The note in the rusted tobacco tin, written in pencil on the back of a union receipt, was in the careful, upright printing of Roy, and it was addressed to nobody. March 14, 1985. Thomas Woods, deckhand, went over at the Smithland lock. Pulled him out two days downstream. The company will say he quit.
I cannot let his people think so. I will keep him here until his brother comes. R.L. I read it aloud under the oaks of Oak Grove Cemetery, on my knees, with a scrub brush still in my wet hand, and the old man in overalls took off his hat and began to cry.
Abner Woods did not make a sound. He simply stood there with his hat held against his chest and tears running down his weathered cheeks into the creases beside his mouth. He was seventy nine years old. He had waited forty years to know where his brother lay. He said at last, in a low rough voice, “He did not run off. He did not quit. I knew it, Mrs. Liles. I told the company and I told the sheriff, and nobody would listen. I knew my brother would never leave me.”
Darrell stood a few feet away, gray in the face, with the death certificate in his hand. He looked at the old man, and at the tin box, and at the small neat mound of the spare plot behind us, where a patch of clover grew. “Mom,” he said, hoarsely, “I was going to give this to the mother of Joyce. I was going to sign it away for a dollar.” I looked at him for a long time. I said, “Son, a plot is more than a hole in the ground. It is a promise. And your father kept this one for forty years.”
A tugboat captain who cannot say a thing aloud may spend the rest of his life saying it with a shovel, a bucket, and a brush.
The sexton, Mr. Bandy, told the rest of it leaning on his cane in the long afternoon light. He had been a young man of forty eight in 1985, working the grounds alone. Roy had come to the gate at midnight with a body wrapped in a tarp in the bed of his pickup, and asked for a place to lay a friend. Mr. Bandy had understood at once. He had unlocked the gate, helped Roy dig, and filled the grave himself. Neither man had said a prayer aloud. They had simply stood there in the dark with their hats off.
What Roy had not told the sexton was why. I found it that evening in the old black Bible beside his bed, where I had never thought to look, a folded page in his handwriting. It was a confession of sorts. He wrote that on the night Thomas fell, the two of them had been working the deck together, and Roy had asked him to step to the edge and check a line. The rail had given way. He had blamed himself ever since. He had not reported it, because he feared the company would accuse the boy of carelessness and cheat the family of a death benefit.
I took the page the next morning to the McCracken County courthouse, where I had worked for thirty one years and where the old clerks still called me Miss Imogene. A young attorney named Mr. Faulkner helped me file a petition to amend the record of death. The cause was entered at last. Drowned in the line of duty. The company, which had long since been bought out, paid the death benefit to the next of kin. Abner received a check for twelve thousand dollars with interest, and held it in his hand like a feather.
We held the funeral on a bright Saturday in May, the three of us and fifty others. Thomas Woods was laid to rest at last under his own name, with a plain gray stone that read, Deckhand, Brother, Friend. The preacher was the pastor of Abner himself, a young man with a warm voice. Darrell served as a pallbearer. He carried the small casket with the grandson of Abner and two deckhands from the old tugboat company, who had driven from Cairo. When they lowered it into the ground, Darrell wept like a child.
He came to supper the Sunday after, for the first time in two months. He sat at my table and ate mashed potatoes and said very little. Afterward he washed the dishes without being asked. I stood beside him at the sink with a dish towel. He said, “Mom, I was ashamed of Dad, for a minute, and I was ashamed of myself.” I told him that his father would have understood, and that he would have added only one thing. Be practical, but be kind first.
The mother of Joyce found a plot in another cemetery, a quiet one outside town, and Darrell paid for it himself. On Memorial Day, the two of us went out to Oak Grove together with a bucket and a brush, the way Roy used to. We cleaned three headstones that morning. One of them was Thomas. Another was a little lamb on the grave of a baby. The third was a name nobody could read. Darrell scrubbed it, patiently, for an hour. When he finished, the letters began to show.
