I told Colt to turn the truck around. He did not argue. We drove back up Old Union Road with the mill dust still in my jacket, and neither of us said a word. The house came into view through the pines, white as a church, and on the porch swing, her hands folded in her lap and a thermos at her feet, sat a small woman in a green cardigan. I knew her before I could see her face. She sat the way Faye sat, with her back straight and her chin up, as if the whole porch were hers by right. My knees went weak all the same.
“Hello, Royce,” Ruby said. Her voice was a little lower than Faye was, a little rougher, but it had the same music. I stood at the bottom of the steps with my hat in my hand. “Ruby. I thought you were in Arkansas.” “I was. I have been in Lufkin for six years. I live over the laundromat on Timberland Drive.” “Six years?” “Faye asked me to,” she said. “In the spring of 2020, when she knew. She called me the night before they took her to the hospital. She said, Ruby, he is going to need somebody. Please do not let me leave him with nobody.”
I sat down on the top step, because I had to. Thirty years earlier I had called a loan on her husband Harlan, a man who borrowed from the mill, lost the money at the track and then looked me in the eye and said he had not. I took his equipment. Ruby never forgave me, and I never apologized, because I was right and I was proud. Faye went to see her sister every month in secret for thirty years and never said a word to me. I found out from a shoebox of birthday cards after the service.
A deed in a mill safe, a note in the wrong handwriting, and a sister in law who had been watching over an old man for six years.
“I wrote the note, Royce,” Ruby said. “I signed it F because I knew you would come to the mill if you thought it was Faye. I am a coward. I did not know how to knock on your door after thirty years.” “How did you get the deed?” She tilted her head toward Colt, who had stopped halfway up the walk. “I followed your grandson. I have been following him since March of last year. I saw that paper on the seat of his truck outside the courthouse, and the window was down. I am seventy nine years old and I have never stolen anything in my life. I took it.”
Colt sat on the bottom step with his head in his hands. “I am sorry, Paw Paw,” he said. “I know that is not enough. I told myself you were old and you would not miss it. I told myself the mill was worth more than the house. I told myself all kinds of things.” “You had a notary stamp a paper while I was on oxygen,” I said. “Who was she?” “A girl I knew from high school. She did it for two hundred dollars. She did not even look at you.” I closed my eyes. A man at the end of his rope will do cruel things with a kind face.
Ruby opened her thermos and poured coffee into the lid and handed it to me. “Royce, I took the liberty of calling Sheriff Hollis on Tuesday. I told him about the notary. He says a deed signed by a man in a hospital bed under false pretenses is no deed at all. It is void. Your house is yours.” I took a sip. It tasted exactly like Faye coffee, strong enough to stand a spoon in. “Did you also tell him about Colt?” She looked at my grandson with eyes the exact shape of my wife. “I told him I would let the family decide.”
That was the moment I understood what Faye had done. She had left me with a family I did not know how to fix, and a woman who could. All those years of contracts and money in the bank, and the one thing she wanted me to hold on to was not in the safe at all. It was sitting on my porch swing, holding a thermos. I put down the cup. “Colt, you will not be going to Pinecrest Manor, and neither will I. You will be going to Houston. Dub Ferrell runs a lumberyard on Telephone Road. I will call him today. He needs a man who will start at five and sweep the floor.”
Colt nodded slowly. “And the man in Nacogdoches?” “I will pay him,” I said. “Directly. Not through you. And you will repay me, five hundred a month, out of what Dub pays you, until it is done.” “That is ten years, Paw Paw.” “Then you had better learn to like sweeping.” Despite himself, my grandson laughed. It was a small broken sound, but it was the first honest one I had heard from him since he moved into my spare room. Ruby watched him with a small smile. Faye used to look at him that way when he was five.
Colt left for Houston that Saturday with two duffel bags and a lunch Ruby packed. I stood in the drive and watched his truck disappear down Old Union Road. I did not cry. I stood a long time with my hat in my hand, and Ruby came and stood beside me and slipped her small cold hand into my big rough one, the way her sister did on our wedding day. Neither of us said anything. A pair of doves took off from the pines. The sun came through the yellow needles in long bars.
We started the 1979 Ford log truck that afternoon. Ruby climbed in behind the wheel in her cardigan and told me to move over. She talked to it sweetly, the way Faye always did, and the old engine caught on the second try. We drove out past the mill, where my father circle saw sits behind glass in the new office, and down to the river bottom where the pines are tall enough to hold up the sky. Ruby parked and rolled down the window. “I am sorry I stayed away, Royce.” I patted her hand. “I am sorry I gave you reason. Stay for supper.”
