Michael read the page with both hands, the way a man reads a letter from a doctor. It was a bill of sale from a jeweler in Portland, dated October of 2016, three weeks after my wife was laid to rest. The item was described in careful type. One platinum solitaire, one carat, with two small sapphires. The seller was signed in a firm black hand that I knew from forty years of birthday cards. Peter Henry Ashby. The price was eleven thousand, four hundred dollars. The lips of Michael moved, and nothing came out. Then, in a voice I will carry to my grave, he whispered, “I thought I lost it. I thought I lost the ring of Mama in the hospital.”
Peter had not moved. He stood at the head of the table with his leather folder clutched against his chest, the man who had spent thirty years convincing judges. “Michael, that is a misunderstanding,” he said. “I sold it to protect the estate. You were in no condition to hold anything of value.” My younger son rose from his chair, thin and tall in his old flannel coat. “For eight years I have hated myself,” he said. “I thought I was high when the ring went missing. I thought I killed the last thing she gave us.” “You let me think that. Every Christmas, you let me say sorry.”
The grandchildren from Boston had gone still on their chairs, two teenagers and a girl of nine with a ribbon in her braid. Gilles, my foreman, who had been sitting in the corner with his hat on his knee, rose slowly and cleared his throat. “Mr. Ashby, may I say something?” he asked, in his French Canadian rasp. “The letter from the Board of Bar Overseers was not from your father. It came from the night watchman, Roland, whom you paid to look away. Roland came to me on Sunday, with tears. He said he could not live with it anymore. He went to the Board himself.” Peter stared at the foreman as though he had been struck.
A platinum ring set in a velvet box gave one father the weekend to bring his sons back to the dining table in Bangor.
I gave my terms from my chair, with my cap in my lap, in the plain voice I once used on the loggers. The papers for the power of attorney and the transfer of the house would be torn in half, in front of everyone. Peter would cooperate with the Board of Bar Overseers, and he would sell his house in Portland to repay the three hundred eighty nine thousand dollars, with interest, over time, under the eye of my new lawyer. The sale of the mill, fifteen point seven million dollars, would pass into a trust at a bank in Augusta. Michael would stay in his program. And the ring would come home.
Peter did not shout, though I half expected it. He set the leather folder on the table, then sat, with his hands flat on the cloth, a man whose suit suddenly fit him badly. “Dad, I was drowning,” he said. “I owed money in Atlantic City. I owed money in Costa Rica. The ring was the only thing nobody would miss.” I looked at my oldest boy. “Peter, somebody did miss it,” I said. “Your brother missed it every day for eight years. That is the debt you cannot pay with money.”
Michael walked the length of the table. He stopped in front of his brother, and for a moment I thought I might have to stand. But he only stood there, breathing. “Pete, I forgive you,” he said at last, in a rough voice. “Not because you deserve it. Because I am tired of carrying you.” He turned away, and his big shoulders shook. Peter bent over until his forehead nearly touched the tablecloth. My granddaughter, the little one with the ribbon, slid down off her chair and went to her uncle and took his hand. She did not say a word. She only held it, and the whole room watched that small hand hold the large one.
Two days later, my lawyer and I drove to Portland, to a narrow jeweler on Exchange Street with a gold clock in the window. The owner, a small man in a vest, listened to the story without comment. Then he went into his back room and returned with a velvet tray. There it lay, a platinum band with a small cut diamond and two tiny sapphires, still bright, as if it had been waiting. “Mr. Ashby, I could never sell it,” he said. “It had a feel to it. I kept it in the safe for eight years.” I paid him the full price, and a hundred more for his trouble, and I carried the little box home in my breast pocket, against my heart.
The money consequences were handled over many months. The Board of Bar Overseers suspended the license of Peter for three years, and he sold the house in Portland and moved into a small rental near the harbor. The mill thefts of Michael were treated as a family matter by the buyer, who agreed to waive them in consideration of his treatment. He completed his program in Lewiston and returned to Bangor with a job at a sawmill, running the green chain, in the old flannel coat.
In the name of my wife, Marjorie, who passed in 2016 and who kept the books at Ashby Lumber for forty years without a title, I started the Marjorie Lumber Fund. It pays for treatment, counseling and legal help for the families of loggers, millworkers and woodsmen in Penobscot County who are being broken by addiction and gambling, and for the old fathers who pay for it all. In the first year, we helped thirty four households. A logger of fifty eight, with a missing finger and a gentle voice, sat in the office with his cap in his hands and said, “I thought I was the only one.”
On the eighth anniversary of his sobriety, Michael came to my house in Bangor for supper, with snow coming down the way it does in October. We ate beef stew at the kitchen table, in the glow of the yellow lamp, and said very little. When the dishes were done, I took the small box out of my breast pocket, where I had carried it for a year, and set it between us. He opened the lid. The ring caught the lamplight. “Dad, that is the ring of Mama,” he whispered. “It is not lost.” I closed his fingers around it. “Never was, son,” I said. “Just misplaced for a while.”