and it said, Lorene, is that you? It was the voice of a man, old and raspy and gentle, and it echoed up out of that hole like a church bell. Ricky nearly dropped his flashlight. I leaned over the edge with my heart going like a hammer, and I saw a ladder leading down into warm yellow light, and a pair of kind blue eyes looking up. The man had a white beard, suspenders, and a coffee mug in his hand. “I am sorry,” he said. “I did not know Hollis was gone until I smelled the cigarette smoke stop.”
I could not make my mouth work. Ricky stood up and slid his hand toward his phone, and I put my hand on his arm. Something about that voice felt familiar, like a song from a different house. The man set his mug on a rung and climbed up slowly, one hand at a time, and stood blinking in the October sun, a thin, stooped old fellow with the same jaw as my husband. “Lorene,” he said. “I am Wendell. I am the brother of Hollis. I do not expect you to remember me.” His hands trembled, though his eyes were steady and clear.
I remembered the name. Hollis had a big brother Wendell who went to Vietnam in 1968 and came home on paper only. The family told me he passed away overseas in 1971, and Hollis would not speak of it. For forty years I had carried flowers every Memorial Day to a little stone in the church yard in Cullman with his name on it. I sat down in the dirt in my good slacks. Ricky said quietly, “Mrs. Bunch, do you want me to call someone?” I said, “Not yet, honey. Let me hear him.” He had no reason to lie, and I knew it.
The man beneath my pecan tree was a brother my husband had kept safe for forty years, and he finally came up into the sunlight and into my kitchen.
Wendell sat across from me on an upturned bucket and told it plain. He had come home in 1971 in terrible shape in his mind. Noise, crowds, even a car door slamming sent him to the floor. He could not hold a job and could not bear a roof over his head. His mother and father were old and ashamed, and the doctors offered nothing but pills. So the family quietly said he was lost overseas, and Wendell wandered, sleeping in woods and sheds, until he wrote Hollis from a bus station in 1984. He said He never missed a visit. He never complained. He said the hardest part of every Sunday was lying to my face when I asked about the tank, and he promised himself he would make it up to me someday.
“Your husband drove all night to get me,” Wendell said. “He had just bought this land, and he told me, I cannot give you a house, brother, but I can give you quiet. He dug that tank himself, with a ladder, a bed, a shelf of books, and a vent so I could breathe the night air. Under the earth I felt safe for the first time since the war.” He took off his cap. “Hollis did the pump truck on Sundays to carry down groceries and see me without you wondering. He hated every lie he told you.”
I thought of the big cans of coffee and the orange extension cord and the flashlight bobbing out by the pecan tree at night. “That was not a coyote,” I said, wiping my face. Wendell grinned, and it was the grin of Hollis exactly. “That was me, coming up for air after dark, walking circles in the yard in my socks. Hollis stood guard with a thermos. Forty years, Lorene. He never missed a Sunday.” My tears finally came, but they were warm ones. My husband had not hidden a shame. He had hidden a love. I would never have noticed a thing.
“I will not stay down there anymore,” Wendell said. “Hollis made me promise, if he went first, to come up and ask you for a bed. But I will understand if you want me gone.” I stood and brushed off my slacks and said, “Wendell Bunch, the guest room has a ceiling fan and a quilt, and you will eat my chicken and dumplings tonight.” He bowed his head and cried. Ricky wiped his own eyes on his Crimson Tide cap and said, “Well, I will be.”
That night, after supper, Wendell asked me to walk out to the old tank one last time. The ladder still stood in the yellow light, and on the little shelf sat a single framed picture of Hollis and me on our wedding day in 1979. “He would bring it down and show me,” Wendell said, “and say, brother, that is the best thing I ever did.” I took the photo and held it against me. My husband had been gone since June, but he had never felt closer.
He took a long time to learn the sounds of my kitchen. The first week, he flinched at the dishwasher and the screen door, and I learned to hum when I walked into a room so he would know it was me. By Christmas he sat at the table every morning with his coffee, and one night he laughed out loud at the television. My son drove down from Birmingham and shook the hand of his uncle for the first time in his life, and neither one of them let go for a while.
Ricky comes by on Sundays now with a pound cake from his wife, and he and Wendell talk about trucks for hours. The county man came out and filled in the old tank, and in its place my nephew planted a bench under the pecan tree. On warm evenings Wendell and I sit there together, where Hollis kept him safe for forty years, and we talk about my husband until the stars come out. It is the quietest, kindest place I have ever known.