The white haired man in the good suit was Dale Whitt, and I had known him all my life. He had served on the county commission for twenty years, shaken every hand at every church supper, and put his name on the new wing of the library. Now he stood beside the guest book with a paper cup of coffee, nodding sadly at the mourners, and my brother Jimmy looked at him from the shadow of the loading dock with fifty four years in his eyes.
“Bertie,” he said, “I want to do this the right way. Please. Let me do it my way.”
I did not understand what he meant until he walked into the room. He crossed the carpet slowly in his old field jacket, past the flowers and the folding chairs, and the murmuring stopped as if someone had cut a wire. He stopped three feet from Dale Whitt. The older man turned and saw him, and his cup fell and splashed on his shoes. For a long moment neither of them said a word. Then Dale whispered, “Jimmy Kincaid.” His face had gone the color of paper. “You are dead.”
“Not yet,” said Jimmy. His voice was quiet and perfectly steady. “I came home to bury my mother. And I came to say something to you in front of the people of this town, because I have been silent a long time.” He turned to the room. He told them about the helicopter, the two duffel bags, the threat in the jungle. He did not shout. He spoke as if he were reading an old report, and every person in the funeral home leaned in to hear.
A woman who leaves the door unlocked for fifty years is not waiting for a ghost, she is holding a place at the table for the truth.
Dale Whitt sat down in a folding chair. He put his hands over his face. When he spoke, it was in a broken voice that I did not recognize. “I thought you were dead,” he said. “For a whole year I believed it. I took the money and I told myself you had died, and that the dead do not need it. Then I started a business, and it grew, and every time I looked in the mirror I saw two men.” He wept openly. “I have waited fifty four years for someone to knock.”
He told the rest to the sheriff the next morning, with our lawyer present. The money had been payroll for a whole battalion, sixty three thousand dollars in cash, and he had used it to buy forty acres of timber and a sawmill. He had paid back none of it. But he had kept every receipt, in a metal box in his basement, because, he said, he had always known that someday he would have to give it all back. He signed a sworn statement before noon.
The Army, to my surprise, moved faster than I thought it could. A colonel from the Pentagon visited Beckley in the spring. He sat at my kitchen table and told us that the sworn statement of Dale cleared Jimmy of every suspicion. The record had listed him as killed in action. It would now be corrected to show that he had survived the crash and later been unable to return because of threats. A Purple Heart he had earned in the crash was finally pinned to his jacket in the VFW hall.
Dale gave the sawmill land to the county, and all the timber money, with interest, to a fund for veterans families. He stood trial for theft of government property and received a suspended sentence and a fine, because of his age and his plea, and because Jimmy, to the amazement of everyone, spoke for him in the courtroom. “He is not a monster,” Jimmy told the judge. “He is a scared kid who waited too long. I know the feeling.”
My brother moved into the old house in March. He took the room at the top of the stairs, where he used to keep his model airplanes, and he found them still hanging from the ceiling on fishing line, dusty and perfect. I had never changed a thing. We sat up late in the kitchen with a pot of coffee, two white haired people, a brother and a sister, laughing over stories we had not told in half a century. He ate fried pies until he could hardly stand.
The back door is still unlocked at night. I could not bring myself to change it, and neither could he. But now, when I walk through the kitchen before bed to check, I find the porch light burning. Jimmy turns it on every evening after supper. He says he spent fifty four years walking up a dark path, and he would like to leave a light for anyone else who is still on the way. Last month, a neighbor boy came in from the cold for cocoa.