Earlene said only one other person had a key to her mothers house, the house where Exhibit C went missing from the cedar chest, and that person was her brother Wade. He had taken it, because Exhibit C was the one thing that would clear my name out loud, and he had spent forty years making sure it never would.
My mother-in-law left a letter meant to clear me after she was gone, and her own son stole it from her chest, because the truth in it was the opposite of the lie he had been telling the whole town about me for forty years.
Homer had already read the blue book to the historical society dinner. This is a transcript of a 1984 probate hearing, Calcasieu Parish, certified by the court reporter. The judge asked Wade under oath where the stores money went, and Wade answered that he had borrowed sixty thousand dollars against the store in his daddys name, without telling anybody, and lost it on riverboat cards. The next page said Clarence paid off what was left of the note with his savings so the family wouldnt lose the house. Wade, is that your signature on page forty, Homer asked. Wade did not say a word, and a man at table four said, hes been telling it backwards for forty years.
Then Homer read the last line, Exhibit C, a sealed letter returned to the widow at her request, and Earlene said that envelope was in her mothers chest and now it was gone.
I am Clarence, seventy-five. I have cut hair on Ryan Street in Lake Charles for fifty years, same red chair since 1981. Earlenes daddy had a hardware store three blocks from my shop, and when he died in 1984 the store closed six months later, and her brother Wade told everybody I gambled it away. For forty years he sat in my chair and said it loud so the waiting bench could hear, careful boys, dont play cards with the barber, hell take your store. Earlenes mama asked me in 1984 to keep quiet for the familys sake, and I promised her, and I kept that promise until she died this April at ninety-six.
Cleaning out her cedar chest, we found the blue book with a note tucked inside, for Clarence when Im gone. At the historical society dinner, where Wade was being honored as keeper of Lake Charles memories, he looked at me and said some men build things, some men lose them at a card table. I walked the blue book to the front and handed it to Homer.
The transcript alone cleared me, in Wades own sworn words. Exhibit C was the thing he could not stand to have read. When we found it, recovered from where Wade had taken it, it was my mother-in-laws own letter, the one she wrote and sealed, in which she set down plainly that Wade lost the store, that Clarence saved the family with his savings, and that she was ashamed she ever asked me to stay silent. She meant it to be read after she was gone, to clear my name at last. Wade took it from her chest with his key so that day would never come.
Stealing a letter to bury the truth is a small crime next to forty years of slander, but it is of a piece with it. Wade faced the historical society, which took his name off the hardware store photo, and he faced a room of people who had believed him his whole life.
Earlene whispered, you knew all this time. I did. Her mama asked me to carry it, and I carried it, because a promise to a dying woman is a promise. But her mama changed her mind at the end, and wrote it down, and all Wade managed to do by stealing her letter was make sure that when it finally surfaced, it landed twice as hard.
Some men lose things at a card table, Wade told the room. One man did, forty years ago, and it was him. I kept a promise and a secret for a lifetime, and my mother-in-law kept the truth in an envelope, and in the end her letter said what I never would, and gave me back my name.