The bank officer slid a printout across the desk and said, very gently, “Mrs. Garner, you may want to sit down.” I was already sitting. The account that had been receiving the disability checks of my brother for fourteen months was held at a credit union in Decatur, and it belonged to a company called Garner Home Services LLC. It had been opened by my husband. The signature card was dated the week after Jerry sold the chickens, and the address on it was the post office box of a man I had never met.
I drove straight to the farm of my brother with the printout on the passenger seat. Toby was sitting on the porch step in his green cap, watching the empty yard. He looked up and smiled the way he always does, with his whole face, and said, “Lisa, I am saving the money for new chickens.” I knelt in front of him and could not speak. Fourteen months of checks. Every dollar he was owed for the work he did in his own way. I put my arms around his shoulders and held on.
The county adult protective services worker was a calm man named Mr. Okafor. He took copies of everything, then asked Toby, in a patient voice, to tell him about the day the birds went away. Toby told it all. The white truck. The man with the clipboard who said the farm was too much work. Jerry holding the gate. Toby remembered the number on the side of the truck, because he loves numbers, and he said it out loud twice without a mistake. Mr. Okafor wrote it down and put a circle around it.
The people who steal from the gentle count on them to forget, but gentle people remember every number and every face.
The number belonged to a poultry buyer in Taylorville who kept careful records. He had paid Jerry four thousand two hundred dollars cash for sixty two birds, and the mower had gone to a pawn shop in Springfield for three hundred. But that was only the first page. Detective Marsh found that Jerry had done the same thing to two other families with a relative in a group home, a widow in Chatham and a man in Pawnee. He had named himself the helper of the family. He had kept the checks. He had sold what he could carry.
They arrested my husband at his work, on the loading dock, in front of his crew. I was told later that he did not say a word. At the station he asked for a lawyer, and then he asked whether I would still bring him his blood pressure pills. I said I would send them through the jail. The detective looked at me kindly. He said most spouses in my position are angry, and I said, truthfully, that I was too tired to be angry yet. The anger came later, in the shower, on a Wednesday.
There was a hearing in October. Jerry pleaded to financial exploitation of a person with a disability and received five years, with an order to repay everything. The judge looked at Toby, who sat in the second row in his best flannel shirt, and said that the law of Illinois has a long memory for those who steal from the defenseless. The two other families were in the room too. We stood together on the courthouse steps in the wind. Nobody said much. We just stood close, the way people do after a storm.
I moved to the farm in November, with two suitcases and a cat. It is a small place, a white house and a long yard and a barn with a leak in the roof. Toby showed me his old chart on the refrigerator, with the feeding times in red marker. He said he wanted to start again. I said we would, slowly. A neighbor named Mr. Bell, who had bought forty of the birds from the buyer in good faith, heard what happened and drove them back to us in his truck the next morning, free of charge.
They came out of the cages blinking and fluffed, forty brown and white birds in the cold sunshine. Toby sat down in the dirt among them. One climbed in his lap. He laughed so loudly that the cat ran up a fence post. Mr. Bell stood at the gate with his hands in his pockets and said that a thing like this should never have to be paid for twice. I thanked him till he looked at his boots. He said, “Well, you would do the same.” I said I hoped so.
In March, the county victim fund paid back the first of the money. I did not buy a single thing for myself. I took Toby to the hardware store in Pana, and we walked up and down the aisle of lawn equipment together while he ran his hands over the handles. He chose a red Craftsman, the same model as before, with the same silver cap on the gas tank. He asked the clerk if it was the very best they had. The clerk, a teenager, looked at me and then at my brother and said, “Sir, it is.”
On the first warm Saturday, Toby mowed the whole front yard in perfect stripes, one after another, humming. I stood on the porch with a glass of lemonade and watched him go up and down, with the birds scratching at the edges of the lawn and the sun going low behind the barn. When he finished, he cut the engine and looked over at me with his cap pushed back and the biggest grin I have ever seen. “Lisa,” he said, “I am home.” I said, “Yes, you are, Toby.”
