Wrapped in a rotten feed sack on the bottom shelf of the old safe lay a double barreled shotgun, its stock cracked and its barrels dark with rust, and tucked into the sack beside it was a folded piece of ruled paper. I knelt on the cold floor of Gilliam Hardware with the grandson of the old man watching from the doorway, and my hands were shaking so badly that I had to try twice to lift the page. It was in the handwriting of my father. It was dated September of 1988.
I read it in the dim back room, under a bare bulb. My father wrote that the gun belonged to Royce Pittman, deacon of our church and our neighbor across the road. He wrote that on the night of September ninth, Royce had come to our barn after midnight with the gun in his hands and a face like a ghost. The bank was taking his farm.
His wife, Lorene, had miscarried that spring. He could not bear another day. He had walked across the road meaning to say goodbye, and he had found my father awake, mending a harness.
Daddy wrote that he sat with him until four in the morning. He did not preach. He did not argue. He only talked, about the peanut crop, about their fathers, about the creek where they had fished as boys, and he kept one hand on the barrel of the gun the whole time. At last Royce broke down and handed it over. My father drove him to a cousin in Macon before sunrise, and put him in the hands of a doctor who asked no questions. Then he went home and took the gun to the hardware store.
The kindest secrets are the ones kept to protect a man from his worst night, and the people who keep them rarely ask to be thanked.
The truck at the river bridge had been left by Royce himself. He had parked it there and walked away, thinking that if he vanished, the farm insurance might pay his wife and she would be free of the debt. It was the plan of a drowning man. My father had not corrected the rumor, because the doctor in Macon said that Royce needed time to heal, and a town that believed him dead could not hunt him down. Only Mr. Gilliam knew, because Daddy had needed a place to hide the gun.
I sat in that back room for a very long time. Then I asked the grandson to call his grandfather. When Mr. Gilliam came on the line, ninety years old and wheezing, I asked him the only question left. I asked him where Royce was now. The old man was quiet. Then he said, “Peggy, he lives in the Magnolia Care Home on Bellevue Avenue. He is ninety one. Your daddy has been visiting him every other Sunday for twenty years.”
I did not understand at first. Then I remembered the Sundays. All my life, my father had left the farm on alternate Sundays after church, saying he was going to see a friend. I had thought it was a woman, and I had been glad for him. I had never followed him. I drove to Magnolia Care Home that same afternoon in my funeral dress, and I walked in through the front doors and asked at the desk for Royce Pittman.
He was sitting in a wheelchair in a sunny room, a small and wrinkled old man with a blanket on his knees and a crossword puzzle. I told him who I was. He put down his pencil. “Vester is gone,” he said. It was not a question. I nodded. He cried then, softly, the way old men cry, and I held his hand. He told me my father had saved his life, and that his wife, Lorene, had joined him in Macon in 1989 and never once reproached him. They had been married fifty six years.
Royce asked me whether I would do him a kindness. He wanted the gun back, he said, not to keep, but to give away. He wanted it taken to the sheriff and turned in, and he wanted the whole story told at his own funeral when the time came, so that the young men in the church would know what a deacon looked like in his weakest hour. I promised. The sheriff accepted the gun the following Monday with grave courtesy and wrote a receipt that I still keep.
The boxes of shells came down from the barn loft that autumn, all nineteen hundred and twenty four, and the grandson of Mr. Gilliam took them back, to be donated to a county program for hunters safety. I kept a single box, on the kitchen windowsill, the last one my father bought. Every other Sunday, I drive to the Magnolia Care Home with a plate of pound cake and a paper. Royce and I do the crossword together. He says it is the least he can do.