Clyde Barnes finished his cigarette and ground it out under the heel of his work boot. He said, “Your mother was in the car with him that night, Linda. She was thirty five years old. She had played the organ for a funeral in Palmyra, and the judge had offered her a ride because her own car had a flat. They were coming back along the River Road, and he had been drinking at the wake.” He wiped his mouth. “He did not see the girl. She came out of the dark on a bicycle with no light. Your mother told me the sound was something she heard for forty years.”
I leaned against the cold brick wall behind the Methodist church with my hand pressed to my chest. I said, “Why did she not go to the police?” Clyde said, “He told her he would take care of it. He said it was an accident and the girl was already gone. He said that if it came out, your father would lose his job at the cannery, and you would lose your home.” He gave a ragged laugh. “And she believed him. She was a good woman, and she was afraid, and he was the judge of the county.”
He told me the rest in a low voice, in the shadow of the dumpsters. Judge Ames had loaded the bicycle into the trunk of his Buick, along with the girl, and driven to his family farm on the bluff. It was Clyde, who had come out of the dark with the tow truck at the wrong moment, who saw him close the trunk. “He knew I had seen,” said Clyde. “And two weeks later, I was in handcuffs. Burglary, he said. A hardware store I never entered. The sheriff was his cousin.” Clyde held up his hand with the crooked anchor. “I did eight years for what he did.”
A kindness that is also a cage is still a cage, and it takes a child brave enough to open the door.
I walked back into the church in a daze. The judge was still in the front pew, eighty three years old, with his cane across his knees and his eyes fixed on the casket. He looked up at me as I approached. I do not think I have ever seen a face so frightened. I said nothing. I sat down beside him, and I took his big mottled hand, and I held it. After a long moment, he said, in a whisper, “Linda, your mother came to see me last month.” I said, “I know.” He said, “She told me she was dying. She said she had written it all down.”
That night, at my kitchen table, I opened the sewing box of my mother. I had never looked inside it. Under the spools and the tape measure was a thin black notebook, bound with a rubber band. The first page was dated the day after the accident, March 14, 1984. Her handwriting, small and upright, filled thirty pages. It was an account of everything she had seen. A map, drawn carefully, with an X. Under it she had written, This is where the Judge put her. It is the old cistern behind the barn. I have never forgiven myself.
She had begun the grocery bags the year that Clyde came out of prison. “I could not give him back his years. But I could give him bread. I told him that if he ever talked, the judge would destroy him again. So I fed him, and I kept him quiet, and I told myself it was kindness.” She had written, I know now that I was buying my own silence with eggs and coffee. I am a coward, Linda. I have been one all my life. Please do what I could not. Please bring that child home.
I called the Marion County sheriff at six the next morning. He was a young man, a stranger to the old politics, and he listened to the whole story with a notebook. By noon, the state police had a warrant. By evening, a backhoe was at the old Ames farm. They found the cistern behind the barn, filled with stone and rotted lumber. At the bottom, in the dark, they found a bicycle with a bent wheel. And beneath it, they found a girl of fifteen.
Her name was Patricia Ellis. She had been missing for forty one years. Her sister, Joan, was seventy one years old, and she had kept a light burning on her porch every night since 1984. When the sheriff drove up to tell her, she was standing in the doorway in her robe. She did not need to be told. She said, “Is it Pat?” He nodded. She put her hand on the doorframe and slid to the porch boards, and she wept and wept, and the sheriff sat down beside her and held her until the sun came up.
Judge Ames did not wait for the trial. He sat down in the office of the sheriff, with his lawyer, and told them all of it, in a voice that cracked. He was too old and too ill for prison, the court said, and he went into a nursing home under guard. He died within the year. At his bedside, I am told, there was only a nurse. Clyde Barnes was exonerated in March by a judge who read the apology from the bench. He received four hundred thousand dollars from the state, and he left the bottoms for a small yellow house on Hill Street with a porch.
We buried Patricia in the spring beside her parents. Clyde was there, in a new gray suit, with a flower. Joan took my arm, and we walked together up the hill. Afterward I drove to the house on Hill Street and left a grocery bag on the porch, the way my mother always did. But this time I knocked, and waited, and when he opened the door I said, “Come to supper, Clyde.” He looked at me a long time. Then he took off his hat, and he came.