“I know who did it,” Harold had written, “because I saw him in the barn that night with a lug wrench. His name is Ricky Dale Sumner. He works for the pipeline company as a land agent when he is not hunting with Brent. I wrote it on the back of the survey, the last page. I did not go to the sheriff because I did not have proof, and because Brent is the husband of our girl. Nita, I could not bring myself to do that to Tammy. But if I am wrong, and something happens to me, take this to Elijah Banks. He will know what to do.”
I read it three times, on the floor of the closet, with the smell of gun oil and old wool in my nose. Then I got up, put the envelopes in my apron pocket, and drove to Leesburg. Mr. Elijah Banks was sitting on his porch in a tie and a pair of suspenders, with a mason jar of sweet tea. He read the letter of Harold without a word, and then he read the survey, and then he took off his glasses and polished them on his sleeve. “Juanita,” he said gently, “your husband was a careful man. He was not a fool.”
He made two calls from the telephone in his front hall. The first was to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, to an agent named Teresa Lowe, a woman he had known since she was in pigtails. The second was to a lawyer in Albany named Marcus Ellison, whom he described as the sharpest man in Dougherty County and the kindest. By four that afternoon, the three of them sat around my kitchen table, with the survey spread out between the sugar bowl and the coffee pot, and Agent Lowe asked me a long list of quiet questions.
A man who writes the truth down and hides it with love has already won a battle for the people he leaves behind.
The truth came out in pieces over the next three weeks. The pipeline company, a firm out of Houston, had indeed wanted to run its line across the north forty of the orchard. They had offered Harold one million four hundred thousand dollars for the easement, and he had said no, because the trees on that ground were planted by his granddaddy and he did not sell his granddaddy. A land agent named Ricky Dale Sumner had been told to get the signature by any means, and he had seen a way through the son in law.
Brent Coggins was in debt. He had borrowed against the truck and the house, and then against the credit cards, and he had a boat he could not pay for. Ricky had promised him a fee of two hundred thousand dollars if he could deliver the orchard, either by persuading an old widow to sell cheap or by having her declared unfit. Then Ricky would sell the easement to the pipeline for a million dollars more. It was a tidy scheme, Agent Lowe said, and its only flaw was an old man who had written down a name.
They arrested Ricky first, at a hunting lodge near Camilla, with the wrench still in a toolbox in his truck. A forensic mechanic found the pattern of the tool on the lug nuts of the old truck of Harold, which I had kept in the barn. Then they came for Brent. He was working a pool convention in Orlando when two GBI agents walked up to his booth. Tammy told me later that he did not even argue. He just said, “Is it about the orchard?” and held out his hands.
I was most afraid of Tammy. I drove to her house in Albany that same night, in the dark, and found her sitting on the back steps with a glass of wine and no lights on. She had known nothing. She said she had begun to wonder in the summer, when Brent started sleeping badly. I told her everything, all of it, the survey and the lug nuts and the wrench. She listened with her face turned to the sky. When I finished, she said, “Daddy knew, and he did not want me to be hurt.”
“He was protecting you,” I said. “And me.” She put her head on my shoulder and wept for an hour. She filed for divorce in November. The court gave Brent seven years for conspiracy, exploitation of an elderly person, and tampering with a vehicle. Ricky received twelve, for that and for his part in a string of similar schemes in three counties. The pipeline company, hauled before the state, agreed to move its route a mile east, through land belonging to a county that was happy to take the money.
I put the orchard into a conservation trust that winter, with the help of Mr. Ellison, so that no one could ever sell it out from under me, or after me. Tammy moved home. She wears the old boots of Harold and a pair of work gloves, and she is learning to read the soil. Last week we stood in the north forty at dusk, under the oldest tree, the one planted on March 3rd, 1938, and she put her hand on its rough bark. “Mama,” she said. “It still smells like Daddy.”
In November the whole orchard smells like toasted nuts and woodsmoke, and Mr. Banks comes out on Saturdays in his tie to sit on the porch and supervise. He is ninety one now. He says he has never seen a finer crop. I bring him pecan pie, and he eats it slowly, with great attention, and tells me stories of my husband as a boy. And in the evening, when the pickers have gone and the light turns gold on the long rows, I sit at the kitchen table and read the letter of Harold one more time, just the last line, which says: Nita, you were always the stronger one.