I untied the string on the brown folder slowly, because it was the same string Mr. Halvorsen had tied around the first paper certificates in 1979, and I did not want to hurry it. The brokerage statement came out first. Thirty one million dollars, in plain type, under my name. After it came the share certificate itself, yellowed and soft as cloth, with the old company seal and the signature of a dead man. Gene put on his glasses and bent to look at it. “That is the Halvorsen stock,” he said in a hush. “You kept that paper in a coffee can, Earl. I remember you telling us it was worthless.”
I told them how it went. Eleven of us in the break room that January, the heater clanking, Halvorsen with his hands shaking, saying he could not make payroll. Eight men laughed and walked out the door. Walt Brzezinski and Harold Pruitt and I took the paper. Harold died poor in 1998, and his widow still lives in a trailer outside De Pere. Walt sold early and put four kids through college. I held. Mike, the husband of Shannon, let out a low whistle and sat back in his chair, and Dennis took his glasses off altogether and looked at me as if I were a stranger.
Then I took out the second thing in the folder, a stack of photocopied bank pages that the lady at the county counter had helped me request, along with her signed note that my taxes were paid in full and no lien had ever existed. Behind that were the checks of Gene and Dennis, eight of them, each made out to Shannon, each marked taxes for Earl. And behind those, a deposit record, showing every one of them going into an account at a roofing contractor and a truck dealership. I laid the pages side by side on the table, in the order they were cashed. Nobody said a word.
A folder tied with an old string held a coffee can secret, a family debt, and the names of eleven men.
Shannon set down the knife. She is forty seven years old, with a college degree and a kind of competence that people lean on, and I watched it drain out of her in the space of a breath. “I meant to put it back,” she said. “The roof was leaking into the nursery, and the truck of Mike was repossessed, and every time I picked up the phone to tell you, you were so cheerful. You never wanted for anything. I thought, he will never miss it.” Mike stood up so hard that his chair fell over backward, and nobody moved to right it.
“I told you it was my bonus,” Shannon said to her husband. “I know.” He did not shout. He picked up the chair, and set it straight, and put both hands on the back of it, as a man does when he needs something solid. “I have been driving a truck that my uncle in law paid for without knowing it,” he said. “I do not know how to sit in that.” Gene reached over and put a heavy hand on his shoulder. The brothers have never been big on speeches. Gene only said, “Son, you sit in it the way we all sit in it. Humbly.”
I spoke last. I told Shannon that I did not hold the money against her, because money is paper and she had never taken from me, only from men who loved me. I told her what I wanted. She would pay my brothers back, every cent of seventy two hundred each, a little each month, from her own paycheck. She would go with Mike to see a financial counselor. And she would never again say to an old man living alone, give me your mail, I will sort it, unless he asked. I gave her one more thing. I gave her a hug, long and awkward, and she cried on my green jacket.
Gene and Dennis tried to refuse their own repayment. They said it was only money. I wrote them both a check on the spot, for the full amount and the interest and a little more, and slid them across the table. “Brothers do not carry each other bills in secret,” I said. “That is how families get small.” Gene studied the check as though it might bite. Then he laughed, that big bark of a laugh I had not heard since we were boys sledding in the field behind the shed of our father, and said, “Earl, you old goat. You were rich all along.”
Then I opened the folder one last time and took out a plain sheet of paper with eleven names on it. Eight of them were the men who had laughed and walked out of the break room in 1979. Over the last three months, with the help of an honest lawyer and a very patient librarian, I had found every one of them, or their widows and their children. Each name had a number written beside it, and the number was more than a man might make in ten years on the floor of a plant. “I want to send these quietly,” I said. “Do not tell anyone where they came from.”
The letters went out in November. Within a week, my telephone started ringing. the widow of Harold called first, in tears, and asked if she could come out and thank me in person. I said that I would rather come to her. So I drove to De Pere on a cold Tuesday with a pie from the church bake sale and sat in her tiny kitchen and listened to her talk about Harold for three hours. Walt came out of retirement for one afternoon just to shake my hand. The two of us sat on a bench behind the old plant and said very little, which is how men of our age say everything.
This Friday the whole family came to the supper club, all thirty eight of us, at a table that ran the length of the room. I paid for everybody. The owner took a photograph for the wall. Shannon sat beside me, in a plain blouse, and slid a small box across the cloth. Inside was the key to the mailbox I had given her three years ago. She said that she would not need it anymore. I put it in my pocket, along with the green jacket I still wear every day. Old habits, I told her, are the last thing a man should change.