Reverend Lindquist lifted the photograph out of the steel box with two fingers and held it up to the light. It was Brett at thirty four, in 2019, standing beside the Buick of the church treasurer in the parking lot, holding a brown canvas offering bag. The date was printed in the corner in the orange numbers of an old disposable camera. Under the photograph lay a ledger, a small green one, with columns of figures in the pencil of Harold. It was a record of the Sunday offerings of the church for eleven months of 2019, showing, week by week, the amounts counted and the amounts deposited. The gap was in red.
The head elder, Elmer Voss, seventy nine years old, put on his glasses and read the ledger without moving his lips. The gap came to thirty eight thousand, four hundred dollars. Harold had noticed it in 2019, while he was still the usher at the east door. He had followed Brett one Sunday, with a camera, and found him handing the offering bag to the treasurer, Carl Hendricks, in the lot before it reached the bank. They had both been skimming it. Harold had put the evidence in a steel box and asked me to hide it under the cemetery, until he could find a way to tell the pastor without breaking the heart of his daughter.
Brett stood on the grass in his good loafers, his face the color of the stones. Linda had come out of the church in her heels and stood beside him, bewildered, with her hand on his arm. “Brett,” she whispered, “what is this?” Reverend Lindquist spoke very gently. He said that the church would not call the sheriff that afternoon, because the sheriff would not be needed. What the church needed was the truth, in front of the elders, in the fellowship hall, before the coffee got cold. Brett looked down at the green ledger, then up at the sky, as if looking for a way out through it.
A steel box dug from a cemetery gave one mother the afternoon to bring her family back to the church in Abilene.
I gave my terms with the spade still in the grass, leaning on the cane of Harold. “Brett, you will repay the thirty eight thousand, four hundred dollars to the church, from your own savings, within the year. You will resign from the committee of the men and from the ushers. You will go to the counseling at Salina, every Tuesday, and Linda will go with you on the first night. The two of you will move out of my house by the end of the month, to the rental on Buckeye Street, and I will pay the first six months of rent. And I will go on tending the grounds of this church until I am carried out of it.”
Brett gave a dry sob and dropped to one knee on the grass, right on the new green square of the sod, as if he could not hold himself up. “Lorraine,” he said, “I took your credit card because I was drowning, and I took the church offering because I was desperate, and I told them you were confused because I could not stand to look you in the eye. You kept this church green for thirty eight years. I could not even keep my own life on the ground.” Linda crouched beside him and took his hand, and the two of them stayed there in the cemetery, kneeling.
Then something in Brett snapped, and he lunged for the steel box in the arms of the head elder, wrenched the ledger free, and bolted across the cemetery toward the parking lot. He was twenty yards along when Elmer Voss, who is seventy nine and farmed wheat for sixty years, swung the long spade across the path of Brett like a turnstile and caught him behind the knees. Brett went down flat on the grass among the headstones. The ledger skidded away, and the second elder, a quiet man named Orville, put one foot on it and bent to pick it up.
Brett lay on his back looking at the sky, breathing hard, and then, to the astonishment of everyone, he began to laugh. It was the ugly, breaking laugh of a man at the end of a long lie. Linda helped him up. I took a handkerchief from my purse and wiped the grass stains off his cheek, as I had done for my own children, and I told him that falling down in a cemetery was a fine place to start getting up. Reverend Lindquist put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Come inside, son. The coffee is still hot.”
The money consequences were fair. Brett repaid the church within eight months by working a second job at the grain elevator, and the elders voted not to press charges against him once the treasurer, who had retired to Arizona, was located and gave his own statement. The four million, seven hundred thousand dollars from the lawn company stayed under my name. I gave the church a new irrigation system for the grounds, and I paid the lawyer to draft a rule that no one person could count an offering alone, ever again.
In the name of Harold, who passed in 2022, I started the Harold Abernathy Fund. It pays for grass seed, tools and groundskeeping help for small rural church cemeteries, and for gambling counseling for families, in Dickinson, Geary and Saline counties. In the first year we restored thirty two cemeteries. One was a prairie graveyard near Chapman where the sod had burned out and the stones had tilted. When the green blend of Harold came up in the spring, a woman of ninety stood among the stones and said it looked as if her husband had finally been allowed to rest.
On the first Saturday in June, Brett came to the cemetery in work boots and gloves. He had asked me the week before if he might help with the mowing, and I had said the committee would consider it. The committee had considered it for two minutes. He pushed the mower along the rows of stones in the early sun while I walked behind with the hose, and Linda sat on the bench by the gate with her Bible in her lap. Neither of us said much. At the end of the row, he turned the mower around, and he looked at the grass, and he said it was the greenest he had ever seen.