The voice behind me in the third pew said, “Ardith, would you do me the kindness of turning around?” I had known that voice for fifty years. It had sung bass in the church choir for as long as I had been in Hendersonville. It had said grace at the covered dish suppers and read the scripture on Easter. It was the voice of Deacon Wendell Pace, a white haired, upright man of eighty, who had carried the casket of my husband in June. I turned, and he was looking at me with his hat in his hands and his wife Opal beside him, as pale as paper, with her purse clutched to her chest.
“I know why you came to the church today,” he said quietly. “Opal told me last night what she saw in the library. The glass. The ribbon. The name.” The whole pew behind us fell silent. The preacher, who had just risen to begin the opening prayer, stopped with his Bible open in one hand. Wendell stood up, slowly, and cleared his throat, and in front of the congregation of First Baptist, with his big weathered hands on the back of the pew, he said, “Friends. I have to say something that I should have said in 1974.”
He said that in the fall of 1974 he was twenty eight years old, and deep in debt to a man in Spartanburg, and working as a foreman at the sawmill of the Coble family. He said that he set a fire in the engine room, with a can of kerosene, to make a shortage look like an accident. He did not know the night watchman was asleep in the office. The watchman was Cecil Ray Hampton, a forty year old man with a wife and four small children. Cecil Ray did not wake up.
The heaviest sentence a man ever speaks may be the one he has practiced in the dark for fifty years.
The congregation did not gasp. They sat very still, the way people do when a long suspected thing is finally said. Wendell stood and shook, but he did not stop. He said he ran away from the fire that night. He said that the next morning, the county surveyor, a quiet man named Thurman Coble, came to the ashes, and walked the burnt line with his transit and his chain, and found where the fire had started. He said that Thurman looked at him across the smoking boards and said, “Wendell, I know.” And he said that Thurman did not tell a soul.
I put my hand to my mouth. In the pew behind me, the old woman who had backed out of the library, Opal, bent forward over her knees. “Why did my husband stay silent?” I asked. My voice shook. Wendell turned his face to me. “Because I had a little boy,” he said. “He was four. His name was Danny. Thurman told me that he would not take a father from a boy. He told me to make it right, any way I could, for as long as it took. He said he would write it down in case I did not.” He wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist. “And I never did. Not for fifty years.”
Thurman had said that he would write it down. So he had. For forty years, in his den after supper, with the door shut, clack, clack, ding, my husband had typed the confessions of other men, the things he saw and could not say. Survey notes, he had called them, and so they were. The boundaries of what a man could carry. I felt a tide rise in me then, not anger, but something wider. I looked at the stern, wet face of the deacon, and I understood that my husband had given this man fifty years to do the right thing, and had trusted him to do it.
It was the preacher who moved first. He came down from the pulpit with his Bible, took Wendell by the arm, and said in a low voice, “Brother, you have done a brave thing. Now let us do the rest of it properly.” They drove together to the courthouse that very afternoon, the preacher and the deacon and Opal, and Wendell Pace walked into the office of the sheriff with his hat in his hand and turned himself in. I sat in the car outside with my son Lonnie, and I did not know what I felt. I only knew that the wind was blowing the leaves across the parking lot like a lot of small brown letters.
The prosecutor was gentle but firm. There is no statute for murder in North Carolina. Wendell pleaded to second degree murder in January, with a statement of his own, and the judge, who had known him for forty years, sentenced him to eight years, of which he would likely serve five, given his age and his heart. He took it standing up. Opal sat in the first row, in her church coat, and when the gavel fell she did not look away. When it was over, a tall woman in a gray suit rose from the back of the courtroom and walked up to me. She said, “Mrs. Coble? I am the daughter of Cecil Ray Hampton.”
Her name was Loretta, and she was fifty six. She had been six years old the night her father died. Her mother, Inez, was alive at ninety two, in a nursing home in Greer. “We always knew it was not an accident,” she said. “We never knew who. My mother said, God will tell us when He is ready.” I took her hands, and we stood there in the empty courtroom with the light coming down through the high windows. I told her about the ribbon. I told her about the typewriter. And I told her that my husband had written one more thing, which I had not yet dared to read.
I read it that evening, alone in the den, at his desk, by the lamp. The repairman had copied the very last page off the ribbon, and it was addressed to me. Ardie, it began. I have spent forty years in this room writing down what I could not say, and I am sorry for every evening I gave to the dead and not to you. I did not know how to tell you the hard things, so I told the paper. But I want you to know the one true thing, which does not need a ribbon. You were the best survey I ever made. Everything I wanted was inside your lines.
We have Letter Day every Thursday still, and now there are forty people, and a waiting list, and the library has put in a second table. Raelynn comes every week and types alongside me, the long fingers of her father on the keys, with a tongue between her teeth. She started with a letter to me that she never mailed, and then she did. I keep it in the tin with the ribbon. And at Christmas, Loretta brought her mother, Inez, in a wheelchair, to the table by the window, and the old woman dictated one short letter. It said, Wendell, you are forgiven. I mailed it myself.