“He is at my desk right now, Doris,” whispered Mrs. Vogt on the telephone, “and he is asking for the gray atlas. His name is Gerald Pruitt.” I stood in my kitchen with the brass key in one hand and the old clipping in the other, and I felt my knees go weak.
Everyone in Beloit knew Gerald Pruitt. He had been vice president of the bank on Main Street in 1994, the son of the founder, and he had retired with a gold watch and a standing seat on the church council. He was seventy six, and he had been a friend of my husband.
I told Mrs. Vogt to keep him there, to be pleasant, to say the atlas was on its way. Then I did what Stanley would have done. I picked up the telephone and called Sheriff Dan Ulrich, whom I had known since he was a boy in my Sunday school class. I read him the clipping, and I described the key. He was silent a moment. “Mrs. Kuhn,” he said, “do not go anywhere. I will meet you at the library in ten minutes, and we will do this together.”
We found Gerald in the reading room, sitting at a table with a newspaper he was not reading. He had grown stout and gray, and he wore his good tan jacket, the one with leather elbows. When I walked in with the sheriff at my elbow, carrying the atlas in both arms like my husband used to, he rose half out of his chair. His eyes went to the book. He did not say a word. The color drained from his face from the top of his head to his chin.
Sometimes a man spends thirty years watching a library book, and the only thing he is truly guarding is the conscience of the other man.
He confessed in the back office, with the door closed and the librarian standing guard in the hall. In July of 1994, he had been in debt. A bad investment had cost him nearly all his savings, and he feared losing the house. On the night of the estate auction, when the money sat in the night deposit box, he had the key. He took the bag, drove to the library, and hid the cash in a locker he rented under a false name at the bus station. The brass key was to that locker. He had slit the spine of the atlas to hide it.
Stanley had seen him do it. That was the thing that pressed hardest on Gerald, he said. My husband had stood behind a shelf and watched, and had never said a word to anyone, even when the bank investigation turned on three innocent clerks. He had kept the atlas checked out for thirty one years so that Gerald could never retrieve the key. And Gerald, who had not dared to touch it, had waited all that time, fearing the day it would be found. “He was the better man,” Gerald said, hoarsely. “I knew it every single day.”
The locker, when the sheriff opened it that afternoon, held a canvas bag and a rubber banded stack of cash, yellow with age. The bank had long since been absorbed by a larger one, and the estate heirs were scattered across three states. The court appointed a trustee. Within the year, every dollar had been returned to the family of the old farmer whose land was sold. Gerald pleaded guilty. He received probation, a heavy fine, and a requirement to speak every month at the high school about what he had done.
The three clerks, one of whom was still living in Concordia, were cleared in a public hearing and received a letter of apology from the bank. I attended with my best hat on. The oldest of them, a man named Walt, took my hand in the courthouse hall and said, “Your husband saved my name, and I never knew.” I told him that Stanley would have been embarrassed by the fuss. He said, “That is exactly what makes it so fine.”
The county offered me a reward, ten thousand dollars, for the recovery of the money. I thanked them kindly and told them to give it to the library. Mrs. Vogt wept. Within a month, the little Carnegie library on Hersey Street had a new roof, a new reading corner for children, and a plaque by the door. It read, in plain black letters, The Stanley Kuhn Reading Room. I touched the letters with my fingertips on the opening day. They were still cool from the engraver.
The atlas is back on its shelf now, with a new spine, repaired by a bookbinder from Salina. On Thursday afternoons I walk up to the library with a thermos of tea, and I take it down and carry it to a table in the sun. I open it, which my husband never did, and I turn the pages slowly. The maps of far places lie there in their gray and blue. I run my finger along the roads he never traveled, and I tell him about each one.