The voice on the old cassette tape was thin and dry, but it was unmistakably the voice of Willa Mae, and it filled my kitchen in Spartanburg like the opening of a service. “Darrell,” it said, “if you are listening to this, then Sandra has found the money, and the frame has done what I made it to do. I did not trust you with the truth while I lived, because you would have gone straight to the pulpit with it, and I needed time. I need you to listen to all of it before you give that man the painting.” My husband, who had come to stand in the kitchen door, sat down on the nearest chair.
She told it plainly. In 2008 she had gone to the hotel in Greenville with Pastor Glenn Hollis, and she wanted her son to hear that it was not the sin he would assume. She had gone to confront him. For years he had borrowed money from her in the name of the church building fund, forty one times, over two hundred thousand dollars, and she had suspected he was spending it elsewhere. He had made her come to a hotel to hand over the last loan, and she went with a tape recorder in her purse. She had the whole conversation, including his threat to ruin her family.
“He knew about the cocaine of Darrell, and about the day that I made you confess it from the pulpit,” the voice went on, steady. “I was wrong to do it. I did it to prove that I was the strongest woman in Mount Hebron, and I broke my own boy in front of three hundred people to do it. Glenn used that. He said he would tell the church that you had stolen from the offering. You never did. I paid him to keep it quiet, and he kept taking.” The tape clicked, then hissed. My husband was weeping without a sound.
A painting frame pried open on a kitchen table gave one daughter in law the afternoon to bring her husband back to his church in Spartanburg.
I gave my terms standing at the kitchen table, with my hand on the false back of the golden frame. “Darrell, we are not hanging this painting in Mount Hebron while Glenn Hollis is in the pulpit. We are taking these forty one IOUs, this hotel receipt and this tape to the elders of the church and to the district attorney, and I am going with you. Then the money, all eighty eight thousand dollars, goes to what Willa Mae meant it for, which is your treatment and the peace of this house. And the painting hangs in our own front hall until the church is clean.”
Darrell lifted his gray face. “Sandra,” he said, “Mama made me stand up before the whole church and say the word, and I did it, and I hated her for twenty years. And all that time she was paying a man to keep quiet because she thought it would protect me.” His voice cracked. “She was wrong about nearly everything, and she was right about the one thing that mattered. She never stopped fighting for me. I did not know it. Why did she not just tell me?” I put my hand over his on the table.
We were still sitting at the table when the doorbell rang, and there on the porch, in his pressed gray suit and a big smile, stood Pastor Glenn Hollis. “Brother Darrell,” he boomed. “Sister Sandra. I have come for the painting, as Sister Willa Mae wished.” He stepped over the threshold, saw the open frame on the kitchen table, and his smile disappeared. He lunged across the room, grabbed the tape player in both hands, and bolted back down the hallway. Two ushers of Mount Hebron, who had come to deliver the sympathy casserole and were standing in the front yard, stepped into the door.
The pastor stopped at the threshold with the tape player clutched to his chest. One of the ushers, a big quiet man named Mr. Booker, reached out and took the tape player from him as gently as lifting a sleeping child out of a car seat. “Reverend,” said Mr. Booker, “I believe that belongs to the family.” Glenn Hollis looked from one face to the next. Nobody spoke. Behind me in the kitchen, I heard Darrell stand up, and then I heard him begin to play the tape again, and the voice of Willa Mae filled the house.
The money consequences were exact. The tape and the forty one IOUs were delivered to the district attorney, and Glenn Hollis was charged with theft by deception and extortion. The elders of Mount Hebron voted that week to remove him from the pulpit and to repay the building fund. The eighty eight thousand dollars paid for the treatment of Darrell at a quiet place in the mountains, and the rest was kept for the church roof. The gold frame went back on the painting, and the painting went into our front hall.
In the name of Willa Mae, who passed in the spring, I started the Willa Mae Pruitt Fund. It pays for treatment and honest counseling for families where addiction has been met with shame, in Spartanburg, Cherokee and Union counties. In the first year we placed forty two people in treatment and trained nineteen church volunteers to listen instead of judge. One was a deacon of seventy who confessed to a stranger that he had hidden his own son for years. He cried like a boy and said he had been waiting to be asked.
Darrell came home from the mountains after ninety days, and he stood in the front hall in front of the painting for a long time. The face of Jesus on the canvas was gentle and tired, a little like his mother. He took down the cassette tape from the shelf, held it in his two hands, and put it in the player, and we listened to the end of it. The last words, at the very end of the tape, were a hum, an old hymn, soft and off key. My husband hummed along.