“It is, Mr. Pratt,” I said. “And thank you for sending it to me instead of keeping it.” The gray haired man in the bolo tie, Wendell Pratt of Austin, dealer in rare books for forty years, gave a small bow. “Mr. Tackett, I have handled maybe six thousand family Bibles in my life. I have never seen one with a letter like that tucked in the back. When your son offered the Bible for sale, I told him the letter alone was worth more than the book. He asked me to leave it out of the deal. That was when I got worried.” He turned to Cody. “Young man, a book without its family is just paper. I could not do it.”
I opened the white envelope slowly. The pages inside were so thin they rattled like dry leaves. They were brown at the edges, written in a slow, careful hand, in iron gall ink gone the color of tea. Dated the ninth of March, 1871, from a small farm outside Jefferson, Texas. “To my daughter Hester, on the day she leaves home.” I read the first lines aloud, and I could feel the whole patio listening. “Hester, you carry nothing but this Bible and a clean apron. Do not weep. I carried less, and I was freed. What a family owns is not what it keeps in a trunk, but what it will not sell.”
Shayla, the wife of Cody, had pressed her hand over her mouth. Nobody in the house said a word. The fireworks from the neighbors lot popped in the dark and the crowd did not even turn their heads. I kept reading. “Write every name in this Bible, even the ones you lose. A name written is a name that stays. When your children ask what we were, open it to the front, and let them see that we were people who did not forget one another. Hester, I have no money to leave you. I leave you the knowledge that you come from people who stayed.” Wanda had read this letter to me in 1974.
A letter from 1871 came home in a white envelope, and a son found out what a family record is really worth.
I folded the pages and held them against my chest. “Wanda found this letter when she was twelve, hidden in the lining at the back,” I said. “Her grandmother showed her. She read it to me on our wedding night, and every New Year. She said a family should read it out loud at midnight, so that whatever the old year took, the new one begins with what cannot be sold.” I looked at my son through the cold lights. “And tonight I sat outside on the patio, freezing, while you counted down without me. Cody, I am not angry. I want you to tell me the truth. Why did you pawn your mother Bible?”
Cody did not answer for a long moment. Then he said, “Dad, I owe the bank on the Midland house. We bought it above our means. There are three other loans. I took the Bible to the pawn shop to cover one payment, thinking I could buy it back by Christmas. When I could not, I called Mr. Pratt to sell it outright. I told myself you would never miss it. You never open it.” His voice cracked. “But I did not even think about the letter. I did not think about the names. I thought about the money. It was the worst thing I have ever done.”
I held up the Bible, which I had retrieved from his shelf, the pawn tag still swinging from the gold edged pages. I opened it to the front. There was the first entry, in a spidery hand. Hester Mae Bell, born free, 1853. Then a hundred and fifty years of births, marriages, and passings, each in a different ink. The last entry was in the handwriting of my wife. Cody Allen Tackett, born the sixth of April, 1986. “Your mother wrote you into this book before she wrote you into anything else,” I said. “Your name is here because somebody refused to forget you.”
Cody crossed the patio and knelt on the cold concrete. He did not say anything for a while. He just put his forehead on my knee, the way he did when he was four and had skinned his elbow in the first shop pit. Shayla joined him and rested her hand on his back. Behind us the guests had gone quiet, then one by one slipped away to the kitchen, giving us the privacy that decent people give. I laid my hand on my son head and felt the tremble in his shoulders. “It is all right, son,” I said. “Hester forgave a worse thing than this.”
Wendell Pratt stayed for coffee, and he and I talked until two in the morning. He offered to take the Bible to Austin for conservation, free of charge, to keep the pages from crumbling, and I accepted on one condition. It would come back for the next New Year. Then I called Cody and Shayla in and told them what I had decided. The shops were sold, eleven and a half million dollars. The Midland house debt I would settle, once, and only once. In exchange, every Saturday morning Cody would stand in the pit of the first shop on 8th Street and change oil beside me.
Cody laughed, tearful. “Dad, I have not touched a wrench since high school.” I said, “Then I will teach you. The first thing a roughneck learns is to look the customer in the eye.” Shayla added that she had a better idea, and she did. She proposed that the family write down a new page in the Bible. It would include the money, the debts, the whole mess of the fall, and it would end with a single line from the letter. A name written is a name that stays. We wrote it that night, three generations at the kitchen table, in my wife old fountain pen.
At midnight on the next New Year, Cody stood in front of the fireplace in his own living room in Midland, with the Bible open in both hands, and read the letter of 1871 aloud to forty guests. His voice shook only once. When he finished, nobody clapped. They simply bowed their heads. Then my grandson, who is nine, stood up and said that he wanted to write his name in the book. Cody handed him the pen. He wrote it slowly, very straight, and underneath it he added a single word of his own. Stayed.