Part 3 — Initials On The Lid
Hollis laid the rusted lockbox in my lap and I opened the lid with trembling fingers. The initials of Clyde were scratched into the metal, the same letters he cut into the bottom of every tool he owned. On top lay the deed to the parsonage, a copy newly recorded at the courthouse in Mayfield. On the grantee line, in careful type, was the name Glenda Haney.
My sister. For a moment I could not hear anything but the rain on the roof and the drip into the bucket by the third pew. Glenda sat three rows ahead of me with a tissue in her fist, and she did not turn around. I got up on legs I did not recognize and walked to her pew. “Glenda,” I said. “Did you sign this?”
She said yes, and she said it in a whisper. Jarrod had come to her last spring with a paper and a story. The church was about to be sued over the roofing contractor, he told her, and the parsonage needed to be put in a family name for safekeeping until the trouble passed. She was a trusting woman and he was her only boy, a deacon in a good suit. She signed in her front room and never read a word. “Opal, I thought I was protecting you,” she said.
Under the deed in the lockbox lay a second paper, yellow and soft as cloth. Clyde had written it himself in 1991, and the whole congregation had voted on it. It granted the parsonage to Brother Clyde Whitfield and his wife Opal for the term of their natural lives. A life estate, the lawyer explained the next Monday. It meant no deed in the world, signed by Jarrod or Glenda or the President of the United States, could take that house out from under me while I lived.
Clyde had hidden my safety in the rafters thirty years before anyone knew I would need it. I put my hand flat on the cold lid and closed my eyes. In all our marriage he had never once told me what he was worried about. He just built things, quietly, and left them where I would find them in time.
Deacon Purcell stood at the pulpit with his hat in his hand. The board voted on the spot, eleven to nothing, to set the transfer aside and to thank Glenda for her honesty. The county clerk voided the deed the following week. My sister was not charged. She had been used, and everyone in that sanctuary knew it. She put her head on my shoulder, and I let her.
The outside accountant spent four days with the books. He found the $52,000 gone, along with $9,300 missing from the youth account. Jarrod resigned as treasurer before the end of the month, and in December he pleaded guilty to theft by deception. He was given five years of probation, and the court ordered every dollar returned. The Tracker boat sold at auction for $27,500, and the rest he pays out of his paycheck, a little each month, with the circuit judge watching.
Hollis Bybee brought a licensed crew of six men up from Fulton in the first week of November. For eleven days they stripped the old shingles, replaced the rotten decking over the pulpit, and laid a new roof across the whole sanctuary. Hollis would not take a cent for his own labor. He said he owed it to Brother Clyde, who once married him and his wife for free and then ate three helpings of cake.
On the second Sunday of December the congregation held the dedication again, and this time it rained, a cold gray rain on fresh shingles. We sat in the third pew with our coats on, listening. Nobody said a word. There was no sound above us except the soft, honest patter of weather that could not get in.
I carried the bucket out to the church yard and set it upside down by the back steps. The children use it for hopscotch now. The brass plaque from the trophy shop still stands on its easel by the pulpit, and I let it stay. This time the words are true. In loving memory of Brother Clyde Whitfield, who looked after his own.
Glenda comes to the parsonage on Tuesdays. We play two-handed rummy at the card table of Clyde, and she lets me win more than I ought to. We have not discussed the deed again. We do not need to. A sister who is willing to say yes to the truth in front of a whole church is a sister worth keeping.
In the evenings I still play the piano in the sanctuary after everyone has gone home. I play the hymns Clyde loved best, and the new roof holds the sound in a way the old one never could. When I finish, I sit a moment in the quiet. It is the first time in twenty-five years that the quiet has been dry.
