I did not open the last package that night. I sat at the kitchen table with it in my lap until the clock on the stove said four, and then I put it in the bottom of my purse, drove to the Putnam County sheriff office as the sun came up, and waited in the lobby until my son walked in. Danny looked at the purse and then at my face and said, “Mama, you have not slept.” I told him I would open it in front of him, with the door shut, and that whatever was inside, he would hear it from the woman who raised him and not from a file.
We opened it on the desk in his office. The butcher paper was folded twice. Inside was no cash at all. There was a thick envelope addressed in the block letters of my husband to Carol Ann Hatfield of Bowling Green, Kentucky, a cassette tape, and a small gold security badge with the name Earl pressed into the metal. Under those lay a single note held with a paper clip. “Peg. If you are reading this, I am gone and it is time. Read the letter. Then go to Danny. I should have gone to him myself.”
It began in 1987. The company where Dale drove had folded his pension, the mother of the two brothers needed an operation that cost more than both men earned in three years, and Earl, the younger one, had a plan. One bank. One time. Earl drove and Dale went in wearing the camouflage mask of a deer hunter, and they split what they took and hid it in a place where no officer would ever look, a freezer full of venison. It was supposed to be the only time. It never was. “I told myself,” Dale wrote, “that no one was ever hurt, and that every dollar was a loan I would pay back.”
A debt buried in the freezer will keep for thirty years, but it never stops asking to be paid.
Then came the spring of 1999. Earl told his brother he was finished. He had taken a job as a guard at a bank in Bowling Green, he wanted to be an honest man for his wife, and he made Dale swear to stop. Dale swore, and for six months he kept his word. In November, a man named Rudy Voss, who had driven for them once and had learned their habits, told Dale that he would rob a bank on his own and that he did not care who stood in the way. Dale begged him to wait. Voss went anyway, and Dale followed him, and only when they pulled up did Dale see the name on the front of the building.
He wrote that he ran inside after the shots. He wrote that Earl was on the floor of the lobby, still breathing, with his hand pressed over his chest, and that Earl looked up at him and said one thing. “Go, Dale. Go home to Peg.” Dale held his brother until he heard the sirens. Then he left him, and he drove back to Tennessee with a stolen sack of money that he never spent a cent of, and he told me that Earl had died in a car wreck on the interstate, because he could not say the truth out loud in his own house. He wrote, “I buried my brother twice, and the second time I did it with a lie.”
My son put the letter down and covered his eyes with the heel of his hand for a long moment. Then he straightened, the way the deputy in him always does, and called a detective at the Kentucky State Police named Ross Tillery. The tape turned out to be Dale reading the very same words in his own tired voice, along with the full name of Rudy Voss and the name of the nursing home in Jackson County where Voss was living out his seventies. Detective Tillery drove down himself. He sat at my kitchen table with his hat in his hands and thanked me, which I did not expect.
They arrested Rudy Voss in a wheelchair, in a room that smelled of lemon polish and stewed carrots. He did not deny it. He looked at the little gold badge in an evidence bag, and I am told that he said, “That boy should have stayed home.” A judge in Bowling Green sent him to prison for the rest of his life, which the doctors gave him about two years to serve. I had not known and I had not taken a dollar, and in the end I was not charged with anything at all.
Every cent of the $187,400 went back, through the court, to the banks and the insurers that had paid for it, and a few of the managers wrote me letters that I still keep in the freezer drawer, of all places. Then I drove to Bowling Green with the envelope and the tape. Carol Ann Hatfield lived in a small yellow house with a porch swing. She was seventy years old, with Earl on the mantel in his guard uniform. She read the letter on that swing, slowly, and when she finished she said something that stopped my heart. “Every November, for twenty six years, someone has left a package of venison on my porch. Wrapped in white paper. No name. I thought it was a friend of Earl.”
I told her it was Dale. She nodded for a long time. I offered her the six thousand dollars from the last package, though the court had said it must go back to the bank, and she shook her head and pushed my hand away. “I do not want his money, Peggy Lou. I want the last twenty six years to have been what I thought they were. A kindness. And I think they were.” She pressed the gold badge into my palm and told me to keep it, so that the two of us would each carry a small piece of the brothers.
The next November, I stood at the grave of Dale in Cookeville with a package wrapped in butcher paper, tied with kitchen string, and dated in my own handwriting. Inside was a pecan pie. I told him he was an old fool, and that I forgave him, and that I was going to drive to Bowling Green on the first Saturday of every month, and that Carol Ann was already baking. Then I set the package on his stone, and the wind lifted the edge of the white paper, and for a second I could swear I heard a truck engine down on the road, turning for home.