“Sister Mabel,” said Pastor Reed gently, “is there something you have been carrying for thirty years?” In the back pew, an old woman with white hair and a cane lifted her head. Mabel Odom was eighty one years old now. In 1995 she had been the church secretary, a small, tidy woman who kept the bulletin and the keys. She rose slowly, holding the pew in front of her, and the whole church waited. “Pastor,” she said, and her voice was thin as paper, “I saw him take it. I have seen it every night since. I am so sorry, Evelyn. I am so sorry.”
She told it standing, with her eyes shut. On the Saturday night in March of 1995, she had stayed late to fold the programs. She saw Deacon Simms come in through the side door and lift the gray cash box from the safe. He told her it was going to the bank early. She believed him. On Monday morning the box was empty and the green ledger was gone, and when she went to him, frightened, he stood in the door of his office and said very quietly, “Mabel, your sister rents that house from me. I would hate to see her put out in the rain.”
The church made a sound like a long breath. The sister of Mabel, a woman in a wheelchair, had been crippled by a stroke. Mabel had been afraid for three decades. She told how she had lain awake, how she had prayed, how she had watched the family of Evelyn leave Tupelo in a borrowed truck and said nothing. I crossed the sanctuary, climbed to the back pew, and took her trembling hands in mine. “Mabel,” I said, “I knew somebody was afraid. I did not know it was you. It is all right.”
Silence is a debt that always comes due, and the one who pays it with the truth is richer than the one who collects it.
Loretta Simms had not moved. She stood in the second pew with one hand on the back of the bench, her face a hard, powdered mask. “You have no proof of any of this,” she said. “The old woman is confused. My husband is dead and cannot defend himself.” Pastor Reed, who had turned back to the ledger, cleared his throat. “Sister Loretta,” he said, “I will read the last page aloud.” He lifted the book to the light. “In red ink,” he read, “in the handwriting of Deacon Simms. Owed to the lenders in Tunica, forty thousand dollars. Paid from Mount Zion. Blame to be placed on E. Brooks.”
I had to sit down. For thirty years I had imagined that the church simply made a terrible mistake. I had never imagined it was planned from the first. Deacon Simms, a respectable man in a gray suit, had gambled his own money away at the casinos in Tunica, owed men who were not patient, and taken the treasury of his church to pay them. Then he had chosen the treasurer, a young black schoolteacher with no relatives in town, as the one who would carry the shame. The congregation heard it, and the congregation wept.
Lorettas mask finally broke. She did not scream. She sat down in the pew very slowly, as though someone had cut a string, and put her face in her hands. “I knew,” she said in a small voice. “Not about the casino. About the money. I found a bank envelope in his coat in April and I asked him, and he said never to speak of it. I said I always wondered about Evelyn because I could not afford to wonder about him.” She raised her head. “I have been wondering about the wrong person for thirty years.”
Pastor Reed came down from the pulpit. He did not give a sermon. He knelt on the carpet before me in his black robe, with the church watching, and said, “Sister Evelyn, on behalf of this congregation, I ask your forgiveness.” Behind him, one by one, the deacons stood, and then the choir, and then the families in the pews, until the entire church was on its feet. I looked at their faces, the same faces, thirty years older, and I felt something unclench in my chest that had been tight since I was thirty six.
“I forgive you,” I said, and my voice carried. “I will not pretend that I forget. But I forgive you.” Then I added, because I am a teacher and cannot help myself, “And I will expect a better example from the next generation.” A ripple of laughter went through the sanctuary, warm and tearful and loud. The organist struck the first chord of Amazing Grace, and the entire church sang, and I sang with them, standing at the front, holding the green ledger against my heart like a hymnal.
Within the month, Loretta sold the lake lot her husband had left her and delivered thirty eight thousand dollars to the church office in a cashier check. The deacons added two thousand more. The building fund, at last, was whole. They broke ground on the new sanctuary in the spring, thirty one years late, and at the groundbreaking, a line of children from the Sunday school, none born when I left, handed me a shovel with a ribbon on it. My husband, Earl, drove down from Memphis and was voted an honorary deacon by acclamation.
On the first Sunday of homecoming, the church held a covered dish dinner that went on until dark. My daughter, who had stopped receiving birthday invitations at the age of eight, was handed a cake with thirty candles on it by a woman who had once refused to look at her. Mabel and I played a piano duet, two old ladies on one bench, and fumbled the middle verse and laughed. I have taught for thirty years and I have never seen a room so full of people trying to be better than they were.
The green ledger now sits in a glass case in the lobby of the new sanctuary, open to the last page, with a small brass plate underneath. I chose the words myself. They read, THE TRUTH KEEPS ITS OWN BOOKS. Every Sunday, as I go in, I stop and look at the red ink. Not in anger anymore. I look the way you look at an old scar on your own arm, a thing that hurt and healed and made you who you are, and then I go in to worship with the people of my town.