On the third ring, an old man picked up, and I could hear a television somewhere behind him and the rattle of a walker. I said my name. I said I was the daughter of Velma Wohlgemuth. The line went so quiet that I thought he had hung up. Then he said, in a voice like torn paper, “Patsy. Thank God. I have been afraid I would die before you called.” He told me his name was Dean Utz. He was eighty eight years old. He lived in a hospice house in Great Bend, and he had perhaps two weeks.
I drove out that night with Lyman Siebert in the passenger seat, clutching his cassette player on his knees like a hymnal. It was seventy miles of dark highway, and for the first thirty of them neither of us spoke. At the hospice, a nurse in lavender scrubs led us down a quiet hall to a small room with a lamp and a bed. Dean Utz lay propped on three pillows, a skeleton of a man with enormous hands. On the table beside him, in a wooden box, shone a gold pocket watch with a chain.
He did not wait for me to sit down. He said he had killed my grandfather. He said it flat out, looking at the ceiling, the way a man says a thing he has said to himself ten thousand times. In 1980 he owed money to a bad man in Salina, and he knew that Emil Koehn kept cash from the feed store in the safe on Saturday nights. He went to rob it. Emil came back from the loading dock, and there was a struggle, and Dean hit him once, hard, with a pry bar, and the old man fell and did not get up.
I could not speak. Lyman put a steady hand on my shoulder. “Mr. Utz,” he said, “why are you telling her now?” Dean closed his eyes. “Because I have a few days,” he said, “and because of Velma.” He explained that on that terrible night, my father had been there, too. Arnold Wohlgemuth, who was thirty one and the son in law of Emil, had driven by the feed store and seen a strange truck. He came in through the loading dock and found Dean standing over the body. He fought him. He took a blow to the head and lay unconscious while Dean fled, with the watch from the pocket of Emil.
Sometimes the person we suspected for years of the worst was the one who stood in the doorway and tried to stop it.
I put a hand on the bed rail. All my life I had heard the whispers. That my father had a gambling problem. That he had been seen near the store. That he hushed up when anyone mentioned the robbery. That my mother, Velma, had stared at him across the supper table in a way that was not quite trust. Now I understood the other half of it. “He was hurt,” I said slowly. “That is why he limped for a year. He told us it was a fall from a ladder.” Dean nodded. “He told the police he saw nothing,” he said. “He was afraid of me.”
My father had been afraid, Dean said, because Dean had threatened Velma and the baby, and Patsy was only fourteen months. Arnold kept silent for twenty two years until he died, and never forgave himself. My mother knew, or half knew. Every Friday for forty six years, she called the radio station, because she believed the man who took the watch listened. She wanted him to know that someone remembered, and that someone was watching. “She called to tell me I had been seen,” Dean whispered. “For forty six years. I heard every call.”
“Why did you take so long?” I asked. His eyes opened. “I was a coward,” he said. “Then I was ashamed. Then I was old.” He held out the box with the watch with both hands, trembling. “Last month, the doctor told me I had until Christmas. Then he told me less. I drove in to Hays to the station and asked a boy at the desk for the phone. I wanted to say sorry on the air, to your mother. But your mother was already gone.” His voice broke. “She never got to hear me say it.”
The watch was heavy and cold in my palm. On the back was engraved E.L.K., worn almost smooth. I turned it over and held it to my ear, and I swear I heard it ticking. Dean said he had wound it every day for forty five years. It was the only way he could bear to keep it. I looked at the dying man and at Lyman and thought of my mother with her lips pursed at the phone on Friday mornings, saying fair price, in her soft voice, week after week, to nobody and to him.
I did not forgive him that night. But I stayed. I sat beside the bed for two hours while Dean gave a full statement to a deputy, with Lyman Siebert recording it on a cassette, because he does not trust a thing that has no tape. At the end Dean asked if he might hold my hand. I said yes. He said, “Tell Velma I am sorry.” I said I would. And I said, to my own astonishment, “I think she already knows.”
He died eleven days later, a Thursday, with a pastor and a nurse in the room. The sheriff of Ellis County closed the file on the killing of Emil Koehn with a letter to my family. It named my father as a witness who had tried to intervene. I read it to my children at the supper table. My son, who is thirty one, the age of Arnold that night, got up and left the room and came back with red eyes. He said, “Grandpa was a hero.” I said that he was, and that nobody had been told.
The following Friday at a quarter past seven, I sat at my kitchen table and dialed the station. Lyman, who cannot stay away, put me on the air. “Morning, Lyman,” I said. “It is Patsy on Ash Street.” He asked what I was hunting. I said, “Mom, I found the watch. You can stop calling now.” There was a pause on the line. Then, very softly, I heard the whole listening county breathe out. Lyman said, “You heard her, folks.” And for once, nobody had to call back.