Uncle Royce did not leave the second pew. He sat down slowly, like a man lowered by ropes, and held the pew in front of him until the knuckles of his hand were as white as the pages of a hymnal. The preacher had stopped speaking at the pulpit. Three hundred people in a hot church watched a retired judge, who had sentenced half the county, stare at a dented tin cup. I wheeled Mrs. Odom back down the aisle. I did not know what I intended to say.
He spoke first. In a thin dry voice, loud enough for the front rows, he said, “Thomas, take that woman home. She is confused. She has always been confused.” Mrs. Odom looked at him with a patience that made my skin prickle. She said, “Royce, I have waited fifty eight years for you to say that in front of a church.” Then she put both hands on the arms of the chair and stood up by herself, trembling and upright, and the whole room heard her take a breath.
I called Sheriff Dunavant that night. I had known him since Little League, when he was a catcher with a bad arm. He drove out to my house in the dark, and I sat at my kitchen table with a glass of water I never drank and told him all of it. He took his hat off to listen. When I finished, he said, “Tom, there is no time limit on this. But I need that well. And I need a judge who is not your uncle.”
A debt paid in silence for fifty eight years is still a debt, and one old woman with a tin cup can collect it in a single walk down an aisle.
Judge Whitaker of Carroll County signed the warrant by morning. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation brought a small excavator and a team in white coveralls. They lifted the concrete cap on Tuesday, with Mrs. Odom in a lawn chair at the edge of the yard, a blanket over her knees, watching with her hands folded. Nobody asked her to leave. By three in the afternoon, the first man in the pit said a single word into his radio, and the whole yard went quiet.
They found Lewis beneath eleven feet of fill, wrapped in a canvas tarp, with a belt buckle from the Brewer sawmill still on his belt. Mrs. Odom wept without a sound, the way a person weeps who finished crying aloud a long time ago. She told the agent, in a voice as steady as a rail, “I knew it was him by the buckle. I gave it to him for his birthday.” I had to turn away and put my forehead against the cool side of my truck.
That evening I went through the big Bible that had sat on the table by the recliner of my father all my life. Between Second Samuel and the Psalms was an envelope, yellowed, and opened many times. Inside were pages and pages, each written on the first of January since 1969, in his careful deacon print. Each began with the same line. Lord, I have not told, and here is what I did not tell. Fifty eight letters. The last was dated this past January.
He had written down everything: the night, the hour, the truck, the name of the watchman who died at the mill in an accident that was no accident, and the words of Royce at the well. He wrote that he had never held the shovel but had stood and watched, and that watching was its own kind of sin. He wrote that he paid the water bill because it was the only penance a coward could afford. I read that line standing in his garage, and forgave him, and did not know I was crying until I had finished.
Uncle Royce was arrested at his house on Poplar Street on Thursday morning, in a bathrobe, with his hands shaking over a cup of coffee. He did not ask for a lawyer for the first hour. When he did, it was too late, because he had already said enough. He pleaded guilty in March to second degree murder and obstruction. The judge who sentenced him was a young woman who had never once been in his courtroom. She gave him the maximum, and the room was silent when she said it.
We buried Lewis Odom on a Saturday in April, in the cemetery behind Northside, in a good oak casket that the congregation paid for without being asked. The whole church stood. Three hundred people held white carnations. Mrs. Odom, in a navy dress that had been waiting fifty eight years, sat in the front row with the tin cup in her lap. When the preacher asked if anyone wished to speak, she said, “My boy was a good boy,” and that was all, and it was enough.
I still pay the water bill on the little white house. Mrs. Odom lives with us now, in the sewing room of my mother, but she likes to be driven out on Saturdays to look at the pump in the side yard. The county has capped it again, with new concrete, and a plain stone says Lewis. I set the tin cup on that stone each August. And each year, when I pour the first cold water from the pump into it, I say, “Dad sends his love.”