“Mr. Hollis, I would be obliged if you would say that again, slowly,” I said. The old man, ninety four years of age and in a wheelchair since his stroke, had rolled himself across the pasture in the evening light, with a quilt on his knees and a gray felt hat on his head that I had made for him myself in 1979. His eyes were as clear as creek water. “I said I told Colt to take that hat block,” he answered. “I have known about the bank note since 2011, and I have known what my son did. I wanted you to come out here before I go to my reward.”
Hollis Pruitt took a long breath, and the words came out one at a time. “Lyle, for twelve years I watched my boy make you carry a debt that was his,” he said. “I am ashamed of it. When you sold your company, I knew Wade would never confess. The only way to make him stand before you was to take something he could not hide.” He turned his head toward the barn. “That block is the only thing in Erath County you would drive through a storm to get. So I told Colt to take it to his shop and keep it dry until you came for it.” Colt lowered his eyes. “Granddad said you would come,” he mumbled.
Wade stood by the fence with his Sunday school Bible still under his arm, and he looked like a man who had been shot and had not yet fallen. “Daddy, I could not tell you,” he said. “The note was for the feed store, and then the feed store went under, and every month I told myself I would catch up.” His voice cracked. “I let a good man pay for my pride.” I looked at the Bible, and then at the face of the man I had once called brother. “Wade, I cosigned that note because you asked me with tears in your eyes,” I said. “I never needed you to be perfect. I needed you to be honest.”
A basswood hat block wrapped in a horse blanket gave one uncle the weekend to bring his nephew back to the hat shop in Stephenville.
The terms came easily, because Hollis had already thought them through. He would sell forty acres of the pasture the following week to a neighbor who had wanted it for years, and the whole of the two hundred thousand dollar note would be paid off from that sale. Wade would stand before his Sunday school class and tell them everything, in his own words. Colt would return the basswood hat block, the steam kettle and the patterns that same night. And Pruitt Hat Company would be closed, and its sign taken down from the shop on the highway.
Colt loaded the hat block into the back of my truck himself, wrapped in an old horse blanket as though it were a sleeping child. I took it in both hands and turned it to the light. My thumb found the burned mark on the underside, L.D. 1975, the year I made my first hat in the shed behind the house of my father. It was warm from the sun. For a moment I could not speak, and Rhonda put her hand on my back. Colt stood there with his hat in his hands. “Mr. Lyle, I am so sorry,” he said. “I only wanted to learn how to make something real.”
I did something that surprised even me. I put my hand on the shoulder of that young man and said, “Come to my shop on Tuesday morning at seven.” He stared at me. “You are not going to press charges, sir?” he asked. “You took a block of wood that I would have given you if you had asked,” I said. “The papers I sign are my own business.” That Tuesday, I handed him a steaming kettle, a basswood block and a piece of raw felt, and I showed him how to pull a brim over the steam without a single wrinkle. He worked in silence for six hours.
That night Rhonda and I sat on the porch swing with a pot of decaf, watching the fireflies rise out of the grass. She was quiet for a long time. Then she said, “Lyle, I would have wanted to throw that boy off the place.” I told her I had wanted the same thing, for about an hour. “And then?” she asked. I looked at the hat block in my lap, with the mark of the thumb of my own father worn into the wood at the crown. “Then I remembered somebody once gave me a second chance,” I said. She squeezed my hand, and the swing creaked in the dark.
The money consequences were settled before the end of the month. The forty acres sold for two hundred twenty thousand dollars, and the note was paid off at the bank with Hollis sitting in his wheelchair beside the loan officer, signing in a shaky hand. Wade took a second job at a hardware store in Stephenville to repay his father. On the fifth of each month, a check for three hundred dollars arrived at my door, and in the corner of the memo line, he wrote, Still owe you. Every time I read it, I felt something loosen in my chest that had been tight for twelve years.
In the name of my father, Amos Dunagan, who passed thirty years ago and who shaped hats by hand in a shed behind our house, I started the Amos Dunagan Block Fund. It pays for apprenticeships, tools and raw felt for young people in Erath County who want to learn leather work, saddle making and hat making and have no family to teach them. In the first year, we placed nine apprentices in shops across Texas. A girl of twenty, with callused fingers and a shy smile, finished her first brim and said, “Mr. Dunagan, it feels like holding a piece of my future.”
On a Sunday morning in spring, Wade stood in front of his Sunday school class and told every one of them the whole truth. Nobody left. At the back of the room sat Hollis, in his wheelchair, wearing a new gray hat that I had finished for him the night before. When class ended, the old man rolled over to me, took off the hat, and turned it in his hands. “Lyle, this is the best hat I ever wore,” he said. “I mean to wear it to church every week.” I told him it suited him, and he winked at me, and we both laughed.
