The man in the third pew was named Clifford Tate. I knew it before Linda said it, because I had met him that morning in the parking lot, an upright, white haired man of eighty eight in a camel coat who had held the door for me and wished me a blessed day. He was the church treasurer. He had given the building fund half its budget. He had paid for the new steeple. And in 1975, Linda told me, in a voice as dry as paper, he had paid a jury foreman eight thousand dollars to see that his son walked free.
Peggy had been nineteen. She was walking home from her job at the dime store in Oil City on a November evening when a car came around the bend too fast. The driver was Dennis Tate, the son of Clifford, who had been drinking at a roadhouse. He did not stop. She died on the roadside. Dennis was charged, and the trial was brief, and the foreman of the jury, a quiet man who owned a hardware store, spoke the words not guilty. Linda, who was twenty three, sat in the courtroom and understood nothing, except that justice had been bought and paid for.
“Frank was twenty,” she said. “He adored my sister. He quit college and took the trucking job, because he could not bear the town. He did not know about the money until 2009. The foreman was dying, and he sent for Frank. He had kept a piece of paper for thirty four years, a signed confession, and he wanted it to go to the right hands.” Linda looked at the altar. “Frank came here with it and told the pastor to keep it in the safe. He did not want to bring it to you. He did not want to hurt you.”
The people we marry bring their whole past into the house; the work of love is to meet it kindly when it finally arrives.
Pastor Emmett brought it out. He worked the old combination lock with trembling fingers, and the door of the safe swung open, and from a stack of ledgers he drew a plain brown envelope. On the front, in the square handwriting of my husband, was one word: CAROL. I took it from his hands and sat down in the front pew, in the quiet church with the gray light coming through the windows. Inside, folded in thirds, was a letter, and behind it a yellow sheet of notarized paper. I read the letter first.
“Dear Carol,” Frank wrote. “If you are reading this, I am gone, and the pastor has decided to let you see it. I have kept two things from you in our whole life together. The first was Peggy. I should have told you on our wedding night, and I did not, because I was ashamed that I had loved someone before you and lost her so badly. The second is this envelope. I could not bring myself to use it, and I could not bring myself to destroy it. You are better with numbers than I am. You will know what is fair.”
I read the statement on the yellow sheet. It was in the blocky hand of a dying man, signed and witnessed in 2009. It said that in November of 1975, Clifford Tate had come to the hardware store with an envelope of cash and asked him to see that the jury did not convict his son. It said that he had taken the money, and had lived every day since in a cold sweat of shame. It was an ugly paper. I held it, and thought of Frank in the church, doing the books for the Bible study of the men, two feet from the man who had ruined his life.
I asked Linda what she wanted. She said she had spent forty nine years asking God and had never gotten an answer. “I do not want revenge,” she said. “I want him to say it out loud, in front of someone. I want the name of my sister said in this church.” I looked at the pastor. He was crying openly. “Tomorrow,” he said, “after the service, we will meet him in the fellowship hall, the three of us, and the deacons. We will not shame him. But we will not pretend, either.”
Clifford came in at noon the next day, in his camel coat, with the same polite smile. It faded when he saw the faces. I stood and laid the yellow paper on the folding table between us. He read it, and his hand began to shake, and he sat down hard on a metal chair. For a long time he said nothing. Then, in a voice I will remember until I die, he said, “I have been waiting fifty years for someone to find that.” He looked at Linda. “Your sister was a lovely girl. I saw her at the dime store once. She smiled at me.”
He confessed it all, in the plain words of an old man. There was no one to prosecute: his son had died in 2012, the foreman had died in 2009, and the law had closed its book. But Clifford signed his name to a new statement in front of a notary, and resigned as treasurer that afternoon. He gave Linda the deed of a piece of land by the river, and he established a scholarship at the community college in the name of Margaret Peggy Ostrander, the first wife of my husband, for any young woman who worked and studied at the same time.
Linda forgave him on the church steps in the cold. I do not know if I could have. She took his hand and said, “My sister would have wanted me to try.” He wept, an old man in a camel coat, and went home alone. I did not forgive him that day. I did not hate him, either. I only stood beside her, two old women in the November wind, and looked at the steeple he had paid for, and felt the weight of the thing Frank had carried slide, a little, from my own shoulders.
Linda and I drive to Oil City on the first Sunday of every month. We sit in the third pew from the back, not the third from the front, and we sing the hymns, and Linda cries at the second one. After the service we go to the cemetery and put flowers on the grave of Peggy. On the way home we stop for coffee and she tells me about the girl Peggy was, funny and bold and always late, and I tell her about the man Frank became. Between us, I think, we have almost the whole of him.