“She told me where he was,” Eunice had said on the back steps of the church, “and honey, you have been walking over him every day of your life.” I drove her home that same afternoon, her walker in the trunk and her hand holding mine across the seat, and I thought of nothing but the old iron bell on its post at the corner of the porch. By the time we turned into the drive, the shadows were long on the pasture. Eunice pointed with one shaking finger at the post, at the place where the rope hung, and said quietly, “Dig there.”
I did not dig that night. I called the sheriff of White County, a gray man named Hollis Parnell, who came out with a deputy at dusk. I told him as much as I knew. He listened, hat in hand, and then asked Eunice whether she was willing to say it all again in the morning, on the record. She said she had been waiting fifty four years. She sat on the porch swing with a blanket on her lap, and in the last of the light she looked younger than she had at the funeral.
In the morning, a small crew from the state came with a machine and a little shovel. They worked slowly around the base of the bell post, which my great grandfather had set in concrete, and by noon they had found what Eunice had promised. Under four feet of pasture clay, wrapped in a canvas tarp and tied with baling wire, were the bones of a man, with a belt buckle and the remains of a shotgun. I stood in my yard in my apron and watched them lift him out with a kind of tenderness.
Some people spend their whole lives protecting the helpless, and only after they are gone do the helpless learn how much it cost.
The inquest was held three weeks later in the courthouse in Searcy. Eunice testified from a chair, in her blue church dress, with her hair pinned up. She told about the root cellar and the lantern and the single shot. She told how the sheriff of 1971 had been a friend of Clyde, and how everyone in the county had agreed to forget. She said her mother had made her swear to say nothing while Ola lived. Then she looked straight at the judge and said, “That woman saved six lives that night. I was one of them.”
The coroner confirmed what the old bones told him. Clyde Hollis had been killed by one blast from a twelve gauge, fired at close range, from the front. A letter written by Ola in 1989 was found in the family Bible, sealed with candle wax, and the lawyer read it aloud.
She wrote that Clyde had come into her yard that night with a gun raised, shouting that he would shoot the first living thing he saw, and that she had fired once to stop him. She wrote that she had buried him herself, because she could not bear the sheriff taking a man who would only be set free.
The judge ruled it justified. It took him less than a minute. The room, which had been full of old neighbors in their church clothes, let out a long breath, and several women began to cry. Eunice sat very still. Then she turned to me and took both my hands, as she had on the church steps, and said, “Darcy, I have been afraid of that sound all my life. The sound of three bells. I would like to hear it again, and not be afraid.”
So we gave Clyde a proper burial in the cemetery by the creek, with his name on a stone. Eunice stood at the grave in a wheelchair that her granddaughter had borrowed, and she spoke softly to the father she had feared and the mother who had fled with her. She forgave him, she said, as she had forgiven God for letting it happen. When it was finished, she asked if we might go home to the farm and ring the bell one more time. It was nearly six.
I pulled the rope. It is heavy, and the first pull startled me, because I had not rung it since Mamaw died. Clang. The sound rolled out across the pasture and bounced off the tree line and went on over the creek to the gray house with the sagging porch. Clang. Eunice had her eyes closed. Her lips moved. Clang. She whispered, “Thank you, Ola.” Then she opened her eyes and smiled, and I saw a girl of nine in the face of an old woman.
I still ring the bell every evening at six, three times, rain or shine. It does not mean what it once meant. Now it means that someone is home, the light is on, and the cellar door is unlocked for anyone who needs it. Last winter a boy of fourteen came up from the road in the dark with a black eye and a backpack. He did not say why. He stood at the bottom of the steps until I opened the door, and I fed him, and I let him stay.