I could not stop reading the letter, though I had read it five times on the porch, and the woman from Florida, whose name was Patrice, sat quietly in the swing and let me. I am Betty Lou Sanders, eighty one years old, and the name on that yellowed page was Raymond Cole, the best man at my wedding in 1970, the man who had sent a postcard from Mobile every Christmas for fifty years, and who had signed every one of them, simply, Ray. I had never once wondered why. Now I wondered about nothing else.
We drove to Mobile the next morning, Patrice at the wheel of her little white car, and I sat in the passenger seat with the jacket folded across my knees. The shipyard stood on the water, a great gray city of cranes and steel hulls, with gulls wheeling over it and the smell of salt and hot metal drifting through the open window of the car. At the front desk, a young woman looked at the letter, then at my face, and her expression changed. Ten minutes later, an old man in a pressed white shirt came across the lobby with a cane, and his eyes were already filling when he reached me. “Betty Lou,” said Raymond Cole. “I have been waiting fifty five years.”
He told me in his office, with the door closed. On Hill 875, in November of 1968, Ray had been hit by a piece of metal and lay in the open, and the enemy had been coming. Jimmy, who was not even assigned to that company, crawled across forty yards under fire, picked Ray up on his back, and carried him down. Ray lived. Jimmy took a wound of his own that never left him. He asked Ray for one thing, only one. Never tell Betty Lou. Let me tell her myself. He never did.
A field jacket given to Goodwill gave one widow the morning to bring a man from the war back to her porch in Dothan.
I gave my terms across the polished desk, in the voice that I used for nearly sixty years of church suppers. “Ray, I want nothing for what Jimmy did. A man does not sell what he gave away. But he left me a letter, and in it he says you know what you owe. I think what you owe is the truth, to my family, told in your own words. And I want you to stop doing things behind a curtain. Jimmy would not have liked it. I will take what you have to say, and nothing else.”
Ray bowed his head. “Betty Lou,” he said, “I have been paying your property taxes on the house in Dothan for twenty two years. Through a lawyer, with no name attached. I told myself it was not enough, and then I told myself it was too much. I never had the courage to knock on your door.” He opened a drawer and drew out a folder. It was a trust, he said, one million, two hundred thousand dollars, set up in the name of Jimmy, for his family. “I have a daughter who has never met you,” he added. “I would like her to.”
The door opened behind us with a bang. It was Todd, my son in law, red faced and breathing hard, who had followed us from Dothan in his car after Sherry told him where I had gone. He took in the room in one look, and then his hand shot out. He snatched the letter off the desk, where it lay beside the trust, and bolted for the corridor, plainly meaning to destroy the proof before anyone could use it. The IRS, I suppose, had given him a taste for burning things.
Todd got ten steps. Two security officers of the shipyard, big men in gray uniforms who had been standing outside the door since Ray called them, stepped into the corridor from either side, and Todd collided with them in the middle. One of them took the letter from his fingers, gently, and handed it back to Ray. The other took Todd by the elbow and held it, politely, as one holds the elbow of a drunk at a wedding. Todd looked at Ray, at me, and at the great windows full of cranes, and he started to cry.
The money consequences were arranged by the lawyer of Ray and mine. The trust, one million, two hundred thousand dollars, went to Sherry and my grandchildren, with me as trustee, and it cannot be touched by any husband with a tax debt. Todd agreed to pay his own debts and enter a program for people who hide things from their families. The property taxes of the house in Dothan were paid forever. And the jacket, which I took home, hangs once more in the back of the hall closet.
In the name of my husband Jimmy, who passed in March, I started the Jimmy Sanders Fund. It pays for veterans home repairs, counseling for families of veterans and scholarships for the children of those who served, in Houston, Geneva and Henry counties. In the first year we repaired the roofs of twenty seven veterans and sent nine students to college. One was a Vietnam veteran in Slocomb who had slept in a chair for forty years because he could not bear a bed, and who now has a new mattress.
In November, at the Peanut Festival, Ray and his daughter Mary came to Dothan and stood on my porch with their hats in their hands. The boiled peanut stand was open on the Circle, and the parade went by down the street with a band playing. I made coffee and set out a pound cake. We sat for hours, the three of us, with the jacket of Jimmy on the back of the swing, and Ray told every story he had ever kept. I laughed in places and cried in others, and the afternoon was full. When the sun went down, I realized that for the first time since March, the house did not feel empty.
