I turned off the engine of my Buick and texted the unknown number back with one thumb. “Who is this?” The answer came in under a minute. “Meet me at Darlene counter at three. Come alone. Do not open the safe.” Then I got out, walked into my own kitchen, and told my nephew and his lawyer, in a very pleasant voice, that I was feeling faint and would like to lie down. Rusty took my elbow. Mr. Pike closed his briefcase. They did not leave the house until I was in my bedroom with the door shut, and I heard the Lincoln start only after I counted to two hundred.
I went out through the garden, across the bean rows, down the old logging path to the road, and got a ride to town with Hershel Maples in his feed truck. At the candy counter Darlene took one look at me and put the kettle spoon down. She walked me to the back room where the copper pots are kept, and in the corner, on an upturned bucket, sat an old man in a Smoky Mountain Railroad cap. He stood. He was thin, eighty four, with Clyde forehead and Clyde slow grin. “Opal,” he said. “It has been forty five years.”
Lonnie McCarter had left Gatlinburg in 1980 with four hundred dollars and a bad conscience. He told me the whole story over a plate of fudge. In 1979 he and Clyde went in together on two hundred acres up the mountain. Lonnie put in his savings, Clyde put in the rest, and both names went on the deed. Then Lonnie lost his nerve and his money in a bad business deal in Knoxville, and out of pride he ran. He went to Alaska. He worked on a crab boat. Then, in 1992, he wrote Clyde, and Clyde wrote back, and they met in a motel in Chattanooga.
A key with red yarn was missing, a lost brother sent a text, and a framed dollar guarded something far bigger than money.
“Clyde told me he had never put the land in play,” Lonnie said. “He said the deed would wait, in the safe, until somebody needed it. I signed a paper that day. A quitclaim, giving you my half, Opal, not his. He said, Opal will know what to do.” He turned his cap in his hands. “I did not come back because I thought you would hate me. And I did not know about Rusty and the lawyer until a man in a bar in Sevierville, who was buying drinks on a big land deal, said the name McCarter. I got in my truck.” Darlene wiped her eyes with a corner of her apron.
We went back to my house at five. Not alone. Darlene brought her husband, a retired deputy named Harlan, and Pastor Wells, and I brought Lonnie, and the sun was low and yellow in the hollow. Rusty and the lawyer were on the porch. When Rusty saw his father, he went the color of old milk. “Daddy?” he said. It came out like a boy of six. Lonnie did not answer. He walked up the steps and stood in front of his son, and the two of them looked at each other, and neither could speak.
In my kitchen I took the frame off the wall and set it on the table. I opened the little steel door with the combination Clyde made me memorize, our wedding date backwards. Inside there was a deed, a quitclaim with Lonnie signature, and a letter from Clyde. The deed gave me all two hundred acres. The letter said: “Opal, you know what to do. This land sits on the old Sugarlands trail where your people lived before the park took them. Do not sell it to a resort. Give it back to the mountain. Your Clyde.” Mr. Pike coughed and quietly closed his notebook.
I read the letter to the room twice. Then I turned to Rusty. “Honey, I am not going to sell,” I said. “And I am not going to call the sheriff, though I have every right. You took my key, and you brought a stranger into my house.” Rusty stared at his shoes. “But you are going to learn what that land is. Your daddy and I will take you up there Monday morning, and you will carry a bucket.” Lonnie put his hand on Rusty shoulder. Rusty began to cry, and the lawyer, wisely, went out to his car.
A week after the heritage trust was recorded, Rusty drove up Baskins Creek Road in his red Camaro, slow, and parked at the bottom of the drive. He walked up the gravel on foot. In his open palm he carried my house key with the red yarn, which he had kept in his jacket pocket since that Sunday. He did not make an excuse. He said, Aunt Opal, I took it, and I am ashamed, and I will carry buckets as long as you want. I closed his fingers around the key and said, keep it, but this time you knock first.
The McCarter Mountain Heritage Trust was recorded in June. The two hundred acres went to the trust, and the resort offer of eleven million was returned with a polite letter. The old cabins of the displaced Sugarlands families were rebuilt on the property by volunteers, Rusty among them, in sweaty work shirts, with Lonnie directing every beam. There is a trail now, and a sign, and a little museum in the biggest cabin where visitors can hear the names of the families that were moved. Clyde dollar hangs on the wall inside, in the same frame, under glass.
Every Wednesday I still walk to the candy counter on Main Street. Darlene wraps my quarter pound of peanut butter fudge in wax paper, a corner piece for me, and a second piece, bigger, for a man who waits outside on the bench with a railroad cap in his lap. This week she wrote on the paper in pencil. “See you next Wednesday, Miss Opal. And tell Lonnie his chewy one is on the house.” I carried it out to the bench, broke it in two, and we ate it in the afternoon sun, brother and widow, and watched the tourists go by.