Captain Reyes turned the ammo box a quarter turn on the table so the Polaroid caught the light. A girl of twenty six, in a white blouse, her hair blowing, her hand up against the sun, laughing at whoever held the camera. It was Bernice, the way I met her, the way I lost her. I did not take the picture. I had not been there in the summer of 1979. We closed on the shack in September. “Mr. Tuttle,” the captain said, gently, “did your wife ever speak of a man named Raymond Dell?”
I told her I knew the name. Raymond Dell was the man who sold us the land, a thin, quiet fellow with a limp who asked for four thousand dollars in cash and a handshake. He told us he was moving to Texas. What I had never known, and what Captain Reyes now read to me from a paper in the box, was that Raymond Dell was the brother of Bernice. Her older brother. The one she had not seen since she was seventeen, when he left home after a quarrel with their father. He had found her on his own, and sold her the shack at the price of a good fishing rod.
Bernice had known. All forty years. She had never told me. Inside the box, under the Polaroid, was a letter in the hand of Raymond, dated the week he sold the land. “Bernie, I cannot stay, I owe men money in Palm Beach, and they will come to this lake. I am hiding this under the floor for you, a deed to the land in your name alone, signed before a notary, and one thousand dollars in silver dollars. Do not tell Earl. He is a good man, but he will want to pay me back, and I will not be here to take it.”
A scorched ammo box and a faded Polaroid gave one old cane hauler the length of a single week to bring his son in law back to the truth in Clewiston.
I gave my terms the next morning, to Captain Reyes, at the table of the fire station. I wanted to be in the room when Craig was questioned. I did not want a lawyer for me, and I did not want revenge. I wanted to ask him one question, and I wanted my daughter Patty beside me when I asked it. Captain Reyes said it was unusual. I told her I was eighty years old and owed nobody an apology for being unusual. She looked at me a moment longer, and then she went to get another chair.
Craig sat on the other side of the table, in a pink golf shirt and a pair of expensive loafers, his hands under the table. Patty sat beside me. I asked my one question. “Son, did you burn my place?” He looked at his wife, and she did not look away. He said, “Yes. I paid a boy from Belle Glade two hundred dollars. I wanted you to take the deal. I wanted Patty to have something. I did not know about the box. I swear on my life I did not know.” Patty began to cry without a sound. I waited for something to rise in me, anger, and it did not come.
Then Craig did a foolish thing. He saw the ammo box on the corner of the table, with the old deed sticking out, and he snatched it, meaning to throw it into the canal behind the station, because he understood, a second too late, that the land was never mine to sell. He ran out the side door with the box clutched in both arms and crossed the gravel lot in his expensive loafers. He slipped. He fell flat, with the box under him, in a puddle of fire truck wash water.
Captain Reyes, who is five feet four inches tall, stood over him with her hands on her hips and her radio crackling. Two firefighters came out of the bay, wiping their hands on their pants, and one of them said, “Captain, you want us to help him up or leave him?” “Leave him a minute,” she said. Craig looked up from the puddle, soaked to the skin, a salesman without a customer. “Earl,” he said, “I am sorry.” I took the box out from under him, the lid still shut tight, and wiped it on my shirt.
Craig pleaded to arson and was sentenced to four years in a state prison, which he took without argument, and the development company, hearing the whole story in the newspaper, withdrew its offer and then, to my surprise, returned with a different one. They would build the marina on the north side of the lake, and leave my twelve acres alone, with a public easement for the fishermen, in exchange for nothing but my handshake. I gave it. The deed in the name of Bernice was recorded in Hendry County, and the shack was rebuilt in the spring by volunteers, with a tin roof.
In the name of Bernice, who passed in 2016, I started the Bernice Tuttle Fund. It pays to rebuild homes, docks and fishing camps for families who lose them to fire or storms, in Hendry, Glades and Palm Beach counties. In the first year we rebuilt sixteen places, mostly with salvaged lumber and volunteers from the sugar mill. A widow in Belle Glade stood on the porch of her new kitchen and asked who Bernice was. I told her she was a woman who planted hibiscus on a dock. The widow said that explained the flowers.
The new shack stands on the same stilts, with the same tin roof, and a new dock that Patty and I built board by board. The hibiscus of Bernice came back from the roots in April, red as a taillight. I fish at sunrise and sunset, and I keep the Polaroid in a frame by the door, next to a picture of Raymond Dell that Patty found through the sugar company records. He passed in Texas in 1994, a good man, with a limp. The lake is the same. The alligators are the same. But on certain evenings I sit on the dock with two cups of coffee, and I pour one in the water.
