The man in the wheelchair across the waiting room, the one who had looked at Ora Lee all morning with a strange and quiet recognition, was Harlan Boggs, and in the autumn of 1987 he had been shot in the leg behind the counter of a pawn shop in Florence. Ora Lee told me this at her kitchen table with the shoebox open between us and her hands folded on top of the clipping. “He knew my face,” she said. “I did not know his. But I knew his name when he said it, and I could not rest.”
She had gone straight from the clinic to the lawyer. That was what the forty minutes in the office of Mr. Kimbrough had been.
She had changed her will, she told me, not out of anger at her son, but out of a kind of terror. For thirty seven years she had kept a secret, because her husband had made her swear, and because she loved Randall. Then a man in a wheelchair looked up from a magazine and said, “Mrs. Dobbins, you are the mother of Randall Dobbins, are you not?” And she knew she could not wait any longer.
I was stunned. All my years of living next door, I had never imagined it. Randall, in 1987, had been twenty three years old and in terrible debt to a man in Muscle Shoals. He had walked into the pawn shop with the pistol of his father, meaning only to frighten the clerk and take the cash. The gun had gone off in his hand. He had run. His father, Walter, had found the weapon in his truck the next day, and had understood in one terrible instant what had happened.
A father who loves his son may bury the evidence with his own hands, and still spend every night afterward listening to the dead silence of the thing he did.
Walter Dobbins had pawned his own shotguns that week and left the ticket in a shoebox, to make it look as though the guns were gone for money. He had paid the hospital bills of Harlan Boggs in secret, through a friend at the church, for six years. He never forgave himself. He died in 1999 with the secret in his chest, and Ora Lee had carried it ever since, in a shoebox on a closet shelf, along with a dread so heavy that she could hardly lift it.
Randall sat for an hour on the steps of the porch of his mother that day, with the paper in his hand. I watched from my window, not wanting to intrude. When he finally came across the yard to my door, his big red face had gone soft and tired. He asked me, in a voice I scarcely knew, to forgive him for the way he had shouted. I said there was nothing to forgive. He said, “Jeanette, I would like you to come with me to see Mr. Boggs. I do not think I can do it alone.”
We drove together the next morning to a little brick house outside Florence, with a wheelchair ramp and a flag. Harlan Boggs let us in himself. He was a lean man of seventy with a gray mustache, and he looked at Randall for a long time without a word. Randall stood in the middle of the living room and said what he had come to say. He did not make excuses. He said he had been a coward for thirty seven years, and that he was ready to take whatever came.
Harlan listened to the end. Then he said, quietly, “Son, I have waited most of my life to hear a man say that.” He told us he had never been angry at the one who fired, only at the silence. He had known the money for his hospital had come from somewhere, and had suspected it was from the family. He had wanted only the truth. Randall wept openly then, and the old man reached out and gripped his arm and said, “Sit down. Let us have some coffee.”
The statute of limitations had run out long ago, and Harlan did not want a trial. Instead, he asked for something else. He asked that Randall visit the schools in Colbert County once a month, to tell the boys about the day he had picked up a gun, and what it had cost. Randall agreed at once. Ora Lee, for her part, quietly changed her will a second time. The house went to Randall after all, with the river land to be held in trust for the grandchildren and a gift for Harlan.
On the first Sunday of every month now, Randall comes by with a pie and drives his mother to church, and then to lunch with the old man at his house in Florence. The three of them sit around a card table. Ora Lee, who is ninety two, wins at checkers more often than not. I join them sometimes, in my good dress. And when the weather is fine, I take her to her appointments myself, and we stop for ice cream on the way home.