Inside the casket of Willie Brister, folded neatly on the white satin, lay a flag. Not a body. Not bones. Only a flag, of the state of Mississippi, and on top of it a brass deputy badge, polished bright, and an envelope sealed with brown wax. A dozen men stood around the open grave on the windy hill above Highway 12, and no one made a sound. The sheriff took off his hat. Mrs. Brister, seated on a folding chair at the edge of the tent, put her white glove over her mouth.
The envelope was addressed in the elegant slanting hand of my husband. For my friend Odessa Brister, to be opened only when the grave is opened. The sheriff handed it to Cedric, and Cedric handed it to me, and I stood in the wind of the cemetery with my son beside me and read it aloud, my voice shaking. Odessa, if you are reading this, then I am dead, and the time has come that I hoped for. Your husband is alive. He has been alive for twenty nine years.
Sylvester wrote that in June of 1996, two men from the United States Marshals Service had come to his chapel in the middle of the night. They told him that a deputy named Willie Brister had testified before a federal grand jury, and that a plan existed to kill him before he could testify again. The only way to save him was to bury him. Sylvester, who had known Willie since boyhood, agreed. The casket was filled with sandbags. The funeral was held. And a man in a hearse was driven north in the dark.
A funeral director spends his life closing caskets on grief, but only the best of them have ever closed one on a lie that saved a life.
Odessa Brister was ninety years old, with a church hat and a cane, and she did not weep.
She sat very straight in her chair and listened to the letter with her eyes closed. When I finished, she opened them. She asked me to read the last page again. Sylvester had written that her husband was now living in Kalispell, Montana, under another name, in a small apartment at the edge of a lake. The men who had threatened him had all gone to prison by 2003. He could have come home. But Willie, he wrote, had not trusted it.
“Every year,” the letter said, “I mailed a postcard, so that you would know a living hand had touched the paper. Every year I begged him to send for you. Every year he said the same. If I come back and they find me, they will find her too. I am an old man, Odessa, and I may not live to see him change his mind. So I leave the choice to you.” Mrs. Brister folded her hands on her cane. She said, “Lavinia. Honey. I would like to go to Montana.”
We flew on a Thursday, the three of us, Mrs. Brister, Cedric, and I, in the small seats of a plane over the plains. The old lady wore her best hat. She held a photograph of her husband, taken in 1995, in his uniform, with his big hand on a puppy. In Kalispell, a social worker met us at the door of a small brick care home beside a pine forest. She led us down a hall that smelled of pine soap and coffee, and stopped at a door at the end.
The man in the chair by the window was ninety four years old. Thin as a rail, in a plaid shirt, with a blanket over his knees. He had a white mustache, and his hands were trembling in his lap. He was looking out at the lake, and he did not turn around. Mrs. Brister stood in the doorway with her cane and said, softly, as one might call a dog home, “Willie.” And the old man turned his head. And I saw twenty nine years fall off his face like snow from a roof.
I will not tell you everything that was said. Some things belong to two people. I will tell you that she crossed the room faster than a woman of ninety should, and that he rose from the chair, which the nurses had said he could not do, and that they held each other in the window light for a very long time. Cedric, beside me, was weeping into his hand. I stood in the corridor with my back against the wall and looked at the ceiling and thanked God for my husband.
They brought Willie home to Kosciusko in April, in a car with a blanket, and a hundred and fifty people stood outside the funeral home to greet him. The mayor read a proclamation. A choir sang. He and Odessa now live in the little house on Jefferson Street where they raised their children, and Cedric visits on Sundays. And on the corner, across from the Methodist church, the sign over the green awning has been repainted. Hood and Sons, since 1921. Cedric holds the ladder.