Part 3 — The Last Verse
The voice of Ruth Ann went on, unhurried, the way it had gone on from that pulpit for twenty-seven years. “In February I found a shoebox under the seat of the truck of Dwayne. In it were the checkbook of our benevolence fund, the one we keep for the widows and the shut-ins, and the statements that went with it. In eleven months, my son had drawn out $18,400. I counted it three times, Harlan, because I did not want to be right.”
The church was so quiet I could hear the fan in the sound booth. “I put every dollar back from the coffee can in the pantry. Nobody lost one cent of what they were owed, and nobody was told. I did that because I wanted my son to be the one to tell them. I gave him a year. I prayed for a year. I am a pastor, and I believe that a person can change. But I am also a woman who can read a bank statement.”
Dwayne sat down on the first step of the platform. Misty did not move. Somewhere behind me an old man said, quite softly, “Lord, have mercy,” and the congregation answered without being asked. Elroy Pinckney stopped the tape and let the silence stand, as he used to let the silence stand after the last verse. Then he said, “The pastor left one more instruction. She asked that we read this.” He held up a letter.
It was from the community foundation in Spartanburg. Ruth Ann had set up the scholarship fund in March under her own name, and the first deposit had been her own, from the sale of the land of her mother. Every honest gift in her memory had been going there since the funeral, by a link she had asked the church secretary to print in the bulletin. The total, read aloud by Elroy, was $41,860. It had come from the same kind of people whose twenty-dollar bills Dwayne had been collecting on the other side.
Mrs. Bivens, who gave twenty dollars a month out of her Social Security, rose from the second pew with her cane. “Is it safe?” she asked. “Mrs. Bivens, it is safe,” said Elroy. “Every dollar you gave at the Peach Festival table is another matter, and the sheriff will want to talk about it. But the gifts made through the foundation go to students. The first has been promised to a girl from Gaffney High named Maribel Ortiz, who wants to be a nurse.”
The reporter from the Gaffney Ledger had her camera in her lap, and for once she did not lift it. A deputy of Cherokee County, who had come to the memorial in his church clothes, asked Dwayne to step into the study of the pastor, and Dwayne went. He did not argue, and he did not look at the cardboard check. In the study he gave a statement. It took two hours. He asked, at the end, for a glass of water, and Elroy brought it.
South Carolina law treats the taking of funds given for a charitable purpose as a serious matter, and the prosecutor, who was a deacon at another church, did not make an exception for a pulpit. Dwayne pleaded guilty to breach of trust and to fraudulent solicitation. The boat named for his mother was sold at auction, and the Ram with it. The judge ordered full repayment of $86,000 to the donors who could be found and the rest to the foundation, with years of supervision.
Misty gave a statement too, and she returned to her mother in Rock Hill. She wrote me a letter after the sentencing, three pages, in a round hand, and I read it on the porch with the cat in my lap. I will not tell what it said. I will say that she did not ask for anything, and that I wrote back.
The first scholarship was awarded in May, at the same pulpit where Dwayne had held the cardboard check. This time it was a real one, from the foundation, handed over by Elroy Pinckney to Maribel Ortiz, who is eighteen and has the steady eyes of someone who has already worked a hard job. She stood in a borrowed white dress and thanked a woman she had never met. I thought my wife would have said she was welcome and then asked about her grades.
My son writes to me from the county facility on lined paper, once a week. I answer every letter. I do not tell him it is all right. I tell him about the church, the weather and the plumbing of the world, which still needs fixing. In his last he asked if I could send him the words to number 341, because the chaplain has asked him to read the verses aloud at the chapel service on Sundays. I copied them out by hand and mailed them.
A good pastor plants her sermons like seed, and some of them lie in the ground a year before the right rain comes. I keep the cassette in the toolbox of my truck, under the pipe wrenches, wrapped in the same shop rag, with the label turned up.
On the first Sunday of the following spring I sat in the pew where Ruth Ann used to put her Bible, and the new pastor, a young man from Greenville, asked the congregation to turn to number 341. We did it out of habit and out of love. The organ began, a little flat, as it always does, and the old tune rose from a hundred voices, and I sang the last verse with my eyes closed, and my wife was in every note of it.