The name on the gas station receipt was Wendell Haynes. It was written in the loopy, practiced hand I had watched sign a thousand church bulletins, and the date was the night of the parsonage fire, 1:52 in the morning, at a station on Highway 43 twelve miles from town. He had bought two gallons of gasoline in a red can. I sat on the hood of the car of Loretta in the church parking lot with that thin yellow paper in my fingers, and my fathers tape recorder sat in the shoebox like a small black heart.
Loretta put her hand on my shoulder. “Your daddy kept it for thirty two years,” she said. “He said that he could not bring himself to burn it, and he could not bring himself to use it. He was afraid of what the town would do to you and your mama.” I looked up and saw a figure crossing the lot toward us under the yellow lights. It was Brother Haynes. He had not gone home. He had been sitting in his old Buick at the edge of the lot for the past hour, and now he walked slowly, with his head bowed, an old man in a black suit.
He stopped in front of me and did not speak. His hands were trembling so hard that his Bible rattled against his chest. Then he looked at the receipt in my hand, and all of the strength seemed to go out of him at once. “Earl Barlow saw me that night,” he said in a thin, cracked voice. “I knew he did. For thirty one years I have watched a rose appear on that bench every Tuesday, and I have known exactly what it meant. It has been the only sermon I could not preach over.”
Truth can wait thirty years in a shoebox, and one steady habit of remembering is enough to bring it home.
He sat on the bumper of the Buick, because his knees would no longer hold him. He told us the whole thing in a low voice, without once raising his eyes. In 1993 he had been taking money from the building fund for two years, to pay for the care of a brother in a private hospital. His wife Evelyn found the books. She told him she would go to the deacons in the morning. He had gone to the parsonage that night, meaning only to burn the ledgers. He had not known she was upstairs asleep. He had run when the smoke began, and never gone back.
“A nineteen year old boy named Calvin Pruitt had been seen near the parsonage that afternoon,” Haynes said. “He had come to ask for work. The sheriff wanted somebody, and I let them have him. I stood in a courtroom and I prayed over that boy. God forgive me. I have preached every Sunday for thirty one years about mercy, and I have been the least merciful man in Alabama.” He turned toward the building where my father had lain that morning in his casket. “Your father tried to tell them. They told him to be quiet, and I let that happen too.”
I did not forgive him. I want to be honest about that. I stood in that parking lot on the night of the funeral of my father and I felt only a great cold anger, and under the anger a grief so deep I could not see the bottom of it. But Loretta, who had driven a bus for forty years and had seen everything, took the old man by the elbow and said in a level voice, “Brother Haynes, there is a sheriffs car at the corner. You can walk to it, or you can be carried. Which would your wife have wanted?”
He walked. He asked me to hold the cassette. On the way, he said that he would give the sheriff a full statement, and that he wanted it recorded, and that he wished to see Calvin Pruitt face to face, if the man would allow it. He did not ask for mercy. At the station he spoke for three hours with his hands flat on the table, and by sunrise a judge in Lauderdale County had signed an order releasing the old file. The district attorney came out in her robe at the door of the courthouse and wept, which I had never seen a prosecutor do.
Calvin Pruitt was exonerated in February, in the same courtroom that had sentenced him. He sat in a gray suit that his niece had bought him, sixty six years old, with a quiet dignity I will never forget. When the judge said the word innocent, he did not move. He only closed his eyes. Afterward, on the courthouse steps, I found him alone, and I held out my father cassette tape. He took it in both hands as though it were a bird. “I rode the bus every Tuesday,” he said. “I saw the rose. I never knew who.”
The state awarded him compensation, and he spent the first of it on a small brick house on Pine Street with a porch. I visited him the first week. He had put a bench on that porch, and he asked me to sit with him. We did not speak for five minutes, with our hands folded, exactly the way my father had done in the bus station waiting room. When the time was up he looked at me and nodded. I understood. Some silences are not empty. They are a kind of prayer.
Brother Haynes pleaded guilty to arson and the death of his wife, and the judge, citing his age, sentenced him to life. He died in the prison infirmary two years later. He left a letter to the church that said only: Believe the roses. The deacons read it aloud on a Sunday morning, and nobody knew where to look. I did not go that day. I went to the bus station instead, where a new rose lay on the third bench from the door, left by Loretta, as she has done every Tuesday since the funeral.
I carry on the rose now. Every Tuesday after school I buy one for two dollars and forty nine cents at the grocery store on Court Street, and I drive it down to the station, and I lay it on the bench, and I sit beside it for exactly five minutes with my hands folded. Calvin sits with me when he can. Sometimes a stranger sits down on the other side and asks what it means. I tell them my father taught me that remembering is a way of keeping faith.