I drove to the Gas N Go on Highway 82 the next morning with the clipping on the dashboard and the ticket of my father in my purse. The clerk was a girl of nineteen who had never heard of Loretta Simmons. But an old man mopping the floor by the cooler stopped and leaned on his mop. “Lord,” he said. “I have been waiting forty years for somebody to ask.” His name was Hershel Boone. He had worked the counter that March night in 1984, and he had never told the story to anyone but his wife, because the sheriff told him not to.
“She bought gas and a ticket,” Hershel said. “Then a white pickup pulled up beside her car, and two men got out. One of them was her husband, Dwayne Pike, and the other was his brother, Curtis. They had a baby in a car seat in the cab. Loretta saw the baby and ran to the truck. Dwayne hit her. Not hard, but enough. I picked up the phone to call the sheriff, and the sheriff was already on the line. He was the cousin of the Pike boys. He said, Hershel, go home.” The old man looked at his mop. “I went home.”
Then Hershel told me the part that undid me. A truck had been idling at the far pump the whole time. A grain truck. Green, with a tarp over the back. The man in the cab had watched the whole thing through the window with his hands on the wheel. He never moved. When the pickup drove away with the baby, the man in the grain truck sat for another full minute and then drove off in the other direction. “I knew that truck,” Hershel said. “Everybody knew your father, Mrs. Willis.” I held on to the cooler door.
A forgotten lottery ticket gave one daughter the length of a single week to bring a lost son back to the truth in Greenville.
I gave my terms to the sheriff of the county, a young man named Reese Dunlap, who had never heard of Loretta Simmons either. I would give him the clipping, the ticket and the statement of Hershel, and he would open the old file, or I would take the whole story to the newspaper in Jackson. He opened the file in an hour. I asked for only one thing in return. When the baby was found, I would be the first one to speak to him, because I had a promise to deliver from a man who could not deliver it himself.
The baby was named Marcus. He had grown up on the farm of Curtis Pike near Leland, believing that his mother had abandoned him. Curtis, now seventy one and in a nursing home, told the sheriff everything from a wheelchair. “Dwayne wanted the boy to raise as his own,” he said. “Loretta ran in the night. She went to Memphis and she wrote a hundred letters, and we burned every one. We told that child his mother did not want him. I have lain awake with it for forty one years.” I sat in the hall and I wept, because my father had known none of that. He had known only that he did not stop.
Dwayne Pike, who is eighty one and has not been sorry a day of his life, showed up at the nursing home as I was leaving. He had heard. He snatched the old clipping and the ticket right out of my hands, meaning to tear them to pieces and call the whole thing the madness of an old woman, and he turned for the parking lot with surprising speed for a man with a cane. He got four steps. A nurse aide the size of a refrigerator, a woman named Beverly, stepped in front of the door and said, “Mr. Pike, visiting hours are over for you.”
Dwayne tried to push past her. It was like pushing a mountain with a cane. The sheriff, who had been waiting in the lobby, arrived at that moment and took the clipping gently out of his hand. Dwayne sagged. All the meanness went out of him at once, like air from a tire. “I did not mean for it to go that far,” he muttered. “She was going to leave me.” “Mr. Pike,” the sheriff said, “you can say all of that to a judge.” I took the ticket of my father back and put it in my purse, next to my heart.
Dwayne was charged with taking a child by force and with a number of other things that the law in Mississippi has long names for. He pleaded to a lesser charge and was sent to a state facility, where he will stay for the rest of his years. Curtis was spared because of his age and his honesty. The sheriff retired early and returned a pension. And in Memphis, in a little apartment above a laundromat, a sixty six year old woman named Loretta Simmons Hayes opened her door to a deputy and the daughter of a grain truck driver, holding a letter.
In the name of Otis Willis, who passed in 2025, I started the Otis Willis Fund. It pays for search costs, legal help and travel for families trying to find a child or a parent they have lost, in Washington, Bolivar and Sunflower counties. In the first year we helped reunite nine families. A man in Indianola, sixty two years old, met his sister for the first time at a bus station and could not stop holding her sleeve. I stood a little way off, so he would not see me cry, and I looked at the sky and thought of a green truck.
Marcus Simmons is forty one now, a band director at a high school in Cleveland, Mississippi, and he keeps a long, careful silence when you ask him how he feels. On a Saturday in October, he and Loretta came to the kitchen table of my father, where the shoeboxes still sit. I handed him the savings bond I had found at the bottom of the last box, bought in 1984, worth one hundred ninety thousand dollars. On the back, in faded blue ink, were five words: For the boy of Loretta. He read them twice. Then he said, “Then I will say thank you to him.”