I unfolded the last page on the picnic table, between the platters of fried catfish and the hush puppies, and I smoothed it flat with the heel of my hand. It was a letter in the blocky handwriting of my brother Earl, who served thirty two years with the Missouri Highway Patrol. It was dated the week before he passed. Across the top, he had written one sentence. “If anything happens to me, this is for Hazel.” Below it, in neat columns, were dates, dollar amounts and a name that I read aloud for everyone to hear. Deputy Wade Boone. Eight hundred dollars a month, for three years.
The picnic grounds went silent. Deputy Boone, who had been leaning on his cruiser at the edge of the gravel with a plate of fish, set the plate down on the hood. He was a heavy man in his forties, with a gold badge and a sunburned neck. “Hazel, you never told me your brother left a letter,” he said, and his voice was strange and thin. “I did not know he kept records.” I looked at him over my reading glasses. “Wade, Earl kept records on everybody,” I said. “He kept them on his own mother. It was how he slept at night.”
My sister Wanda lowered herself onto the bench and began to cry, very quietly. Her son Ricky, my nephew, stood by the pickup truck with a can of beer in his fist, thin, jittery and gray in the face. Calvin, who had managed my flagship store for twenty years, took one step closer to me, a quiet man in a flannel shirt, and stayed there. The letter went on. Earl had written down the dates of the deliveries to his own cabin on the creek. The chemicals, the barrels and the lights burning at night. And beside each date, the name of the man who had looked the other way.
A plate of catfish left cooling on a picnic table gave one sister the weekend to bring her nephew back to the river in Hannibal.
I gave my terms standing up, with the letter in my fist. The hardware chain had sold for six point one million, and the proceeds were safe in a trust that no deputy could reach. Boone would call the state patrol on his radio, right now, in front of every person at that table. Ricky would go with the troopers and then to treatment. The cabin of Earl would be cleaned by the state, and I would pay for the creek. Wanda would stay with me until the case was finished. And the catfish would be eaten while it was hot, because nobody in my family wastes fried fish.
Boone stood very still. His hand went to the radio on his shoulder, and for a long second I did not know what he would do. Then he pressed the button. “Dispatch, this is Boone,” he said, and his voice cracked once and steadied. “I need the state patrol at the Pickett cabin on Salt River Road, and I need an evidence team. I am the officer who has a conflict of interest, and I am requesting that I be relieved.” He lowered the radio and looked at me. “Hazel, I was a good deputy once,” he said. “Then the money started. I could not find the way back.”
Ricky was not as wise. He threw down the can, dove into the cab of his pickup, and the engine caught with a roar. He pulled out of the grass in a spray of gravel, aimed for the gate, and found it blocked. Calvin had walked calmly to his own truck, parked it nose to nose across the entrance, and was now sitting on the tailgate with his arms folded. The pickup of Ricky slid to a stop four feet from the bumper, and the engine died. For a moment, nothing moved. Then the door opened, and my nephew stumbled out with his hands up, shaking all over.
Wanda wept on my shoulder while the troopers came up the road with their lights flashing. Two of them held Ricky by the arms, and he did not fight. “Aunt Hazel, I am sorry,” he said, over and over. “I am so sorry. I never meant for it to get this big.” I walked beside him to the cruiser. At seventy six years old, I am not tall, but I put my hand on his cheek the way I did when he was small. “Ricky, you cooked poison in the cabin of your uncle,” I said. “You dumped it in the creek where you learned to swim. You are going to fix it.”
The cleanup took the whole summer. The state environmental team pumped out the barrels, sealed the cabin and tested the water along a mile of the creek. I paid for the rest. Volunteers from the church and from the hardware stores hauled out old tires, rusted drums and broken glass, and Calvin organized the crews on Saturdays. Boone pleaded guilty and gave testimony against the supplier, and the judge noted his cooperation. Ricky entered treatment in Columbia, completed a year, and came home to a job stocking shelves in the store, under the eye of Calvin.
In the name of my brother, Earl, who passed in 2023 and who patrolled the highways of Marion County for thirty two years, I started the Earl Creek Watch Fund. It pays for treatment, cleanup and legal help for rural families in Marion and Ralls counties whose land has been used by relatives or by officials for crime. In the first year, we helped twenty families. A man of seventy eight, in overalls, with a cap pulled low, sat in the office and said, “I have known for a year what was happening down in my woods, and I had no one to tell.”
On the last Saturday of September, I stood on the bank of the creek with a paper plate in my hand. The water ran clear over the stones, and the cattails had come back. Behind me, on the old picnic grounds, the whole town had gathered for a second catfish fry. Ricky stood over a black cast iron pot, in an apron, turning the fish with a long fork. He had gained twenty pounds, and he looked me in the eye. “Aunt Hazel, I saved you the first piece,” he said. He set it on my plate, golden and crackling. It was the best I have eaten.
