I unbuckled the straps of the old saddlebag of my father and laid it flat on the table beside the brisket. The leather was cracked and dark with sixty years of sweat and weather, and it smelled of horses and rain. Kelly leaned in, and Randy, across from her, looked everywhere but at me. On the laptop propped against the pitcher of tea, my youngest son Scott sat very straight in his Army fatigues. “Daddy,” Kelly said again, softly, “why did you bring the saddlebag of Granddaddy?” I took out a pocket watch first. It was a plain brass railroad watch with a cracked crystal, and I set it down in the middle of the table, where it ticked in the silence like a small heart.
“This belonged to your granddaddy,” I said. “He wore it every day of his life, to the fields and to town, and he told me when I was nine years old that a man who wears a watch is promising to be on time for the people who depend on him.” I looked at Randy. “I have been late for a good many things in my life. I was late to understand what kind of son I had raised.” I reached into the bag again and took out two long white envelopes. I slid one across to Kelly and held the other up to the camera for Scott. “These are cashier checks. Twenty six thousand dollars each. It is every cent that you sent your brother. I wired the second one to your bank this morning.”
Kelly opened her envelope with a trembling hand. She looked at the figure and then at me. “Daddy, how?” I took out the last item, a folded closing statement from a royalty fund in Dallas. I smoothed it flat. “Nine million, one hundred thousand dollars,” I said, “for the mineral rights your granddaddy left me in 1983. I signed on the second of October. I did not tell any of you, because I was a stubborn old man who thought money would change how you looked at me.” Scott made a sound from the laptop that was half a laugh and half a sob. Randy had stopped chewing. His face was working strangely, as if he were listening to a language he almost understood.
An old saddlebag unbuckled at a brisket lunch held a brass pocket watch and two checks that returned what a son had taken.
“Dad,” Randy said at last, in a voice that cracked in the middle. “You had nine million dollars. And I told them the roof was falling in.” He gave a short, awful laugh. “I am the biggest fool in Lubbock.” “You are not a fool, son,” I said. “You are a man who got into a hole and kept digging.” I pushed the plate of brisket aside. “How much do you owe? Not to your sister and brother. To the people you owe it to.” For a long moment, the only sound was the tick of the watch. Then Randy said a figure, so low that I could hardly hear, and it was one hundred and thirty eight thousand dollars.
Kelly gasped. Scott swore softly, and apologized. I did not blink. I had lain awake the last three nights thinking about that number. I had thought of paying it, in one stroke, and sending my son home with a clean slate. I had thought of sending him to the sheriff. And I had decided that neither would help him.
“Here is what I will do,” I said. “I will pay what you owe the sports betting company directly, once you are in a program. I have found one in Amarillo, ninety days, a place that treats men like you. You will go on Monday. You will sell your truck to pay for the first month, and you will earn the rest.”
Randy stared at me. “Why?” “Because I buried your mother,” I said, “and I could not bear to bury you too.” His face crumpled. He put both hands over it and wept, great shuddering sobs that shook the table, and the watch jumped on the wood. Kelly got up and went around the table to him, and she put her arms around his shoulders from behind. Scott on the laptop wiped his eyes with his sleeve. “Randy,” he said, hoarsely, through the speaker. “I am coming home on leave in two weeks. I will drive you to Amarillo myself.” Randy nodded without lifting his head.
The program was hard, and he nearly left on the nineteenth day. Scott drove all night from Fort Stewart to bring him back. By the end of the ninety days, my oldest boy had lost twenty pounds and gained something else. In the spring he moved into a small apartment near the cotton gin and took a job driving a delivery truck for a feed store. He pays me back a hundred and fifty dollars every month, and I let him, because I know it is not the money. It is a way for a man to keep his own name.
I sent Kelly and Scott on a vacation in June, the whole family, to a cabin in Ruidoso, and I gave Scott the down payment for a house outside the base. He has a wife and a baby on the way, and the first thing he did was send me a photograph of the porch, with a rocking chair. I stood in my kitchen with the phone in my hand and the cotton fields rolling away behind me. Bonnie would have been so proud, I thought. And I said it out loud, to the empty room, and I felt that she had heard.
In August, Randy and Kelly and I drove to Slaton, to the old bunkhouse, where my brother Gary had kept his hired hands in the thirties. Together with Gary and a pair of nephews, we spent three days replacing the roof. It was brutally hot. Randy worked the whole time without complaint, shirtless, with a bandana, hauling shingles up a ladder. On the last evening we sat on the porch with bottles of cold root beer. I took the brass watch out of my pocket and held it up. “It is five in the afternoon,” I said. “I believe we are on time.”
