I drove to Willett Road before sunrise on Sunday with the brass key in my fist and the old suitcase of my mother on the passenger seat, because I wanted to be the first one through that door. I was not. A silver rental sedan sat crooked in the gravel lot of Rickhouse C, and my brother Patrick stood beside it in a pressed golf shirt, rattling the chain on the big double doors. When he saw my headlights he did not look surprised. He looked like a man who had been rehearsing a speech for forty five years and had just lost his place.
“Annie, go home,” he said. “Whatever Dad left you in that suitcase, it is not worth what it will cost this family.” I held up the key. “Then you will not mind if I try it.” An old watchman named Orville Pike came out of the shed with a thermos, looked at the key, and took off his cap. He had worked that rickhouse since 1974. “Miss Annie,” he said quietly, “your father told me this day would come. He paid me for forty years to keep one barrel dry and one door shut.” Patrick stepped back, and I walked inside.
Barrel 1987 114 sat on the third tier in the dark, with a small brass plate nailed to its head that read M.E.C. Orville rolled it down with a hook, and Mr. Hollis, the lawyer, who had followed me in his Buick, helped me pull the bung. There was no bourbon inside. There was a steel tube wrapped in oilcloth, and in the tube were a ledger, six photographs and a letter in the handwriting of my mother. I read the first line out loud, standing in the cold, with the smell of sweet oak all around me: “If you are reading this, Thomas finally kept his word.”
A brass key gave one teacher the length of a Sunday morning to bring her brother back to the truth in Bardstown.
I gave my terms right there on the gravel. Nobody would touch the tube until all three of us sat at one table, with Mr. Hollis present and a recorder running. I called my sister Colleen, who drove down from Louisville in her bathrobe and slippers, and I set the tube in the middle of the dining table of my father, in the house Patrick had locked me out of in March. I told my brother he could read every page, and he could speak, but he could not leave the room. Then I put the key in my pocket and told him to sit down.
Patrick sat for a long time with his hands folded like a boy in church. Then he told it. In the autumn of 1979 he was fourteen, and he had hidden in the loft of that rickhouse to smoke a stolen cigarette. He saw Lyle Prather, the partner of our father, loading barrels onto an unmarked truck at midnight. He saw our mother walk in with a flashlight and a notebook. And he saw the truck leave, and in the morning she was found at the foot of the loft ladder. “I never saw what happened in between,” he said. “But Lyle paid for my college and my law school. And I took it.”
When I read aloud the line about the doctor who signed her papers in exchange for twelve barrels, Patrick stood so fast his chair fell over. He snatched the ledger off the table, meaning to carry it to the fireplace, and he ran for the kitchen door with the pages flapping like a startled bird. He got as far as the back porch. Colleen, who has not run a step since 1998, simply stood in the doorway with her arms spread, wearing her slippers, and said, “Patrick Thomas Callahan, you are not leaving this house with our mother.”
He stopped. I watched forty five years go across his face. The ledger shook in his hands, and then he began to cry, not quietly, not like a lawyer. Orville, who had come along to carry the tube, took one step onto the porch and held out his weathered palm. Patrick put the ledger into it. Mr. Hollis picked up the telephone and called a friend in the office of the state attorney. And my brother sat down on the top porch step and said, “I should have said it the very next morning.” Nobody argued with him.
Lyle Prather had passed in 2009, but his company had not. The state reopened the matter of the missing barrels, and within a year the distillery that bought out his firm was ordered to repay the estate of my mother, with interest. The doctor lost his name on the plaque of the hospital wing. Patrick resigned from his law firm, gave back the share of the stocks that had come from Lyle, and agreed to testify. Colleen and I split the money three ways with him, but he asked me to put his portion into what I was about to build.
In the name of Mary Eileen Callahan, who passed in 1979, I started the Mary Eileen Fund. It pays for winter coats, glasses and school supplies for children of distillery and farm families in Nelson, Washington and Marion counties. In the first year we filled three hundred twelve backpacks and sat in the cold with forty one children while an optometrist fitted them for glasses. One boy looked up at the board in my own old classroom and said, “Miss Annie, the letters have edges.” I had to step into the hall for a minute.
On the last day of school in May, I carried the old brown suitcase into my fourth grade classroom and set it on my desk. The children asked what was inside. I told them my mother, and a little boy named Caleb asked if she was nice. I said she was braver than anyone I ever met, and I opened the lid on a pile of her recipe cards and her red lipstick. Patrick came that afternoon and stood quietly at the back of the room, and when the bell rang he carried the suitcase to my car without a word. That is how brothers say sorry in Kentucky.