I did not sleep. At dawn I drove to Edgewood with the envelope on the seat beside me and Biscuit riding on top of it like a tiny judge, and I found the house on Pine Street where the sale had been held. A white farmhouse, tired but proud, with a pecan tree in the yard and a rope swing hanging from it. Not the farm of my childhood, but a copy of it, built by a woman who could not stop missing the original. My knees went soft at the gate. A man in a John Deere cap came out on the porch and asked what I wanted.
His name was Wayne Mabry, and he was fifty four, and he had my chin. That was the first thing that frightened me. “You must be the one who bought the painting,” he said, in a voice that was not friendly. “The man at the booth told me a woman came asking. Madam, that was not for sale.” “I paid fifteen dollars.” “It was supposed to go to the church sale. Somebody made a mistake.” I held up the envelope. His face changed the way a sky changes before hail. “Where did you find that?” he asked.
He let me in. The kitchen smelled of lemon polish and old coffee. On the wall hung a photograph of two girls in feed sack dresses, one of them my mother. The other girl was also named Margaret. “Twins,” Wayne said. “Margaret Louise and Margaret Ann. My mother and yours. They were born two minutes apart in Ben Wheeler and named for the same grandmother, because the old woman could not decide.” I sat down hard in a kitchen chair. My mother had never once told me she had a twin.
A dusty painting and a folded envelope gave one school secretary the length of a single morning to bring a lost cousin back to the truth in Tyler.
I gave my terms to Wayne at that table, in a quiet voice. I would not call a lawyer and I would not call the sheriff. I wanted three things. The whole story, from the beginning, told by him. The papers of the farm, all of them, laid on the table. And my friend Joann, who had driven with me for forty minutes and was sitting in my car eating a sausage biscuit, would be allowed to come in and sit beside me. Wayne agreed to the first two and then looked out the window at Joann through the glass. “Does she bite?” he asked. “Only when she is hungry,” I said.
Wayne told it with his big hands flat on the table. In 1976, my mother and father owed the bank eleven thousand dollars after a drought and a bad hay year. His father, my uncle Leonard Mabry, was the loan officer at First National in Canton. Leonard arranged for the bank to call the note, then bought the farm at the courthouse steps through a friend, for a fraction of its worth. “He took the farm from his own sister in law,” Wayne said, “and put the profit in the name of my mother. She never stopped being sorry. When Leonard passed, she wrote you the check, and she never could make herself mail it.”
Wayne was not finished, though. When I reached for the envelope and the papers, he snatched the deed of the old farm off the table, meaning to carry it out to the burn barrel behind the house, and he ran out the back door with a speed I did not know a man his size had. He got as far as the pecan tree. Joann, who had come in through the gate with her sausage biscuit and her purse the size of a suitcase, stood directly in his path and swung that purse, once, in a wide, slow arc. It caught him square in the middle.
Wayne sat down in the grass under the rope swing, the deed in his lap, wheezing. “Lord have mercy, Joann,” he said. “What do you carry in that thing?” “A Bible, a hammer and a can of peaches,” she said. “Give her the paper.” He looked up at me, a big man of fifty four in the shade of the tree of my childhood, and his chin began to shake the way mine does. “I am so sorry, Carrie,” he said. “I did not know how to say it.” I took the deed from his lap and sat down beside him in the grass.
The check could not be cashed after all those years, but the old First National of Canton had passed its books to a bigger bank, and the bigger bank had sent the money, with interest, to the state of Texas as unclaimed property. A young man at the comptroller office in Austin found it in an afternoon. It came to a little over one hundred nine thousand dollars. Wayne signed the farm back to me, the thirty acres his father had taken, which a developer had been circling. He asked for nothing. He only asked if he could come to the first Thanksgiving.
In the name of my mother, Margaret Ann Mabry, who passed in 1999, I started the Margaret Ann Fund. It pays for legal help and a first month of rent for families who lose farms and homes to bank and tax sales, in Van Zandt, Smith and Henderson counties. In the first year we stopped eleven sales and put forty four people into safe rentals. One young father in Mineola wrote me a note on a paper napkin that said the mortgage man had cried on the phone when he heard. I do not know why, but I kept it.
The farm outside Ben Wheeler is mine again. The rope swing still hangs in the pecan tree, and my four grandchildren fight over whose turn it is. Biscuit has taken the porch as her kingdom. Wayne drives out on Sundays with a pie from his church and sits on the steps next to me, shelling peas into a bowl, and we do not talk much. Last week he said he thought his mother painted that picture so we would find each other. I told him I thought she had done it so we would finally stop having to look.