The man who climbed down from the cab of the rollback was Mr. Gatlin. He was seventy, lean as a fence post, with a gray ponytail and a face the color of old leather, and he had not brought his mean dog. He walked across the gravel lot slowly, with one hand pressed against his chest, and he stopped about ten feet from the window of my truck and took off his ball cap. The church picnic went silent. Behind me in the truck, Terrence stood up from the cooler, and I felt Jody stiffen, and I did what I had done for twenty seven years as a school nurse when a boy was about to throw a punch. I stepped between them.
“Mr. Gatlin,” I said, “you will state your business, and you will do it politely.” He looked at me with eyes that were a little red. “Mrs. Pickard,” he said, “I have come to give back something that belongs to your husband. And I have come to say a thing I should have said forty nine years ago.” From the pocket of his coat he drew a bundle wrapped in a faded bread bag. It was heavy, and when he held it out, I saw the muzzle of an old revolver through the plastic. My knees nearly went. Terrence took a sharp breath behind me.
“It is not loaded,” Mr. Gatlin said hastily. “I took the bullets out. Please. Hear me.” I took the bundle in my hands, because I could not think what else to do. Mr. Gatlin leaned against the fender of the truck as if his legs would no longer hold him. “I was twenty one years old in August of 1977,” he said, “and I drove the car. I did not hold the gun. But I drove the car, and I stood on that porch, and I watched Walter Teague die. And I watched your husband take a little boy out of that yard and drive away.”
A guilty man may sleep for forty nine years under the same roof as the thing he cannot carry, and then one day pay six hundred dollars to be near it.
Terrence stepped forward. He was a heavy gray man in his late fifties, in a short sleeved shirt and good shoes, and he moved like someone walking into cold water. “You were the driver,” he said quietly. “I saw you. You had red hair. You did not say a word.” Mr. Gatlin nodded, and tears ran straight down his creased cheeks. “I was a coward, son,” he said. “I let Lyle Dunagan do it. I stood there, and I let him. And then the sheriff, who was the uncle of Lyle, kept me out of it, and Lyle went to prison for something else, and I went home.” His voice cracked. “That night I heard a truck playing Turkey in the Straw.”
I put my hand on the hood. The pieces were falling into place in my mind, slow and sure, like the cards of a solitaire game. Ike had come home that August night gray and shaken, and he sat on the edge of our bed with his work boots still on and said, “Nan, I did something, and I cannot tell you.” He did not drive the route for three days. When he finally went out again, he was changed. Quieter. He locked the freezer with a padlock painted with a little white mark, and he put the key on the ring around his neck, and he wore it until the day he died.
“Where did you find this?” I asked, holding up the bread bag. Mr. Gatlin gestured at the truck. “Under the floor of the freezer, Mrs. Pickard. There is a false bottom, a little drawer. I took the batteries out to haul her, and the lid came loose, and there it was. With a letter.” He pulled a folded paper from his shirt and gave it to me. In the square, simple print of my husband, it read, This gun was dropped by the man who killed Walter Teague. The boy in my freezer saw him. When it is safe, give it to an honest sheriff. Ike Pickard, 1977. It was safe now. It had been safe for years.
A patrol car came up the church drive without its siren. The new sheriff, a young woman named Calhoun with a long braid down her back, stepped out and put her hat on. Terrence had called her that very morning, from the motel, after Jody told him whose truck it was. She nodded to Mr. Gatlin. “Mr. Gatlin,” she said, “you called my office from the salvage yard an hour ago, and said you wished to make a statement. I am here to take it.” He nodded. “I have wanted to for a long time.” He held out his wrists. She did not cuff him. She opened the back door of her car and said, “Sir, after you.”
They took the revolver in an evidence bag. Lyle Dunagan, it turned out, had died in prison in 1998, but the sheriff of that year, old Sheriff Teal, had been paid for years to make certain records vanish. The new sheriff said she would see that every single one was found. Mr. Gatlin pleaded guilty in September to being an accessory to the murder of Walter Teague. The judge, who had grown up on Poplar Street, sentenced him to seven years and looked as if the words hurt him.
Terrence came to my house on the day of the sentencing. He sat in my kitchen with a glass of sweet tea and told me the rest. After the freezer, Ike had driven him to his aunt in Greenville, and she had taken the boy and his mother north to Cleveland that same week. Terrence grew up, became a postal supervisor, married, and retired to Anderson in the spring because he wanted to see the street where his life was saved. “I was afraid of that truck for years,” he said. “And then I saw it on Poplar Street, and I could not stop thinking about the sound.” He smiled. “It sounded like being safe.”
Jody had sold that truck for a dollar to the very man who had been waiting to get his hands on it, and he had called his mother a foolish old woman. One night I sat down beside him with my own glass of tea. “Honey,” I said, “you did not know.” He said, “I should have asked what it meant to you.” I said, “Yes, you should have.” He cried, and I let him. Then I made him help me paint a new picture on the side of the truck, in blue.
On the first Saturday of November, the two of us drove the old route together, Jody at the wheel and me on the cooler, with Turkey in the Straw playing as loud as the speaker would bear. Terrence waited at the corner of Poplar Street with his three grandchildren in a row, and Jody leaned out the window and said, as loud as he could, “Mister Ike Pickard at your service.” The children laughed. The littlest one asked for a fudge bar. I handed it down to her myself, with a napkin, and I did not charge her a nickel.