“…a Mr…” was where the page ended, torn across the bottom, and I sat in that cold vault chair in the First Kentucky Bank with the lawyer letter in my hands and a pounding in my ears. Brianna knocked softly and asked if I needed anything. I asked for a glass of water and a pencil. In the envelope of photographs I found a second slip of paper, tucked behind the clipping. A name, written in Dewey square print. Abbott. Dennis Abbott, Arson Investigator, Kentucky Mutual. Under it, a Paducah telephone number, with a note. Still alive in 2015. Ask him about the negatives.
I drove home slowly through the fields, with the box on the seat beside me. The corn stood dry in rows, and the sky was the color of old pewter. At the farm, Crystal had gone to town, and Wade was on the porch swing in his city loafers, scrolling on his phone, waiting for me. He looked up. He said, in the pleasant voice he used when he wanted something, “Mom, where have you been? I have been calling for an hour.” I said I had been at the bank. His thumb stopped moving. He asked what bank. I said, “The one where your father kept a box.”
I will not describe the next ten minutes. Wade did not shout. He sat very still, the swing creaking, and when I laid the photographs on the porch rail, one by one, he went the color of ashes. There he stood, at twenty four, outside a warehouse, in a leather jacket, with a red gas can in his hand. He did not say a word. His breath came in short, shallow pulls. Finally he whispered, “Where did you get those?” I said, “Your father kept them for twenty seven years. He never showed them to anyone. He did not want to hurt you.”
A burned work boot, a map with an X by the springhouse, and a name on a torn page that led to a retired fire investigator.
He broke then, and it was terrible to see, a grown man of fifty one sobbing on his mother porch with his face in his hands. He said it had been his friend warehouse, his friend idea, a plan to collect the insurance and split it. He said he had been drowning in gambling debts. He said he had only meant to scorch a corner, and then the fire had gotten away from them. Nobody was hurt, he said, nobody was inside, but he had been sick with it ever since. He said, “Mom, Dad found out. He drove to Nashville and dragged me out of my apartment.”
Dewey, he told me, had sat with him all night in a diner on Broadway, over cold coffee. He had not turned Wade in. He had made him a different offer. Wade would confess, in writing, and Dewey would keep the paper, and the photographs and negatives, in a vault. And Wade would spend the rest of his life as an honest man, or the paper would go to the sheriff. Dewey had also sent small, anonymous payments to Kentucky Mutual, every year, from tobacco money, in cash, in money orders. Wade had never known. He lifted his head. He said, “Dad paid it back? All of it?”
I did not know. I drove to Paducah the next morning and found Dennis Abbott, who was eighty one and lived in a brick house on Jefferson Street, and kept bees. He let me in, and poured iced tea, and listened without blinking. He said he had suspected the Coleman boy from the beginning. He said Dewey had come to see him in 2001, trembling, and had asked him whether a man could make amends to an insurance company for a crime that was past its time. Dennis had said yes. He had helped Dewey set up the payments. Twenty three years of them. Four hundred and ninety thousand dollars, all told, from our tobacco.
I put my face in my hands. All those years, when I had wondered where the money went, when I had scraped for the electric bill and darned socks by lamplight, my husband had been quietly paying a debt that belonged to our son. Dennis passed me a clean handkerchief with an embroidered bee. He said, gently, “Mrs. McCall, I have never known a more honorable man than Dewey. He did not want you carrying it. That is why he hid it in his boots.” I held the handkerchief to my eyes. I could not stop laughing, and crying, at the same moment.
Wade and I talked for three days. He agreed to see a counselor in Paducah. He agreed to give up the sale of the farm, and the gambling app on his phone, which he deleted in front of me, one tap at a time. He wrote a letter to Kentucky Mutual and mailed it with a check for ten thousand dollars, as a start. I told him that I would not report him, because the law had long since closed that door, but that his father would have wanted him to open another. He nodded. He had not cried so hard since he was ten.
Crystal left in November. She said she had not signed up for a farm. Wade did not follow her. He moved into the room over the barn, and learned, at fifty one, to fix a fence, drive a tractor, and set a tobacco stick, with his mother and the two old mules watching from the pasture with mild disapproval. He rose at five. He worked until dark. One evening, in March, he said without looking up from the plow, “Mom, I do not think I deserve this farm.” I said, “No one does, Wade. That is why you take care of it.”
In April, I took the burned boots to a cobbler in town, who looked at them with sorrow and said they could not be saved. I carried them home anyway. I set them, side by side, on the porch, with a pot of red geraniums growing out of each one. Then Wade and I walked down past the springhouse, with a shovel and a bucket, and planted a young sycamore beside the old one, to keep it company. He patted the soil with his boot. I said, “Dewey, you old fool.” And the wind came through the leaves, and sounded just like him.