The bracelet of my mother in law was on the wrist of my sister Faye in the video of the castle, and I knew it the way a mother knows the cry of her own child. I am Wanda Jenkins, seventy four years old, of Beckley, West Virginia, and I stood at my bedroom dresser on Christmas night holding an empty jewelry box with a ringing telephone in my other hand. I let it ring. Then I answered it, in a calm voice, and I told my sister Faye that I was feeling a little poorly myself, and could she possibly tell me more about those papers of Earl.
Faye told me, in her thin sick voice, that a lawyer in Florida had written to her about the coal settlement. She said that Earl had named her in an old paper, long ago, and that she only wanted to protect me from the tax man. She asked me to read her the number on the little brass key. I told her I would look for it after supper. I put down the telephone, and I felt something hard and cold settle in my chest, the same hardness that Earl used to describe on the morning the roof came down in the mine in 1988.
I called the bank downtown on the morning after Christmas, and Mrs. Tolliver, the manager, who had gone to school with Earl, listened very closely. She told me that a woman had telephoned two weeks earlier claiming to be me, asking how to replace a lost key. She had refused. Then she told me that the safe deposit box held the settlement papers, and also a sealed letter that Earl had left for me alone. I asked her to put a note on the box. And I asked her to be at my kitchen table at four in the afternoon.
A video of fireworks over a castle gave one widow the length of a long weekend to bring her daughter back to the truth in Beckley.
I gave my terms at my kitchen table on the twenty seventh of December, when the front door opened without a knock and my daughter Crystal came in with Shane behind her and Kaylee behind him, and my sister Faye in a red scarf, looking suddenly very healthy. “Sit down, all of you. Mrs. Tolliver from the bank is in the next room, and so is a deputy from the sheriff office. Crystal, I want to hear you say exactly what you and your aunt planned, and how much of it you meant. I will sit here until you finish, and I do not mind if it takes all night.”
Crystal burst into tears before I finished. “Mama, it was the idea of Aunt Faye,” she said. “She said Daddy left a lot of money and that you were too old to manage it. She said if we got the key and you signed a paper, we would all be taken care of. She took the jewelry. I said nothing. I told myself it was only to borrow.” Faye drew herself up and said it was a lie, and then she looked at Kaylee, who was crying in the doorway, and Faye said nothing at all. Crystal added, “We owe seventy thousand dollars on the house in Charlotte.”
Faye was the first to move, and she moved like a woman who had never been sick a day in her life. She snatched her large handbag from the chair, with the jewelry pouch and the forged power of attorney inside it, and Crystal grabbed the folder of papers off my table beside the key, and the two of them dashed through the kitchen door toward the rental car in the front yard, meaning to be across the county line before dark. The screen door banged. The hens in the yard scattered. And in the middle of the driveway, in her Minnie Mouse ears, stood Kaylee.
Crystal stopped in the gravel with the folder in her hands, because her fifteen year old daughter was standing in front of the car with her arms spread wide and tears running down her cheeks. “Mom, stop,” Kaylee said. “I heard you in the car, Aunt Faye. It was your idea. Grandma was alone on Christmas Eve, and you were laughing at the castle.” Faye reached the car door and found Mrs. Tolliver in front of it with a cell phone, and the deputy behind her. Crystal let the folder slip from her fingers into the snow.
The consequences were sober. Faye returned the bracelet, the ring and the dog tags, because the deputy asked her to, and she was charged with theft and attempted fraud, though I asked the judge to be gentle with a woman of seventy. She is not welcome in my house, and she has not asked to be. Crystal sold her second car, repaid the thirty eight hundred dollars, and went to a counselor with Shane, and Kaylee spent the whole January school break with me in Beckley, eating jam cake out of the pan.
In the name of my husband Earl, who passed in 2019, I started the Earl Jenkins Fund. It pays for help with black lung benefits and settlement papers for miners and their widows and for legal help for older people pressured by their own families, in Raleigh, Fayette and Summers counties. In the first year we helped one hundred and six miner families file or recover benefits and stopped nine attempts to take the money of a widow. One was a seventy nine year old widow from Oak Hill who held her settlement check in both hands and said Earl would have sung.
On a clear Saturday in March, I stood in the kitchen of the little coal camp house, with the jam cake of the mother of Earl cooling on the table and a fire in the stove. Crystal and Shane came up the walk with a suitcase each, and Kaylee ran ahead and threw her arms around my neck. I had set the table for five, and dusted it every day. Crystal hung up her coat, and she looked at me, and she said, “Mama, I came the whole way home.” I told her that was all I ever asked.