I slid the envelope across the cloth to the father of Kelly, who is named Raymond, and watched him open it with the care of a man defusing a bomb. Inside was a single stiff page. He read it with his glasses on the end of his nose, and the dining room grew so quiet that I could hear the cheese curds squeak in the bowl. “Marathon Valley Cheese,” he read. “Purchase price, twelve million, one hundred thousand dollars.” He looked up at me. “Lavinia. You sold the factory.”
“In August,” I said. “All one hundred and ten of my people kept their jobs.” Brian made a sound as though he had been struck in the stomach. He had put down the carving knife long ago, and now both his hands lay flat on either side of the turkey, a heavy, sandy haired man who had not had a hard day since the age of twelve. “Ma,” he said, and the word split in half. “Ma, why did you not tell me?” I turned to look at him, and it was the hardest turn I have ever made. “Because I wanted to know what you would do, Brian, when you believed I had nothing left to give.”
The silence went on. Kelly set the receipt down very carefully, next to her wine glass, and put her hands in her lap. She is a pretty, quiet woman who teaches third grade, and I have never disliked her. “Brian,” she said. “Sixty four pounds. Forty eight thousand dollars. Your father dug that patch.” Brian began to speak, and she raised one finger, and he stopped. “Do not tell me it was blight. Do not tell me it was a bad year. I want to hear you say it was your father, and that you took it.” Brian closed his eyes. “It was my father,” he said, in a whisper. “And I took it.”
A green envelope holding a ginseng receipt sat beside a Thanksgiving plate and gave one cheese maker the holiday evening to bring her son back to the garden.
He told it badly, in pieces, and I let him. The truck was the least of it. There had been a loan on the hardware store he had wanted to buy with a friend, and then the friend had backed out, and the loan had not. Sixty one thousand dollars. He had dug up the ginseng himself, in the middle of one October night, with a flashlight, and had sold it to the first buyer who would pay cash. “I stood in that patch with the shovel and I could hear Dad,” he said. “I could hear him telling me not to. I did it anyway, because I was drowning, and I did not want you to know.”
Raymond folded the white page in thirds and set it on the table, flat, as one might lay a flag. He is a retired judge, a tall, bald man with the stillness of someone who has heard a thousand excuses, and he did not raise his voice. “Brian,” he said.
“I have sat on a bench for twenty nine years. I have seen what happens to men who take from their mothers. It is almost never about the money.” He paused. “It is about believing that she will forgive you. And she will. That is the unforgivable part.” Brian began to cry, openly, like a child, with his napkin pressed to his mouth.
I watched my son weep at the table where he had learned to eat, and my heart moved in me the way it did when he was small and had fallen from the barn loft. I wanted to say, enough. But there is a kind of kindness that is only cowardice, and I had practiced the other kind all my life. “Brian,” I said, “you will repay the forty eight thousand dollars. All of it, in a check, by the end of the planting season. You will sell the truck if you must. And you will plant the patch again. By hand. With me beside you. Four years it will take.”
He looked up, puzzled, his eyes red. “Ma. It takes four years for the roots to grow.” “Yes,” I said. “It does. That is the point, son.” I gave a small laugh at his face. “Your father used to say that you can not hurry ginseng. You can only be there, every spring, for a long time, with your hands in the dirt. I want you there.” Kelly reached across and took his hand. Raymond cleared his throat and said that the pie was getting cold. And we all, as people do, went on to eat the pie, because nobody could think of anything else to do.
I did not sleep that night. I sat at the kitchen window and watched the snow cover the shade cloth behind the house, white on gray, and I thought of Herman. He had a way of sitting at that same window every evening, in his blue chair, drinking a cup of tea with too much sugar. I said aloud, to the empty room, “I did not let him get away with it, dear.” I had half expected to feel grief. Instead I felt a small, fierce tenderness, as if the house itself were breathing out, after holding its breath for two years.
Brian paid it back in March, in a cashier check, with a note in his own square handwriting. In April we put on our boots. He dug the soil with a borrowed tiller, and I knelt beside him, an old woman in a straw hat, and set the seeds in the rows one by one, the way Herman had taught me. Kelly brought lemonade. At noon, Brian sat back on his heels and looked at the empty shade cloth stretching over the new beds. “Ma,” he said, “I will be forty three when this is ready.” I told him that was perfectly all right. We both had time.