The name on the license was Casey Wayne Dupree, and I sat on the cold floor of the cabin with that old wallet in my lap until the light through the pines turned orange. Nineteen years old. A thin, serious face and a crooked front tooth. For thirty years the television had said his name every Halloween, and for thirty years my husband had sat beside me on the couch and shaken his head and said, “Terrible thing.” Earl had known. He had sat there and known, and he had written the word Never on a calendar and hung it over the hole.
I did not call Bobby. I did not call the lawyer Crystal had mentioned. I walked back through the pines to my kitchen and telephoned the only man I trusted in Wayne County, a retired sheriff named Amos Tillery, who had been a friend of Earl for forty years and had carried his casket in June. He came out in his old Buick within the hour. I laid the wallet on the table between us. Amos looked at it a long time. Then he took off his hat and said, “Gloria, I have been waiting thirty years for somebody to show me that.”
He told me what he could. The night of October twenty second, 1994, three boys from the county had gone night hunting on our north woods without permission, drunk on whiskey. One of them was nineteen years old. His name was Robert Hutchins. My Bobby. They had shot at a shape in the brush, and the shape had been Casey Dupree, who had been walking home from the house of a girl by the creek road. Earl had been the first deputy on the scene, called by the weeping boys. And Earl had made a choice that had eaten him alive.
A secret kept for love becomes a grave, and only the truth can finally bring the lost one home.
He did not shoot the boy, I need you to know that. It was an accident, a terrible one, three frightened children and a dying young man in the dark. But Earl had buried him in the north woods instead of taking him to the hospital, because Casey was already gone, and because Earl could not bear to see his only son sent to Parchman for the rest of his life. He kept the wallet. He circled the date. And for thirty years he walked those woods every November with a thermos of coffee and sat beside a pile of stones where nobody would ever dig.
I thought of my husband in the deer stand at dawn, his rifle across his knees, his heart giving out in the place that was the only church he had. I cried then, the way I had not cried at his funeral. Because I finally understood why he loved that land so fiercely, and why he never let anyone else plant a post on it. Earl had not been guarding a secret. He had been guarding a grave. And he had left the wallet in the wall for me, because he knew that someday somebody would have to do the right thing, and he had not been brave enough.
Amos and I walked to the north woods together the next morning, with a state investigator and a young woman from the Mississippi crime lab carrying a trowel. The stones were exactly where Amos said. Under them, in red clay, lay the remains of Casey Wayne Dupree, and with them a silver cross on a chain that his mother had given him at his confirmation. Tyler, the young surveyor, stood at the edge of the trees with his hard hat in his hands and wept like a child. He said he was sorry. He said he had no idea. I told him that none of us had.
Bobby came to my house that evening with his wife and his hands shaking. Crystal had not known the whole truth, but she knew enough. Bobby had been drinking about it for thirty years, she said, and talked in his sleep, and when she heard the pipeline company wanted the north woods, she saw a way to bury the trouble for good under a few hundred thousand dollars and an easement. She wept and said she had thought she was protecting him. I said, “Crystal, you tried to rob a widow of the land of her husband to cover up a grave.” She had no answer. Bobby had one. He said, “Mama, I want to turn myself in.”
He did it on a Monday morning, in a clean shirt, with Amos sitting beside him in the truck. The prosecutor in Laurel was a gentle woman with gray hair, and she talked to the mother of Casey for a long time before she decided anything. In the end Bobby pleaded to manslaughter and the cover up, and the judge, looking at a man who had carried a dead boy on his back for thirty years, gave him five years and a lifetime of making amends. Crystal took the pipeline papers to the lawyer and tore them in half in front of the whole office.
The mother of Casey, Loretta Dupree, was eighty one. She came to the funeral in a wheelchair, in a navy dress, and she held my hand through the whole service in the Laurel cemetery with a hundred people standing in the November sun. She did not forgive Bobby that day. She did not forgive Earl. She said, very quietly, “Gloria, you walked to that cabin when you could have kept quiet. I will remember that when I am gone.” And I understood that this was all she had left to give, and it was enough.
The pipeline company moved its route a mile east, with an apology and a settlement I did not ask for. I gave a corner of the north woods to the Dupree family, and there is a stone there now, with his name on it and a verse. Every Halloween I drive out with a thermos of coffee and sit on the porch of the cabin. The calendar is gone from the wall. In the square Earl cut in the logs I keep a small candle, and I light it for two men, one who was lost and one who could not find his way home.