I did not sleep that night, and at dawn I walked out to the shed behind our house, the old one Clyde built from railroad ties, where he kept his waders and his tackle and the bubbling minnow tank he swore he would repair. Behind the tank, under a canvas tarp, sat a red cooler held shut with duct tape. I dragged it into the light with both hands. Inside was a green notebook in the neat block letters of my husband, forty small memory cards in a pill bottle, and a note on the lid in his hand: Bonnie, trust no one in the county. Call Agent Reyes.
I sat down on an overturned bucket and read the notebook from the first page. It was a game warden record, dated and exact. Dates. License plates. The names of three trucking companies. The coordinates of a hollow near Blakely Mountain where, on twenty seven nights since March, tanker trucks had backed up to a ravine and emptied steel drums into the ground. Clyde had written one line at the bottom of the last page: This runs into the watershed. Our grandchildren drink this water. I put my hand on the page, and my hand was shaking.
Agent Reyes of the Environmental Protection Agency in Little Rock was a short, brisk woman who answered her cell phone on the second ring. “Mrs. Castleberry,” she said, “your husband called me three times in June. He sent me photographs. Then he stopped calling, and I read the news.” She asked if the cards were safe. I looked at the pill bottle in my fist. “They are in my hand,” I said. She said, “Do not tell anyone, not the sheriff, not the state police, not your pastor. I will be there by supper.”
An honest watchman may be silenced in the dark, but what he hid for his family will speak in the light.
She arrived at six in the evening in a plain gray car, with a younger man from the office of the Attorney General, and they sat at my kitchen table and went through every card on a laptop. Fifteen of them were blurred with moonlight. Twenty five were as clear as church windows: trucks with the name of Tillery Hauling on the doors, a man in a cowboy hat shaking hands with a uniformed man beside a patrol car, and a photograph, taken on the nineteenth of June, of the sheriff himself, Dwight Pruett, counting an envelope.
“We can put Buck Tillery in the hollow,” Agent Reyes said. “And we can put the sheriff in the same photograph. What we cannot yet do is put either one on that boat ramp. We need somebody who was there.” I put down my coffee. I knew exactly who. I had taught the boy to read when he was nine, on Wednesday nights, in the basement of First Methodist, with flashcards and a box of butterscotch candy. His name was Caleb Rudd. He was twenty four years old now, and he had not looked anyone in the eye since June.
I found him at the laundromat on Albert Pike Road, folding towels at the back, thin as a coat hanger, and when he saw me he dropped the pile. He did not run. He sat down on the bench and put his head in his hands and said, “Miss Bonnie, I hear his voice every night.” I sat beside him, as I had in the basement twenty years before. “Caleb,” I said, “Clyde looked straight into that camera at the end. He knew you were in the truck. He was not asking me to hate you. He was asking me to find you.”
Caleb told it all. He had worked for Buck Tillery since high school, driving the tankers, and he had not asked questions because the pay was good. On the night of the ramp, Buck made him ride along. “I thought we were only going to scare him,” he whispered. “I begged Buck. I told him to stop. He said if I opened my mouth, he would put me in the lake beside Mr. Clyde.” He was crying. “I should have run to you the next morning. I was so afraid.” I held his thin shoulders. “You are here now,” I said.
Caleb wore a wire for eleven days, and he never once let his voice shake. They arrested Buck Tillery on a Tuesday at dawn in the driveway of his house with a lake view, with his boots on, in his cowboy hat. Sheriff Pruett was arrested that afternoon in his office, with the envelope of money in his desk drawer. Tillery was sentenced to life for the murder of Clyde and the poisoning of the hollow. The sheriff took twenty years. Caleb, for his testimony, was given five years of probation, and he cried again when the judge said it.
The cleanup of the hollow took two years and cost the state forty million dollars. The water of Lake Ouachita tested clean in the autumn, and the town of Hot Springs, which had never known how close it came, held a small ceremony at the courthouse, where the mayor said a great many things about Clyde, none of them wrong. I wore my black church dress and sat in the front row with Tyler, who had grown three inches, and who squeezed my hand and said, “Pops caught the poachers, Grandma.”
Last June, on the anniversary, the Game and Fish Commission renamed the Crystal Springs boat ramp the Clyde Castleberry Landing. They put up a bronze plaque and a flagpole. I stood at the top of the ramp with Tyler and Caleb, who now works for the forest service and wears a green uniform, and we watched the evening light come down over the lake. A young game warden handed me a folded flag. I held it against my heart and looked at the quiet black water that my husband loved, and I said, out loud, “Clyde, I found it. Every bit.”