The five letters on the paper in my hand spelled DANNY, and I did not need my brother to tell me what that meant. Danny was my nephew, the boy of Gene, the one with the red truck, the one who had been the star of the McPherson High wrestling team in 1998 and was now a forty four year old man with a mortgage and two kids. I looked at my brother on the funeral home carpet, sixty one years old and crying like a child, and under the letters, in the handwriting of my mother: Tell Shelby. He was only a boy.
We took Gene out to the parking lot. I sat him on the bumper of my car, and the nurse, whose name was Angela, brought him a paper cup of water. It took him a long time to speak. “It was the ninth of May,” he finally said. “Danny was sixteen. He had borrowed the green sedan, the old Buick, to go to a party. He was coming home on Highway 50, in the dark, and he hit a man walking on the shoulder. He thought it was a deer. He drove home and woke me up. He was shaking so hard he could not talk.”
I stood there with my hand over my mouth. “You covered it up,” I said. “I did,” Gene whispered. “I washed that car at three in the morning. I took it to a body shop in Salina. I told myself it was a deer, and that the man had been drunk, and I told myself that Danny had his whole life. I never looked at the newspaper. Then in July, Mama came to the house, and she looked at me, and she knew. She did not say a word. She just put her hand on my face. And on Sunday she started driving to Hutchinson.”
Penance is not punishment; it is a long, quiet kindness paid to the one you wronged until the debt is finally forgiven.
I had thought that my mother was a woman of simple faith, and I had it exactly backwards. Ruth Kraus had found out what her grandson and her son had done, and had decided, at fifty nine, that the debt had to be paid by someone, and that if nobody else would pay it, she would. She had gone to Pleasant View Manor and sat down beside the bed of a man she had never met. She had read the Bible aloud for an hour every Sunday for twenty six years. She had asked nothing in return, not even forgiveness.
Angela told me the rest as we stood in the funeral home hallway. “For the first four years your mother talked and he said nothing,” she told me. “Then one Sunday, he blinked. She cried for an hour. She made a letter board out of cardboard and taught him to spell. His first word was thank you. Do you understand? That man, who had lost everything, thanked her. He did not know who she was. He thought she was just a kind lady from a church.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “She never told him. She was waiting for the right day.”
Gene drove to Pleasant View Manor that same night, and so did Danny, who came in from Wichita when his father called. I went with them. We walked down the long hall in the dim light, past the television sets murmuring behind the doors. Room 14 was small and clean. A thin old man lay in the bed with his eyes open, and a lamp burned on the table beside him, and on the wall hung a drawing done in crayon by a child. Angela had told him we were coming. He was waiting.
Danny stood at the foot of the bed with his arms at his sides. He had his father shoulders and his grandmother chin. “Mr. Kinney,” he said, and his voice cracked. “I am the one who hit you. I was sixteen. I was a coward and I ran, and I have thought of you every day for twenty six years.” The eyes of the old man moved to his face and stayed there. Nobody breathed. Then, slowly, deliberately, Thomas Kinney blinked once. Yes. And then Danny dropped to his knees beside the bed and put his forehead on the blanket and sobbed.
Angela brought the letter board. Thomas could not lift his hands, but he could blink at the letters, and one by one, as Angela said each, he spelled out a message. It took twenty minutes. I wrote it down. It said: I KNEW. YOUR GRANDMOTHER TOLD ME IN 2004. SHE ASKED ME TO WAIT. I FORGAVE YOU THEN. I WANTED TO SEE YOUR FACE. Danny read it over and over. Gene stood by the window with his back to us, and his shoulders shook.
The law, in the end, had little to say. The statute of limitations had long run out, and the daughter of Thomas, a schoolteacher in Wichita whom Angela called that night, asked only that Danny take responsibility in the way he could. He did. He paid for the best care in the state, moved Thomas to a bright room at a home near his daughter, and visited every Sunday, with his own children, to read aloud. Gene sold two quarters of wheat ground to cover the cost, and never once complained.
Thomas Kinney died in his sleep eleven months later, with Danny holding one hand and his daughter holding the other. At the funeral, in the small Lutheran church in Wichita, Danny stood up in front of the congregation and told the whole story, with his voice steady, and when he finished, a woman in the back began to clap. It was not applause, exactly. It was something older, the sound of people who recognize a hard thing done honestly.
Last Sunday I drove to the cemetery in McPherson with a thermos and a small worn Bible. I laid it on the grave of Mama, next to the one she had left for Thomas. On the headstone I traced her name with my finger and told her about all of it, the old man, the board, the forgiveness. A little breeze came across the wheat. I could swear I heard her voice, an ordinary kitchen voice, saying that it was about time, and to come home for bierocks.