I took the folder to the kitchen table and spread the bulletins in rows, oldest on the left, a long river of yellowed paper stretching from 1983 to this very spring. Each one carried the order of service for the First Methodist church of Elkins, with a list of hymns and a prayer for the sick. And in the margin of each, in the soft pencil of my mother, was a single line of small neat print. I read the first one, then the second. By the tenth I was crying, because I understood. They were not notes. They were a diary written to a man who could not read it.
Dear Virgil, the first one said, October 1983. Today we sang the hymn about the harvest and I thought of you in the dark with your lamp. The second said, They have moved the trial to the spring. Be brave. The third, Your sister called. She is well. Year after year, my mother wrote down what happened in the town, the weather, the births and funerals, the news of the church, in the faint hope that somewhere a man who had testified against a mine owner and vanished would find comfort in knowing he was remembered.
Near the bottom of the stack, in the bulletin of Easter 1991, I found something different. At the edge of the paper, instead of a sentence, there were only numbers and a name. A telephone number with an area code in Ohio. Beneath it she had written, in capital letters, IF YOU CAN, CALL ONLY FROM A PAY PHONE. My hands shook. I looked at the clock and at the telephone on the wall. It was nine at night. I took the receiver, dialed the number, and stood in my own kitchen listening to it ring in a place I had never been.
The loyalty of one quiet person, kept for forty years in the margin of a church program, can outlast every power that tried to silence it.
A woman answered. She was old, and she sounded wary. I told her my name and that my mother was Opal Gaither of Elkins, West Virginia. There was a long silence on the line. Then she said, in a low voice, “Honey, hold on.” I heard the clatter of the receiver set down, a door, footsteps. I stood there for four minutes with the cord wrapped around my wrist. And then a man came on, hoarse and slow and very careful. He said, “Is this the daughter who plays the piano?” I said it was. He said, “I knew your mother played flat on purpose.”
Virgil Teter was eighty one years old and living in a small white house outside Dayton under the name of Victor Tate. He told me he had spent forty years waiting for the call. When he testified in 1983, the mine owner, a man named Harlan Cobb, had been charged with falsifying safety inspections that killed eleven men at the Dry Fork shaft. Cobb was never convicted. The jury hung, a juror was bribed, and Virgil received a letter with a dead bird in it. The government hid him. My mother learned of it from a deputy marshal who sang in the choir.
She played the flat B every Sunday for the first ten years, to tell him all was well. That was the code. It meant, nothing has changed. Nobody has come. You are safe. She was told he could not return, could not write, could not call. But she kept the bulletins anyway, each one marked and saved, in case there was ever a day he could come home and read the whole story of the years he had lost. I read the last one to him over the phone. It was from this spring. It said, I am not well. Come when you can.
Harlan Cobb had died in 2004, and his company was long gone. The marshal who handled the file had retired. There was no one left to hide from, and I told Virgil so. He was silent for a very long moment. Then he said, in a voice that cracked like old wood, “Do you think she would mind if I came to see her?” I said I thought she would be furious if he did not. I heard him laugh through his tears, a sound like a gate opening.
He came on the fourth of June, by bus, with one small suitcase and a hat in his hands. He was tall, stooped, and gentle, with white hair and enormous work worn fingers. We drove to the cemetery on the hill above the church. He stood at her grave for a long time without moving, and then he bent down, with great effort, and laid his hat on the stone. He said, “Opal, you old fool. You did not have to wait.” And the wind came down off the mountain and moved through the grass.
The congregation gathered for him the next Sunday. They did not make a fuss, they simply made room, a place in the third pew that nobody had touched in forty years. The new pastor read a passage and the choir sang. And at the end of the service, the organist, a young woman named Lacey who knew nothing of the story, asked if anyone wished to request a hymn. Virgil rose, quietly, and asked for the harvest hymn, the one from the first bulletin. The congregation stood up as one.
I played it myself on the old upright, and I played the B flat, as my mother had taught me, sharp and clear. I felt Virgil behind me, his hand resting lightly on my shoulder, and when the last note faded the whole church was silent. Then someone began to clap. It was not a church thing to do, but nobody stopped them. Virgil bowed his head. He told me afterward that the sound was the most beautiful he had ever heard in his life. I told him it was only the sound of a town saying welcome home.