Part 3 — The Safe Deposit Box
Grandmas voice said, It is in the vault at the Farmers Savings Bank, box 44, under my mothers name. The tape clicked off, and the auctioneer set down his gavel without saying a word. The deputy stepped forward, took the tape player, and asked Merrill politely to stay seated.
The sheriff and I were at the bank when it opened Monday morning. The manager recognized Grandmas signature card, and the key from the Bible fit. Box 44 held a gray metal cash box wrapped in oilcloth, a bundle of envelopes, and a letter addressed to me.
The cash box held sixty-one thousand dollars in old twenties, still bound in paper bands from the Ottumwa grain co-operative. In August 1996 someone had broken into the co-op safe on a Sunday night. For twenty-eight years it was one of the unsolved mysteries of Wapello County.
The envelopes held Grandmas diary of that summer, in her small farm-wife handwriting. Merrill and a young hired hand named Rodney Burris had done the job together. Merrill buried the cash beneath the north beam, then threatened Rodney, who was nineteen, and told him to leave Iowa or go to prison alone.
Grandma wrote it all down. She wrote that Rodney came to her kitchen door at four in the morning, shaking, and she gave him a sandwich and forty dollars and told him to go to his aunt in Texas. She told Merrill nothing. Then she put the loot in her own hands, and she waited for the day she could undo the harm.
The Burris boy never came home. The paper printed his picture every August for years, and his mother never stopped hoping. Grandma could not tell her. She was afraid for Rodney, and for Merrill, and she held that secret until her last garden morning. She wrote that she kept the hand on the north beam each morning as a prayer that Rodney would come home.
The sheriff drove to Texas himself. Rodney Burris was fifty-one years old, a roofer in Lubbock with a wife and two daughters, and he had been waiting for this knock for twenty-eight years. He told the sheriff he would come back in the morning.
He walked into his mothers kitchen on Thursday. She was eighty-four. I was not there, but the neighbor who was told me she just stood up from the table, put her hands on his face, and said, You are late for supper.
Rodney gave a full statement and returned the little he had left of his share. Because he was nineteen, a coerced participant, and had come back by his own choice, the prosecutor treated him leniently. Merrill was charged with theft, extortion of a minor, and destruction of the Vera Hollins farmland structures.
The co-operatives insurance company took back the sixty-one thousand dollars, and the court ordered Merrill to pay for the barn he tore down. Grandmas will, found in the same box, left the farm to me, with a room for any grandchild who needed one.
That autumn the neighbors came with trucks and lumber, and Rodney came too, with his daughters. In eleven days the new barn stood on the old footprint. The north beam was oak, cut from a tree that had fallen on Grandmas pasture years ago.
The first morning it was done, I walked out before sunup and put my hand on it. Rodneys mother stood beside me, and she put hers beside mine. Still standing, Grandma, I said.