The voice of my father came out of the old cassette player in the lawyer office, scratchy and slow, and every person in the room leaned toward it as if toward a fire. I am Carla Huckins, sixty one years old, and I sat in a leather chair in Little Rock with my husband Ray beside me and my two brothers across the table. Earl Huckins had said that the worst of it was what they did with the money, and now he went on, in the flat patient voice he used for the weather, to tell us precisely what that meant.
“In the fall of 1998,” said the voice, “Travis and Wade went to a man at the bank in Lonoke, and they showed him a letter with the name of Carla on it. It said she wanted to borrow against the college savings that her grandmother left her. She never signed that letter. They did. The money went to the horses and a truck.” My brothers had gone gray. Travis, the elder, reached for the water pitcher and spilled half of it. I sat very still. I had never known where my college money went. I had worked three jobs to pay for school.
The tape clicked and hummed. “I found out the next spring,” said my father. “I paid the bank back, every dollar, with the soybean money. Then I paid her tuition, twice, so she would never know. I never told her because I was ashamed to have raised two sons who would do it. I have changed my will. Mr. Faulkner has the new one, signed in July. Listen to him now, and listen well.” The tape ran out. In the silence, Mr. Faulkner, the old lawyer, adjusted his spectacles.
A cassette tape played in a lawyer office gave one daughter the afternoon to bring her two brothers back home to the farm near Little Rock.
He read the new will in the voice of a man reading scripture. The farm, four hundred acres on the Prairie County line with the house and the barn and the rice dryers, valued at four million, eight hundred thousand dollars, went to me, Carla. My brothers each received a trust, to be paid in monthly sums, on the condition that they complete treatment and remain well. Nothing was to go to them in a lump. Mr. Faulkner laid the paper down and said, “Those are the terms of Mr. Huckins. He asked me to say that he forgave them and could not trust them.”
Wade began to cry first, quietly, like a boy. He was fifty six years old, with a bad liver and a worse conscience. “Carla,” he said, “I have wanted to tell you for twenty five years. I saw you studying at the kitchen table in your old nightgown, and I wanted to cut my hands off.” I leaned across the table and took his hand. “Wade,” I said, “the tape said Daddy forgave you. I am going to try to do the same, and I am going to need some help from the Lord.”
But Travis could not bear it. He lurched to his feet and snatched the little cassette player off the table, with the tape still inside, and ran for the door, thinking perhaps to smash it in the parking lot. He wrenched the door open. There stood Miss Dot, the secretary of Mr. Faulkner, seventy years old and four foot ten, with a tray of coffee cups balanced on one arm, and behind her my husband Ray, who had slipped out a moment earlier. Ray took the tray from her, set it on the floor, and took the player from my brother, who did not resist.
Miss Dot patted Travis on the arm and told him that Mr. Earl had made a copy, and another copy, and put them both in the safe. “He said you might try this,” she said, kindly. Travis stared at her. Then he started to laugh, helplessly, a wet awful laugh, and slid down the doorframe to the floor of the hall. “He knew me,” he said. “That old man knew me better than I knew myself.” Ray sat down beside him, put an arm around his shoulders, and the two big men stayed there a long time.
The money consequences were exactly as my father arranged them. The farm came to me free and clear. The trusts for my brothers paid their rents and their medicine and nothing else. Travis entered a program in Hot Springs that spring, and Wade went to a clinic in Searcy, and both are still there. The forged loan was never mentioned to the bank, which had been paid back in full. And the rice, which my father had planted in that field every year since 1962, is still growing, and the check from the harvest is mine.
In the name of my father Earl, who passed in the autumn, I started the Earl Huckins Fund. It pays for scholarships for farm daughters who want to go to college, and for treatment for men on the land who are drinking or gambling alone, in Lonoke, Prairie and Pulaski counties. In the first year we sent thirty one young women to school and placed twenty four men in programs. One was a rice farmer from Carlisle who drove himself to the clinic and sat in the parking lot for two hours before he went in.
On a warm evening in September, Ray and I sat on the porch of the old house, watching the combines work the last of the field under the lights. Travis, eight months well, came up the steps with a thermos of coffee and sat on the rail. Nobody said much. From the kitchen came the faint sound of the cassette player, which Miss Dot had mailed to me in a padded envelope with a note that read, he wanted you to have the last word. I sighed, and the sigh went on a long while.