The witness in the police report, the man who had sworn on a Bible that he saw Arnie Tschetter running from the burning barn in a pouring rain, was Orrin Ruud, the older brother of my husband. I read his name three times on the yellowed page that Kent held out to me, in the white light of an October frost, with the old sheriff standing by the truck and the meteorologist turning a plastic sleeve in her hands.
I stood at the weather box in my robe and boots, with my pencil still in my hand, and for a moment I forgot the cold.
“Mom,” Kent said, in a thin voice, “did you know?” I told him that I had not. I told him that I had known Orrin all my married life as a fine, proud, difficult man, who had died in 2011 of a stroke after forty years as a deacon. I had not known that he had put a man in prison on a lie. I looked at the old sheriff, a bent man named Haugen, and asked him to tell me the whole story. He took off his hat and gripped it to his chest. “Thelma,” he said, “I have waited forty two years.”
He told it in the cold morning, leaning against the fender of the truck. In July of 1983, the barn of a neighbor had burned in the night, and a hired man named Gordon Faltin had died in the fire. The county wanted someone to hang it on. Arnie Tschetter, a quiet farmhand with a record for drinking, was an easy target. Orrin, who owed money to the owner of the barn, had agreed to say that he saw Arnie run from the flames. In exchange, the debt was forgiven. It was as simple and as ugly as that.
A man who writes down the weather every morning for forty years may leave behind the only honest record of what really happened on one night.
Melvin had known. Haugen said that my husband had come to him in September of 1983, quietly, with the green ledger in his hand. He had pointed to the page for July ninth and said that the night had been clear, with a full moon and no rain, and that his brother could not possibly have seen what he claimed in a downpour. The sheriff, who owed his own election to Orrin, had put the ledger on a shelf and told Melvin to forget it. Melvin had tried twice more. Then he had stopped, and had kept writing.
I sat down on the bench next to the weather box, because my legs were no longer steady. I thought about my husband, writing down the numbers every morning, rain or shine, year after year. I had thought it a harmless habit, a way of loving the sky. I realized now that it was also a form of prayer. Every day he had added another line to the proof, and every day he had hoped that someone, somewhere, would one day open the book.
Erin Faust, the young meteorologist, told us about Arnie. He was seventy one years old and still in the state penitentiary at Sioux Falls. He had served forty two years of a life sentence. The group of law students in Vermillion who worked on old cases had been petitioning for his release for three years with no new evidence. They had sent letters to every weather station in the area. The ledger of Melvin was the only one that had survived. “Mrs. Ruud,” she said, “you may have just opened a prison door.”
The hearing was held in January. Erin testified about the ledger, and an expert from the university verified that the handwriting and the ink were consistent with the date. Sheriff Haugen, with a trembling voice, gave a sworn statement, and he asked the court for forgiveness. The judge, a woman with a quiet face, read the order slowly. The conviction of Arnie Tschetter was vacated, the charges dismissed, the record expunged. In the courtroom, a few people began to clap, and then a great many.
Kent and I drove together to Sioux Falls to meet him at the gate of the prison, in a foot of fresh snow. He came out in a borrowed coat, a thin gray man with a white beard and eyes that blinked in the sun. I introduced myself, and told him whose widow I was. He took my hand in both of his and held it for a very long moment. “Mrs. Ruud,” he said. “All those years I told myself that someone would find a way. I just did not know it would be the weather.”
Arnie lives in a small house in Aberdeen now, which the state helped to buy. Every morning at seven he comes out to the farm with a thermos, and we stand together at the white wooden weather box. I read the thermometers, and he writes in the green book in his careful hand. Kent comes on Saturdays with the bales and a hot dish from his wife. The sky is cold, and the wheat is under snow. And the numbers, each morning, are exactly what they are.
