Part 3 — The Last Crate
I pried the lid up with a crowbar, and the whole barn leaned in to see what was wrapped in the old bath towel.
Vernice reached for it and her husband Hank caught her wrist. She stopped.
The towel came away in layers. Inside, wrapped again in a flannel sheet, was my fathers fiddle, its varnish dark as tea, with the little chip in the scroll that I had known since I was four years old.
Beneath the fiddle lay Marcys last quilt, folded in squares, the cedar block still tucked into the corner. The one she was stitching by the window the week she went into the hospital.
I sat down on a hay bale because my knees would not hold me.
“Vernice,” I said, “you told me they burned.”
She was crying so hard she could hardly speak. She said she had pulled them from the garage with the rest, because she could not bear to burn them, and then she had been too ashamed to say.
Everything my sister did that month was a lie but this one crate, and it was the only one that kept anything true.
The fire marshal came on Friday with a deputy. My niece told them everything she knew, her voice shaking, and Hank brought out the receipts from the storage unit. The nine loads, the inventory, the dates. The insurance claim of one hundred eighty-six thousand and the claimed contents of thirty-eight thousand were withdrawn that same day.
Washington does not take such things lightly. Vernice was charged with insurance fraud, and the prosecutor weighed the fact that she had come forward with Hank and returned every item. She accepted a plea with restitution and a suspended sentence on the arson count, and she began meeting with a counselor.
The bank took the property. She and Hank moved into a rental in Selah.
I never took the four hundred dollars. I never took anything from her, in fact. I asked only that she and I sit down together once a month for supper and say true things.
The first one was awkward. She brought rolls from a store.
I hung Dads fiddle on the wall of my apartment. Marcys quilt I put on my bed, the cedar block still in its fold.
That night I held the fiddle in my hands for the first time in twenty years and drew the bow once across the strings. It was out of tune, and it was beautiful.