Travis came down the haul road in his big belt buckle and good boots, walking faster with every step, and I saw Sergeant Ramirez fold the letter against his chest. “Mr. Kroeker, you want me to stop him?” “No, Sergeant. Let him come.” Travis stopped ten feet away. He looked at the green Ford, then the duffel bag, then the sandwich bag in the sergeant hand, and I watched forty seven years of easy talk drain out of his face. “Uncle Dale,” he said, in a voice I had not heard since he was twelve. “Please do not read the rest of that. Please.”
Ramirez handed me the letter. Ruth had written it on the back of a Hutch Lanes score sheet, which was like her, thrifty to the end. I put on my reading glasses with fingers that would not hold still. “Dale, if you are reading this, Travis has done it again, and this time I could not protect you from it. In March of 1999 I began to notice the deposits coming up short. I thought the bank was careless. In April I followed Travis myself. He had been driving the deposit run for a year, and each Friday he kept a little. Sixty one thousand dollars by May, Dale. He was gambling it away across the state line.”
“I caught him in the north pit lane, with the truck and the cash in my own bowling bag. I do not know why he used my bag. I think he wanted me to find it. I told him I would not call the sheriff. I told him I would make it good, every dime, if he would swear on his mother memory that he was done. He swore. I think I knew what he would do next. So that night I copied the ledger, wrote this letter and slipped it in with the money, and I gave the bag back to him. He reported the truck stolen and drove it into the pit, and I believe he never looked inside again.”
A bowling bag at the bottom of a gravel pit held a wifes secret, a nephews debt and the last thing she ever asked of her husband.
“I paid the bank back from the sale of my mother quarter section by the Arkansas River. Do not be angry that I never told you, Dale. You would have gone after him with a tire iron, and you would have lost the pit and your good name too. I would rather you were angry at me for a while than at him for the rest of your life.” I could not read any more out loud. Ramirez took the letter back gently and finished it in his own quiet voice. He did not look up once, and neither did the men by the wrecker.
Travis had sat down on an upturned bucket by the haul road, his hat in both hands. He was crying without a sound. “Aunt Ruth never said a word to me about it,” he whispered. “Not at church. Not at Christmas. She just kept sending me home with pie. For twenty years I waited for her to say it, and she never said it, and it ate me alive.” I thought about all that pie. “Why the Wesley Towers, Travis? Why the dollar?” He wiped his face. “Because I knew the sale would drain the old pit. I wanted the land in my name first.”
That was the whole of it. Not greed, not even love of money, but a boy afraid of a wet hole in the earth. I felt something loosen in my chest that had been tight since Ruth passed. All those years I thought my nephew was only vain. He was something sadder. He was a man standing his whole life on a plank over a deep pit, waiting for it to give way. I took off my hat and sat down on the bucket beside him. Sergeant Ramirez stepped back and became very interested in a wrecker cable.
“Sergeant,” I said, “is there any complaint on a twenty seven year old deposit run?” Ramirez rubbed his jaw. “The bank closed that account years ago, Mr. Kroeker. Your company is the only injured party, and from this letter it was paid back. The truck report was false, but the time ran out on that a long while ago. I can write it up as recovered property and stop there.” “Write it up,” I said. Travis made a sound like something tearing. Kayla, in her hard hat, turned her back and pretended to read a clipboard.
I knelt and unzipped the duffel bag again. The old bills had turned the color of lettuce, but I knew a man at the Federal Reserve in Kansas City who could tell me whether they could be redeemed. “Travis, here is what we are going to do. This is Ruth money. She sold her mother land to put it right. It is going to the Hutch Lanes youth league in her name, for the kids who cannot afford shoes. And on Sunday you are going to stand up at First Methodist and tell them what you told me. Then you are going to visit those bowling kids every Tuesday until I say stop.”
He looked at me as if I had asked him to walk back into the pit. “Uncle Dale, I cannot do that.” “Ruth could,” I said. “She walked into that pit lane alone with a bowling bag and a score sheet. I think you can manage a Sunday morning in a nice clean church.” He stared at the muddy water draining from the green Ford. Then he put his hat back on, very slowly, and nodded once. I have seen men nod that way when a flood finally goes down and the road shows again.
On Sunday the whole congregation watched Travis walk to the front, his belt buckle shining under the lights. He talked for nine minutes. Not one person coughed. When he finished, old Mrs. Dreiling in the third pew stood, crossed the aisle and hugged him, and the rest followed. I sat in the back with my hat on my knee and Ruth old bowling shoes in my lap, because I had brought them. Outside, the Kansas wind laid the cedars my father planted in the Dust Bowl over almost flat, and then let them stand up straight again.