My sister Loretta did not speak for a long time on the telephone, and when she did, her voice was small. “Dale,” she said, “I have known about Marcus since 1994. I found the first of the letters in the footlocker when I was cleaning for Mama after her stroke. I read them all in one night, and I put them back, and I never said a word to Daddy.” I stood in the middle of the barbershop on Broadway with the cut hasp in one hand and the receiver in the other, sixty one years old, feeling the floor of my whole life move under me.
She came to the shop that afternoon with her husband Ray. We sat in the two barber chairs of Daddy, spinning slowly, with the footlocker open on the floor between us. Loretta told me why she had kept the secret. She said Daddy had met the woman, Odessa, in 1978, in the Army hospital in Clarksville, a nurse. It was a single mistake in a hard season, and the boy was born in 1979. Daddy never left Mama, and he never abandoned the boy. He sent a bank envelope every month and he answered every letter, and he wrote one back on Sundays after church, with the door shut.
“I did not tell you,” Loretta said, “because I was ashamed that I had laughed at you about the socks. I knew exactly what was in that trunk, and I let you think you got nothing. I thought if I told you, you would hate Daddy, and I could not stand that.” She was crying openly. Ray, beside her, kept looking at the door of the shop. He asked, a little too quickly, how much money was in the footlocker. He asked it the way a man asks when he already has a plan.
An army footlocker opened in a barbershop gave one son the afternoon to bring his half brother back to his family in Paducah.
I gave my terms in the chair of my father, with the sunlight coming through the barber pole in red and white stripes. “Loretta, I forgive you, and I want that said first. Ray, the money in this trunk is seventy one thousand dollars, and every bill of it belongs to Marcus. Daddy wrote his name on every envelope for forty five years. Tomorrow morning, I am driving to Tennessee, and I am taking the footlocker and the letters and the photograph. If Marcus wants to throw me off the porch, he has the right. But he is going to see the face of his brother first.”
Loretta covered her mouth with both hands. “I want to come with you,” she said. “I have wanted to meet him for thirty years, and I have been too much of a coward.” She looked down at her hands. “Daddy used to say that the Lord forgives the sins we confess, and the rest we carry. I carried this one into every Sunday service of my life. When I laughed at you over the socks, I was laughing at myself. Please let me come. Please let me be a sister to him, if he will have me.”
Ray, however, had other plans. As Loretta spoke, he stepped quickly around the chairs, snatched the stack of bank envelopes out of the footlocker, and bolted for the front door of the shop with them stuffed inside his jacket. The door swung open before he reached it. Three deacons of the church, Brother Willis, Brother Parker and old Brother Jessup, had come by to pay respects to the family and stood framed in the doorway in their dark suits, with their Bibles in their hands. Ray stopped short, and Brother Jessup said quietly, “Son, those belong to someone.”
Ray looked at the three deacons and at me, and the fight went out of him. He pulled the envelopes out of his jacket, one at a time, and laid them on the shelf of the shaving mugs. Then he sat down in the waiting chair, as red as a beet. Loretta took no notice. She crossed the shop, and I stood and met her halfway, and the two of us stood there between the barber chairs of our father, holding on to each other while the deacons discreetly turned their backs and examined the hair tonic.
The money consequences were warm. The seventy one thousand dollars was given to Marcus in full, in the presence of both of us, in the living room of his mother in Clarksville. He did not want to take it at first. Ray apologized and went to work at the shop sweeping floors until he had paid back the humiliation. The house, the shop and the savings that Loretta had inherited were divided three ways, with a third for Marcus, by her own insistence, signed at a lawyer office on a Thursday morning.
In the name of Earl, who passed in August, I started the Earl Whitlock Fund. It pays for baseball equipment, school fees and tuition for boys without fathers at home, in McCracken, Ballard and Livingston counties. In the first year we outfitted nine teams and sent fourteen boys to college. One was a catcher of seventeen from Wickliffe who showed up at the first practice in the work boots of his stepfather. He hit a double in his first game, stood on second base, and pointed up at the sky.
Marcus came to the barbershop on a Saturday in November, forty five years old, with a baseball cap in his hand. He had my nose and my chin and the eyes of my father. He sat down in the first chair, and I put the cape around his neck. He said, “I always wanted him to cut my hair.” I told him that I would do my best, and I picked up the clippers of Earl, and Loretta came out from the back with a cup of coffee for her brother. The barber pole turned in the window.