“House,” my father finished, and he lowered the spoon of beef stew that had been halfway to his mouth. “Son, the lawyer called it a quitclaim. It means I gave Dale the house. I did not understand, down there, by the lantern. I thought the paper was about the insurance.” His hands trembled on the blanket, thin and spotted as an old map. In the doorway, Mr. Dabney of Adult Protective Services quietly lowered his folder. “Mr. Ross,” he said, “a deed signed in a cellar by a man who was not told what it was is a thing a judge will want to hear about.”
The deed was easy to find. Mr. Dabney and I drove to the courthouse in Jasper County at nine the next morning, and a clerk with reading glasses on a chain pulled it from the record in four minutes. Recorded three weeks earlier. The signature of my father sat at the bottom, wobbling like a line drawn on a moving bus. The notary stamp belonged to a Ms. Vera Lund of Carthage, who, when reached by telephone, said that a man had brought the page to her office already signed, said his father was too ill to travel, and paid her forty dollars in cash. She had never seen my father in her life.
The lawyer turned out not to be one. His name was Mr. Pruitt, and he had lost his license in Arkansas in 2016 for draining the estates of elderly clients. He had been hired by my brother for two thousand dollars to draw up papers that looked like a deed and sounded like a promise. Detective Alvarez of the Joplin police, a heavy man with tired kind eyes, explained it all to me at the kitchen table while my father slept. “Mr. Ross,” he said, “your brother is in a motel in Carthage. We will bring him in tonight.”
A cellar can be filled in, but a son must still go down the steps and carry his father up.
Dale was arrested at dawn in a room that smelled of cigarettes and fried food, sitting on the edge of an unmade bed with a pawn ticket in one hand and a beer in the other. He did not resist. He asked the arresting officer, I am told, whether he could finish the beer. When I saw him at the county jail three days later, through scratched glass, I did not recognize him at first. He was fifty one, and he looked seventy, and the hair that had been black the last time I saw him was the color of ash.
“Gary,” he said into the telephone on his side of the glass, “he owed me.” I waited. “I came back in June to make it right, I swear. Then I saw the house and the checks and the mail, and I got to thinking about the twelve thousand dollars I borrowed from him and could not repay, and how he never once called me again.” His voice cracked. “I wanted to be forgiven so badly that I stole the thing he would have given me if I had asked.” I said nothing. A man can be angrier than he is sad. I was both.
The deed was voided in a one hour hearing. The insurance company recovered all but nine thousand dollars of the fifty four thousand, which Dale had spent. Dale pleaded guilty to financial exploitation of an elderly person and received five years, with release possible in two. The nephews of my wife went home to their mother. Lorna, who had gone to the house of her sister, gave a full statement to the detective, in tears. I thanked her for it. I filed for divorce on a Tuesday, with a lawyer who was real, and I did not look back.
I went down into the cellar one last time, alone, with a flashlight. The cot was still there, between the canned tomatoes and the rusty lawn mower. The lantern, the bucket, the crackers. His Army cap on its nail. I stood at the bottom of those ten steps and let the dark settle around me, and I tried to feel what my father had felt, and I could not, and that is the thing I will carry. I took the cap off the nail and held it against my chest. The next day, a crew with gravel and concrete filled the hole, and over it I planted a small peach tree.
I quit the long routes. The senior center in Joplin needed a driver for its van, five days a week, local only, home by supper. The pay was half what I made on the road, and I have never been happier. Dad rode up front on Fridays, in the seat behind the door, with his Army cap and a thermos. He knew every stop. He knew every old woman who boarded, and half of them had known him in 1968, and by October they were fighting over who would sit next to him.
In November, he asked me to drive him to the prison. I said no. He asked again, and again, with the calm stubbornness of a man who survived the Pacific. So we went. Dale was brought into the visiting room in an orange jumpsuit. He stared at our father as at a ghost. Dad sat down across from him, folded his hands on the table, and said, “Son, I am not going to sign anything. But I am going to write to you every month. And when you get out, you are going to have a hot supper.” My brother put his head on the table and wept.
The following spring, I organized a charter for the senior center to Branson, in the big bus, eighty miles of green hills. Dad sat in the front seat with the cap on his knee. At the second rest stop, he stood up at the front of the bus, held to the rail, and began to sing, in a cracked baritone, an old song about a river. Forty gray heads joined in by the second verse. I watched him in the big mirror, and I drove very slowly, so the song would last all the way home.