The jeweler on Timberland Drive, a patient old man named Abel Reyes, screwed the loupe into his eye and turned the ring under his lamp for a very long time. I stood at the counter with both hands gripping the edge. Finally he set it down on the velvet pad, took off his glasses, and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Missus Tate,” he said gently, “somebody cut a line of letters into the inside of this band, under the engraving, by hand. It is very small. I would like you to sit down before I read it to you.”
I did not sit. I said, “Read it, Abel.” He put the loupe back and read it slowly, one letter at a time, like a man spelling out a word for a child. “V. E. R. N. O. N. G. A. S. K. I. L. L.” The shop swayed. Vernon Gaskill. My father. A deacon for forty years. A man who carved the Sunday turkey and said grace in a voice like thunder. A man who had buried his only son in 1992 and stood at the grave with his hat in his hands, not shedding a tear.
I drove home with the ring in my fist. I do not remember the road. In the kitchen I laid out everything in a row on the table, the two receipts, the note from the prison, the ring, and I sat there until the light went out of the window. My father had been dead for seventeen years. He could not be asked. He could not be charged. And a man who had done nothing was still locked in a cell in Huntsville because my husband had loved me too much to tell me.
A promise kept to protect the one you love can still hurt the innocent. It is never too late to unlock the door.
In the morning, I did what Clyde would have done. I went through his truck. It sat in the yard where he parked it the day he died, the old red log truck with the cab that smelled of coffee and pine. Behind the seat, tucked under a rain slicker, I found a ring of keys I had never seen. One of them was stamped with the name of the bank in Lufkin. By noon, the manager had walked me down to a safe deposit box that Clyde had opened on the first day of June in 1993.
Inside was a single white envelope, sealed, with my name on it in his blocky hand. I opened it on the little bench in the vault. It held four pages, notarized, signed, and dated. “I, Clyde Tate, being of sound mind, swear that on the night of March 14, 1992, I was in the parking lot of the Longhorn Lounge in Nacogdoches when I saw Vernon Gaskill strike his son Danny Gaskill on the head with a tire iron. Danny fell and did not rise. Vernon drove away. The man later convicted, Earl Wayne Biggs, was inside the bar and never came outside.”
The last page was written to me. “Rosie, I wanted to burn this a hundred times. Your daddy begged me on his knees. He said it would kill you, and he said he would do the right thing himself. He never did. I told myself that the least I could do was visit the boy he put away. I am a coward, honey. I hope you can forgive me, because I cannot forgive myself. All my life I have loved you more than the truth. I put the ring where it would find its way back to you. Always, Clyde.”
I called a lawyer the next morning, a sharp young woman named Pilar Gomez from the innocence project in Lubbock, who took the case before I finished explaining. She found the old bartender, who was eighty now and lived in a trailer near Alto, and he remembered Vernon Gaskill walking out to the lot with something in his hand. He had told the police back then, he said, and nobody wrote it down. The district attorney of Nacogdoches County read the affidavit, the testimony of the bartender, and the autopsy, and he agreed to a hearing in January.
I testified a second time. Thirty four years after the first, I stood in the same courtroom, in the same wooden chair, and told the same judge that I had been wrong. The room was quiet. Earl Wayne sat at the defense table in a borrowed jacket with his white head bowed, and I looked at him as I spoke. When I finished, the judge removed his glasses and said, “Mrs. Tate, that took more courage than anything this court has seen in a long time.” Two weeks later he signed the order of release.
I stood at the gate of the Huntsville unit at dawn with a thermos of coffee and a sack of biscuits. It was cold, and the sky was the color of a nickel. A door opened. Earl Wayne Biggs came out slowly, blinking, in a gray shirt with a clear plastic bag of letters in his hand. Thirty one years of letters from my husband, he told me later, every one of them kept. I walked toward him, and I did not know what to say, so I said what was true. “Mister Biggs, I am so very sorry.”
He looked at me for a long time. Then he said, “Missus Tate, your husband told me once you made the best biscuits in East Texas. I never believed him.” I laughed and cried together. I handed him the sack. We drove to the cemetery in Lufkin, the two of us, in the old truck of Clyde, and stood by the grave in the thin winter sun. Earl Wayne took off his cap. The ring was around my neck on a chain. I held it up, and I read the word inside to the wind. Always.