“The man is Dale Greer,” Granddaddy had written on the white strip under the faded picture. “Deputy sheriff, Barren County. I took this from my truck. The girl was still alive when I took this, and I did not know what I was looking at until the next day. I should have done something that night. God forgive me, I was afraid. I went to the sheriff, who was his father. He told me to forget it. I kept the picture. I could not forget it. Somebody has to remember her. Her name was Linda Sue Crowe.”
I read it standing in the dark kitchen of my grandfather with a flashlight, because I could not stand to turn on the lamp. Linda Sue Crowe was nineteen. I knew the name from the plaque at the Glasgow courthouse, a small bronze square on a bench. She had been found in a field behind the roadhouse in June of 1983, and a drifter named Jimmy Tate, who had been drinking at the bar, had been convicted of her murder in a trial that lasted two days. He had been twenty four years old. He had a record for fighting.
I understood suddenly what the ad had been. The porch light had been a message for Jimmy, but it was also a vow. Granddaddy had sat at the kitchen table every night for forty years and looked at this picture and known that a man was in prison for a crime he did not commit. And he had done what he could. He wrote to the warden. He wrote to Jimmy every month. He paid for a lawyer in the nineties, who had quit when the sheriff threatened him. And every December, he had told the world: Come home.
A light left burning for decades is a quiet kind of faith, and sooner or later it is bright enough to show a prisoner the way home.
I drove to Frankfort at dawn with the Polaroid in a plastic sleeve on the passenger seat and the letters in a shoebox in the back. At the Kentucky State Police headquarters I asked for the cold case unit. A tired sergeant in a gray shirt heard me out for three minutes, and then his face changed. He picked up the telephone and said only, “Get me Lieutenant Abbott. I think we have something on Crowe.” An hour later I sat in a conference room across from a woman with iron gray hair, and a tape recorder was running.
What came next was slow, careful, and painstaking. The state still held the physical evidence from the trial, in a climate controlled warehouse in Frankfort: a torn shirt, a cigarette butt, scrapings from under the fingernails of Linda Sue. In 1983 there had been no test for DNA. Now there was. The lab worked for nine weeks. They were looking for a man who had never once been looked for. The Polaroid, which showed the truck of Greer and the face of Greer, gave them the name. The letters of my grandfather gave them the rest.
Dale Greer was arrested at his lake house in Cave City on a gray Thursday in November. He was eighty one years old, with a walker and an oxygen line. He did not deny it. He said that he had thought about that night every day for forty years, and that he was tired. The sheriff before him, his own father, had been dead for thirty years. The old deputy who had testified at the trial of Jimmy Tate was long retired. Uncle Larry, the brother of my father, sat in the courtroom behind me, with his head in his hands.
He told me afterward, on the steps of the courthouse. “Rachel, I knew Daddy had something. I did not know what. I was a county commissioner then and I did not want to know. I told him to let it alone. I said, You will only hurt the family.” He looked as old as the building behind him. “I let a man rot in Eddyville because I did not want to know. I was one of the men in gray suits that day, hoping that old man would not turn around.” I took his hand. It was shaking.
The judge in Barren County vacated the conviction of Jimmy Tate on the third of December. He was sixty five. He came out of the courtroom in the same stiff denim jacket, and his hands were trembling, and in the corridor a crowd had gathered of people he did not know. They were not shouting. They stood in silence, and when he passed, an old woman in a church hat reached out and touched his sleeve. Jimmy stopped. He looked at all of us, and he said, in his cracked voice, “I did not think anyone remembered.”
He moved into the farmhouse of my grandfather. The state paid him a settlement, though no money could cover the years, and he spent the first of it on a new roof. He keeps a vegetable garden and two Walking Horses, and he sings bass, very low, in the choir at the Methodist church, in the same pew where my grandfather sat. The porch light, which burned for forty years, is still on. Jimmy says that he cannot bring himself to turn it off. He says it is the first light that was ever left on for him.
This December I paid the county newspaper $38 one last time. The ad ran between the used tractors and the free puppies, as it had for forty years. It said: J.T. You are home. The porch light can stay on. Jimmy cut it out of the paper with his good scissors and taped it to the wall over the kitchen table. Then he looked at me over his glasses, with Linda Sue Crowe on his mind and an old man in his heart, and he said, “Rachel, he never gave up on me.”