The old woman with the cane drew a photograph from her purse and held it up to the lamps of the chapel. It showed a man of about seventy standing on the steps of a courthouse in Valdosta, Georgia, with his arm around a younger woman in a pale suit. The woman was smiling at the camera. It was Sheila. “This is my brother Roy,” said the old woman, “on the day he married her. Her name was Sheila Dawn Pruitt then. His farm was two hundred acres of pecans. Three weeks after we buried him, it was sold to a developer. I never saw a dime, and neither did his children.”
Her name was Opal Tanner, and she was eighty three years old. She had read about the death of Carl in a notice in the paper from Dothan and driven two hours in her Buick because something about the name of the wife had nagged her. She had seen a lawyer. She had called a sheriff. Everyone had told her that a widow is entitled to the property of her husband and that she should let it go. She had not let it go. “I have been waiting fourteen years to stand in a room with that woman,” she said, “and I will stand here until I am carried out.”
The lawyer in the second row rose slowly, a thin man in a gray suit named Mr. Dewitt. He took off his glasses and addressed the sheriff, who sat three pews back in his dress uniform. “Sheriff Boyd,” he said, “I believe I must withdraw as counsel in this matter. My client has told me a number of things that I now have reason to doubt.” Then he turned to me with the document I had laid on the casket in his hand, and he read aloud the paragraph written by hand at the bottom of the page by my father in 1962.
A man can leave a farm to the wrong hands, but the right words in the hand of a father will find their way back to the right heir.
“Be it known,” he read, “that this land shall pass to my sons Carl and Walter and to their blood descendants. No spouse of either son shall sell, mortgage, or convey any part of it without the written consent of the surviving brother. Should such an attempt be made, the land shall pass to the surviving brother outright.” He lowered the page. “Mr. Greer,” he said to me, “the wife of your late brother never owned a single acre that she could sell. The developer contract is void from the start.”
Sheila had gone the color of candle wax. She turned and walked quickly down the aisle in her black dress and pearls, her heels clicking on the boards. At the doors of the chapel she found the way blocked by two deputies, men she had probably known by name, who took her gently by the elbows. “Mrs. Greer,” said Sheriff Boyd, who had followed, “the Georgia Bureau of Investigation would like a word with you. So would the district attorney in Houston County. I would suggest you not say anything until you have a lawyer.” She said nothing. She did not look back at the casket.
In the months that followed, the truth came out in pieces. Sheila had married three men in nine years, all of them older, all of them landowners, all of them in poor health. In each case, she obtained a power of attorney within a year, and in each case, a sale was arranged within weeks of the death. With the help of a notary who has since lost his commission, she had forged the signature of my brother on a contract with the developer in January, a month before he passed. The doctor who attended him said his heart simply stopped. I choose to believe it did.
She was convicted in Georgia and in Alabama of forgery, theft by deception, and exploitation of an elderly person. The sentence was fourteen years. Opal Tanner sat in the front row for every day of the trial in a lavender hat, and when the verdict was read, she did not smile or cheer. She folded her hands in her lap, closed her eyes, and moved her lips in what I took to be a prayer for her brother. After the court adjourned, I took her arm, and we walked out into the sun together, two old people who had been waiting too long.
I did not go home to Oklahoma. I had told myself at eighteen that I would never come back to Dothan, and I was wrong about that, as about many things. I took a room at the old farmhouse and began to sort through the possessions of my brother. In the toolbox in the barn, under a coffee can of screws, I found a thin envelope with my name on it. It was in the handwriting of Carl. “Walter,” it said. “If I go first, do not let her sell. I should have listened to you. Come home. The field behind the barn is yours. Love, Carl.”
I read it standing in the dim light of the barn, with the dust turning in the sun, and I wept like a boy. Then I spent the next three nights reading the box of letters I had sent him over fifty years, which he had kept in order by date, tied with twine. They went back to 1969. There were the letters from Da Nang, from Camp Lejeune, from Okinawa. There was one from Hue in 1968, stained with something I do not like to name. He had saved every single one. He had saved all of me.
This spring I planted cotton on the old four hundred acres. I hired four men from the town, two of them sons of the people who worked for my father, and we set the rows in the red Alabama clay. On the first Saturday of May, I put on my dress blues, took a folded flag from the trunk of my car, and drove out to the cemetery on the hill. I stood at the grave of Carl and read him the last letter I had written him, the one that never arrived, and then I read him the first one I would write from home.