The tall old man with the cane was waiting on the front steps of the First Baptist Church in Murfreesboro when I came out after the Sunday service, and I knew him before he took off his hat. I am Margaret Ann Hollis, seventy five years old, the organist of that church for thirty one years, and my knees nearly gave way. His hair was white now and his shoulders were stooped, but the long jaw and the pale gray eyes were exactly as I remembered them from the summer of 1970 in Mobile, Alabama. “Margaret Ann,” said Warren Pruitt, “I have been looking for you for fifty six years.”
We sat on a bench under the magnolia in the churchyard, and for a long minute neither of us spoke. At nineteen, I had been the nanny of his baby son Thomas, in a big white house on Government Street. One August night, a fire started in the nursery, and I carried the baby out through the smoke with my own hair singed. In the morning, the brother of Warren, a man named Clayton Pruitt, told the police I had left a candle burning. I was frightened, and young, and poor, and I took a bus north before anyone could arrest me.
Warren folded his hands on the head of his cane. He told me, slowly, that he had learned the truth only last year, when an old file from the insurance adjuster turned up in an attic. The fire had been started with a rag soaked in gasoline, not a candle. For fifty six years, his brother Clayton had let him believe I was careless, and had let me carry the shame. Warren had spent a year hiring investigators to find me. The one who owes everything, he said, was himself. The check was only a beginning, and he asked me to listen.
A cashier check from Alabama gave one church organist the length of a Sunday service to bring a hidden family secret back to the truth in Murfreesboro.
I gave my terms right there in the churchyard, with the choir still drifting out of the side door in their robes. “Warren, I forgive you, and I thank you for Emily. But I do not want money without the truth. Next Sunday, you will bring your brother Clayton to this church, and you will ask him in front of the congregation to tell what really happened to the nursery on Government Street. I will play the closing hymn, and when it ends, you will have the length of the quiet that follows to hear him.”
The following Sunday, Clayton Pruitt, a stooped man of seventy nine in a rumpled gray suit, came up the church aisle on the arm of his son Russell and sat in the last pew with his jaw set. When the hymn ended and the last note faded in the rafters, Warren rose and asked his brother the question. Clayton stared at his hands for a long time. “I lost the money of the family in cotton futures,” he said at last, in a cracked voice. “I needed the insurance. I never meant for the baby to be in the house. I saw the girl run out with him in her arms, and I swore to God I would make it right, and I never did.”
But Clayton had brought a lawyer, and the lawyer had brought a folder. At the sound of the confession, the son of Clayton, Russell, a man with a loud tie, leaped from the pew, snatched the signed statement and the old adjuster file from the hands of Warren, and ran for the vestibule doors, meaning to throw the papers into the creek behind the church. He knocked over a stand of hymnals. A deacon grabbed for his sleeve and missed. The congregation gasped. And at the double doors, the choir, still in their robes, closed ranks.
Russell stopped in the vestibule with the papers crushed in his fist, thirty singers in purple robes standing shoulder to shoulder across the doors, the afternoon light falling in colored squares through the high windows. The choir director, a small woman named Mrs. Abernathy, spoke with the calm of a person who had stopped many fights over the hymn selections. “Young man, the people in this church have heard everything. Give Mr. Pruitt his papers, and sit down.” Russell looked at the faces. His father, in the pew behind, was weeping openly. He set the papers on the hymnal stand.
The consequences were soft but sure. Clayton gave a signed statement to the police in Mobile, and because of his age and his honesty, the district attorney declined to bring charges, but the insurance company was repaid and the name of Margaret Ann Kincaid was cleared in the old report. Warren changed his will, and he insisted on paying the tuition of Emily through graduation, plus the cost of a graduate school if she wished. Russell came to my door a month later with his hat in his hands and apologized, and I gave him a cup of coffee.
In the name of my mother Lucille, who passed in 1998, I started the Lucille Kincaid Fund. It pays for tuition and books for children of church musicians and teachers and for emergency help for families who lose a home to fire, in Rutherford, Williamson and Cannon counties. In the first year we helped sixty three students and fourteen families. One was a seventy year old church pianist from Smyrna who held a scholarship letter for her granddaughter against her heart and told us she could not stop shaking, for happiness.
On a bright Sunday in May, I sat at the organ of First Baptist with my glasses on my nose, ready for the opening hymn, and in the third pew sat Warren with his cane, Emily with her cap and gown over her arm, and a fifty six year old fireman named Thomas, in a pressed shirt, who had driven all night from Mobile to hear me play. When the last chord faded, Thomas came forward and took my hand in both of his. “Miss Kincaid,” he said, “my father says you carried me out. I have been wanting to say thank you.” I could not answer.
