in concrete. Ray Allen stood on the planks and bounced, and the whole thing held. He looked at me with the jaw and the grin of Lester. “Mama,” he said, “try it.”
At dusk, I walked down to the pond with my flashlight, the same as always, and my son and my daughter walked on either side of me. We sat at the end of the dock in a row, three Inmans, with our feet over the dark water. The first great blue heron came in low over the cattails, long legs trailing, and landed in the oak with a soft heavy creak of its wings. Starla took my hand. Nobody said a word. We watched the herons come home.