The old flip phone sat on the lawyer table on State Street with its tiny speaker crackling, and I heard my husband draw a long breath before he went on. I am Sharon Whitlock, seventy two years old, and I sat with my purse in my lap while Gary leaned forward in his chair with his knuckles white on the armrests. “There is one more thing on that tape,” said Ron, from beyond the telephone. “Something I never told the fire marshal. Sharon, honey, you need to hear this part. So does Gary. It is the reason I kept the tape at all.”
The tape, said Ron, had run for six minutes after the heater went over. For the first two, it showed what Gary expected, a drunk man staggering out of the office door as the flames climbed the paneling. Then it showed something else. Gary turned. He stood in the lot looking at the building, and then he ran back in. He came out a minute later dragging a boy by the collar, a seventeen year old sweeper named Dewey who had been asleep on a cot in the back room. Gary laid the boy on the gravel and threw up beside him.
“I watched that part a hundred times,” said Ron. “That boy is alive because of my brother. I never knew how to say it. Every time I looked at Gary, I saw the man who burned my yard, and the man who saved a child, and I could not make them into one person.” Across the table, Gary had begun to shake. The smirk was long gone. His eyes were red, and his lips moved without sound. The lawyer, Mr. Pruitt, laid a hand flat on the edge of the table, as if to steady the room.
A flip phone left in a lawyer safe gave one widow the afternoon to bring her brother in law back to the family in Bowling Green.
“Here is what I want,” said Ron, and the lawyer pressed the button to pause so that he could read from his own paper. I gave my terms from the will that my husband had written for me, and I gave them as my own. Gary would receive the small house on Smallhouse Road and a pension of twenty four hundred dollars a month for life. He would receive them on one condition only, that he stay sober and attend the Thursday meeting at the church. If he failed, the pension would stop. If he stayed, it would be his until the end.
Gary put his face in his hands and wept like a boy. “Sharon,” he said, “I told everybody Ron promised me half. He never did. I made it up, because I could not stand being the one he forgave.” I got up, with my bad knee complaining, and walked slowly around the table past the box of tissues and the pitcher of water that nobody had touched. I put my hand on his thin gray head, the way I had once touched the heads of our children when they were feverish. “He did not forgive you because you earned it,” I said. “He forgave you because he loved you. That is the only way anybody gets forgiven.” The lawyer blew his nose into a white handkerchief and looked out the window.
Then the old panic found Gary one more time. He lunged for the little flip phone, snatched it up, and ran for the door, plainly meaning to smash it, so that the world would never hear what he had done. He had crossed half the room when the lawyer stepped out from behind the desk and set his back against the doorframe. At that moment the door swung open from the other side, and in walked Sheriff Dewey Moss, in full uniform, who had come at the request of the lawyer, and who filled the doorway with his wide gray shoulders.
The sheriff took off his hat. “Gary,” he said gently, “I have heard that tape. Mr. Pruitt played it for me on Monday. I have been waiting twenty two years to say thank you.” Gary stopped short, with the phone clutched against his chest. The sheriff put out his hand. After a long minute, Gary laid the phone in it. The two men looked at each other. Then the sheriff, who is six feet three, stepped forward and wrapped the thin old drunk in his arms.
The money consequences were straightforward. The lumberyard and the land, two million, seven hundred thousand dollars in all, stayed with me, and I placed most of it in a trust for our grandchildren, with the lumberyard run by the foreman of Ron. Gary moved into the little house that fall. He has not touched a drop of bourbon in nineteen months, and every Thursday he sits in the second pew with a cup of coffee. He sends the sheriff a card on the anniversary of the fire.
In the name of my husband Ron, who passed in August, I started the Ron Whitlock Fund. It pays for treatment for men and women struggling with drink and for scholarships in the building trades, in Warren, Simpson and Allen counties. In the first year we placed forty two people in treatment and sent eleven young carpenters to school. One was a mill hand from Franklin who had been hiding bottles in his truck, and who told his family the truth at a kitchen table in the middle of the night.
On a Saturday in the spring, we all stood on the new gravel lot of the lumberyard, where the foreman was hanging a fresh sign. Gary held the ladder. The sheriff, off duty, passed him the hammer. A truck pulled in, and a young man in a hard hat climbed down and asked for two by fours. “Right this way,” said Gary, brushing off his hands. And I stood in the sun with a thermos of coffee, listening to the sound of nails going in, and I thought Ron would have liked the sound.
