Taped inside the sweatband of the old felt hat, flat and yellowed and folded in four, was a letter in the blocky pencil of Cleve. I sat down on an upturned bucket in the barn, in the gray light of a rainy morning, with the hat in my lap and my reading glasses on my nose. The first line was a name. Mr. Gearhart, sir. I am Cleve Turner, the boy who stood at the tree line. I have waited fifty one years to tell you where your partner is, and I am sorry it took me this long.
The letter was two pages, and it was the longest thing my husband had written in his life. He wrote that in September of 1973, he had been nineteen, working for his father at a still on the far side of Runnett Bag Creek. The night the agents raided, he had run into the woods. He had watched them from the dark. And when Harlow Biggs went back alone the next night, with a flashlight and a sidearm, to wait for the moonshiners, Cleve had been hiding in the same woods, too frightened to move.
Biggs had walked in the dark along the creek, he wrote, and had stepped into the mouth of an old well, a hole in the ground covered with rotten boards that every child in the county was warned about. Cleve heard the crash. He heard the cry. He ran, in the dark, and he found Biggs at the bottom, thirty feet down, with his leg broken and his flashlight smashed and his breath growing thin. Cleve tried to climb down. He tried for an hour. He could not save him.
A boy who runs from the law at nineteen may spend the next fifty years paying for one night, in silence, with the whole weight of his life.
“He died before I could get a rope,” Cleve wrote. “I sat beside that well till dawn. I knew nobody would believe me. I was a moonshiner son with whiskey on my shirt, and he was a federal man. They would have hung me. So I did the only thing I could think of. I covered the well with stones and earth, and I put his badge in a cloth, and I put the cloth in my daddy still. I told myself I would give it back someday. I never could.”
At the bottom of the letter was a small hand drawn map, with an arrow, a stand of three chestnuts, and a single cross. He had marked the spot with the care of a man who had walked to it every year. I took the letter to the house and read it a second time, then a third. Then I put on my good coat and drove to Rocky Mount, to the tasting room, where Walter Gearhart and Ricky and Josh Pendleton were still sitting around the copper pot in silence.
I read the letter aloud. When I reached the sentence about the well, Walter bowed his head over his cane. He had searched that creek for months in 1973, he said. He had searched it for years afterward, on his own time, every autumn, until he was too old to walk. He said that he had passed the three chestnuts a hundred times. Ricky sat with his face in his hands. Josh quietly poured a glass of water and set it in front of the old man.
The sheriff and an ATF recovery team went out on Monday with ground radar and a backhoe, led by Walter in a borrowed wheelchair. It took them one day. Under the chestnuts, beneath four feet of earth and a layer of creek stone, they found the remains of a man in a tattered gray raincoat, with a broken leg, and a rusted revolver in a holster. Walter held the gun in his two hands and wept like a child. He said, “Harlow. You old fool.”
The bureau held a funeral at the courthouse in Rocky Mount on a bright Saturday in November, with full honors, a flag, a bugler, and three hundred people in the street. The daughter of Harlow Biggs, a retired nurse from Roanoke, flew in to attend. She wore the badge of her father pinned to her coat. After the service, she crossed the lawn to me, took my two hands, and said, “Your husband carried that for fifty one years. I want you to know that I forgive him.”
Ricky came to my house in December with a load of firewood and a small bottle. It was the very first batch from the copper pot, clear and gold in a plain glass. On the label, in careful letters, was one line. For Harlow Biggs and Cleve Turner. He set it on the mantel beside the picture of his father. He said, “Mama, I am sorry about the dollar. I did not know what that pot carried.” I said none of us did.
We keep the bottle sealed. On the anniversary in September, Ricky and Josh and Walter and I drive to the three chestnuts on Runnett Bag Creek and stand together in a ring. The leaves are red then. Walter lays a bunch of tomato plant wire on the stone, because that is what Cleve used, and says a short prayer in his shaky voice. Then we all go to the tasting room, and the young people pour a little whiskey in the old copper pot, to give it back to the earth.