I called the number at the bottom of the note at six in the morning, with a cup of cold coffee in my hand and the tobacco tin open on the kitchen table in front of me. A woman answered, brisk and polite, the voice of someone who had worked the early shift a long time. I asked for the name Harold had written. There was a pause. “Special Agent Tom Reilly is the supervisor of our cold case squad now,” she said. “May I ask what this is regarding?” I looked at the photograph of the two young men and the money bag. “A bank in Ottawa, Illinois,” I said. “October 1985.”
Reilly was at my kitchen table by eleven, a tall, rumpled man of sixty with half moon glasses and a worn leather satchel. He sat quietly and read the letter of Harold twice. He studied the photograph for a long time, turned it over, and held it to the window. “Mrs. Ebersole,” he said at last, “we have had a file open on the robbery of the First National Bank of Ottawa for forty years. A guard named Edwin Brannigan was struck on the head that night. He lived two more years, in a nursing home, unable to speak, and died in 1987. In this state, that makes it murder. It is a case that never closes.”
I held on to the edge of the table. “And the key?” he asked. “Where does your husband say he hid the rest?” I had thought about that through the night. Harold had said he hid it where nobody would think to look. In all our years of marriage, there was one place on the farm that I never set foot in unless I was bringing him a sandwich: the stool in the machine shed, beside the workbench, where he sat every winter evening for three decades with a radio and a cup of coffee, restoring the old tractors. “Come with me,” I said.
A man who hides the truth under a tractor seat for forty years has not hidden it from his wife; he has only saved it for her.
We found it under the concrete floor, a foot to the left of the leg of the stool, where a square of lighter cement had been poured and troweled smooth in some other decade. The technicians of Reilly took two hours to cut it out with a saw. Beneath it was a steel box, dull gray, with a padlock the size of a fist. The brass key of Harold turned in it as if he had oiled it that very morning. Inside was a canvas bag with a bank name on it, stiff with age, and a smaller envelope. The bag held forty one thousand dollars in old twenties and fifties. The envelope held a cassette tape.
We played the tape on the old radio in the machine shed, the one Harold used for the ball games. The voice was young, drunk, and unmistakable, the voice of Dale in 1996 at a kitchen table, bragging to his brother. “I tapped that old guard just once, Hal,” it said. “Just once. How was I to know he had a soft head?” Harold, low and miserable: “He is dying, Dale.” And Dale, laughing: “Everybody dies, little brother.” Agent Reilly shut it off. The three of us stood in the cold shed in the light of a single bulb, and nobody spoke for a long time.
Two days later, as promised, Dale drove up the lane in his truck with the buyer from Indiana, and behind him, with the lights on and the siren off, came the car of the county sheriff. I stood on the porch with a pot of coffee. The sheriff was a broad man of fifty, Tom Brannigan, whom I had known since he was a boy playing Little League against my own sons. Dale swaggered up the steps. “Joyce, here is the sheriff, as I told you. Those tractors are family property, and I am going to take them.” I said, “Come into the shed, all of you. There is something you should hear.”
They stood in a half circle around the old radio. I pressed the button. When the voice of Dale came out of that speaker, young and slurred and cruel, the color drained from his face as if somebody had pulled a plug. Wes Kimball, the buyer, turned and tried to leave, but there were two men in dark jackets in the doorway of the shed, and they did not step aside. Sheriff Brannigan did not move. He listened to the whole thing with his hat in his hands, to the part about the soft head, and the laugh, and the word everybody.
“Tom,” Dale said, in a high, cracked voice, “it was a long time ago. It was an accident.” The sheriff looked at him. I will not forget that look as long as I live. It was not the look of a man who is angry. It was the look of a man who has been carrying a very heavy stone for thirty eight years and has just been told he may put it down. “Dale Ebersole,” he said quietly, “you are under arrest for the murder of Edwin Brannigan. He was my father.” And he took out his own handcuffs and did it himself, with a steadiness I could not have managed.
The trials took place in Chicago. Dale was sentenced to life, and Wes Kimball, who had planned the robbery and fled to Indiana, to thirty five years. The forty one thousand dollars went to the insurer of the bank. The judge said that a man who had done wrong in his youth and spent forty years carrying the weight of it had, at last, in his death, done the right thing. At the sentencing, Sheriff Brannigan came to sit beside me. He did not say anything. He took my hand and held it, as a son would.
In August, the six tractors went to the county fair for the first time without Harold. My grandson Ben, who is sixteen, drove the red one of 1939 in the parade, with the ribbons of his grandfather pinned to the fender and his chin up like a general. I sat in the bleachers with a lemonade and a paper fan. When the old red tractor came around the bend, putt putting down the dirt track with the brass shining, the whole crowd rose. And I stood too, at seventy two, and said out loud, to the sky, “Look, Harold. The tractor of your granddad.”
