Dub Fowler hauled himself up the dock ladder with water streaming off his old wetsuit, and he laid the steel case on the boards between my feet. It was the size of a small suitcase, gray with silt, wrapped in a rusted chain that Hoyt had padlocked around the piling forty years earlier. Dub scraped the lid with his thumb. Under the muck were stamped letters, crooked, the kind a church sexton would use. FIRST BAPTIST ANDERSON BUILDING FUND. And below it, smaller: D. VARNER, TREAS. I looked at Lance, and I looked at his black truck, and I said, “Varner. That would be your daddy.”
Lance had stopped smiling. He leaned against a post with his gold watch glinting in the sun and said nothing. Bobby sat in the car with his head on the steering wheel, a grown man of forty eight hiding like a boy. I asked Dub to cut the chain with his bolt cutters. The padlock was so corroded that it fell apart like wet bread. The case itself was sealed with a gasket Hoyt had made out of inner tube, and when Dub pried the lid, a smell came out like old money and lake mud. Inside, in neat bundles, lay stacks of bills.
Lying on top of the cash was a letter in a ziplock bag, in the careful capitals Hoyt used for everything important. I read it kneeling on the dock with Dub holding my shoulders. “MATTIE JO. IF YOU READ THIS, I AM GONE AND SOMEBODY WENT LOOKING. HERE IS THE TRUTH. IN THE SUMMER OF 1983, DALE VARNER, TREASURER OF OUR CHURCH, CAME TO ME AT NIGHT WITH THIS CASE. HE HAD TAKEN SIXTY ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS FROM THE BUILDING FUND TO COVER A BAD DEBT. HE WAS SICK WITH SHAME. HE BEGGED ME TO HIDE IT UNTIL HE COULD PUT IT BACK.”
Mattie Jo Pickens spent every summer weekend for forty years at a tin roofed cabin on Lake Hartwell.
The letter went on, and I made myself read every line. “I SHOULD HAVE TURNED HIM IN. BUT HE HAD A WIFE AND A BABY BOY, AND I DID NOT WANT THE BOY TO GROW UP WITH A THIEF FOR A FATHER. I SANK THE CASE UNDER THE THIRD PILING AND TOLD DALE TO COME FOR IT WHEN HE WAS READY TO CONFESS. HE NEVER CAME. HE LEFT FOR FLORIDA IN THE FALL OF 1984 AND NEVER SPOKE TO ME AGAIN. I HAVE KEPT THIS SECRET FOR FORTY YEARS. THE MONEY BELONGS TO THE CHURCH. PLEASE, MATTIE JO, RETURN IT.”
So there was the whole sad truth, lying wet on the dock. Hoyt had kept the sin of a friend and the money of a church in the mud for forty years, because he did not want to ruin a family. It had weighed on him every evening in that lawn chair. I thought of him sitting at the end of that dock with his Pabst, looking at the sunset, with a steel case under his feet. No wonder he never let anyone touch the pilings. I put the letter against my chest and cried, and Dub, who had never cried in front of me in fifty years, took off his cap.
Lance finally spoke. He said his father had confessed in his last illness the previous spring, and that all he had wanted was to see what was left of the money, and use it to build a marina, and nobody would be hurt. I looked at him and said, “Mr. Varner, the money is not yours, it is not mine, and it is not my son. It belongs to forty families who put quarters in a plate.” He started to argue. I held up the first page I had signed and tore it in half, then in half again, and let the pieces drift down onto the water.
Bobby climbed out of the car then. He walked down the dock slowly with his hands hanging at his sides, and he stopped in front of me. “Mama, I am so ashamed,” he said. “Lance told me there was gold. He said it was a treasure, and Daddy had been hiding it from us. I thought you would never need it.” I told him I was not angry about the money. I was hurt that he had decided I was too old to be told the truth. Then I did something I had not done in years. I put my arms around my son and held him until he stopped shaking.
We counted the money at the kitchen table, Dub and Bobby and me, with the church pastor sitting across from us. The bills were soaked and stuck together, but Pastor Mike, who turned out to be a very patient man, laid them out one by one on towels to dry. It came to sixty one thousand, two hundred dollars. The pastor sat back and said that the church had always believed the money was lost to a thief who had left town. Hoyt had saved it, for forty years, in the dark. The whole congregation stood when I carried it in on Sunday.
They used the money to build a pavilion at the church camp on Lake Hartwell, and they named it the Pickens Pavilion. I did not sell the cabin. The developer withdrew his offer, and the county, hearing the story, voted to protect the cove from any marina. Bobby spent the whole summer on the dock with a hammer and a box of nails, replacing the boards, and I sat in the lawn chair and gave him orders. On the Fourth of July, my granddaughter learned to dive off the dock, right over the third piling.
Every evening I sit at the end of the dock with a sweet tea and look at the Georgia hills going pink. Bobby sits beside me in a second chair that he brought from Charlotte. We do not talk much. When the light goes, he puts his hand over mine on the armrest. I think Hoyt would be proud of us both. I tell him every night that the cove is clear, the case is empty, the debt is paid, and the piling is just a piling again.