The post office in Wells was a low brown building next to a feed store, with a flag out front and a bench where two old men sat arguing about the price of hay. Tonya was behind the counter. She was a big, kind woman with reading glasses on a chain, and she did not say anything when I put the death certificate and my license in front of her. She just nodded, went into the back, and came out with a gray plastic bin so full of envelopes that she had to carry it with both arms.
There were nine hundred and some letters. Tonya had counted. Every one was addressed to Vera Kittredge, Box 311, in the same slanting hand, and every one was from the Ely State Prison, with the same inmate number in the corner. The earliest was postmarked 1999. I took a handful from the middle and sat on the bench outside, in the wind, and my hands shook so badly I had to hold the first one with both. I opened it. It began, Dear Mrs. Kittredge.
It was from a man named Tommy Reese. He wrote that he was thinking of her on the anniversary, and that he hoped the cattle had come through the winter. He wrote about the library at the prison, and a class on welding, and a cell mate who had died. He wrote the way a man talks to a friend. At the end, he always signed it the same way. Still sorry, Tommy. I sat a long time with that name, and then I found it. Tommy Reese was twenty two years old in the spring of 1999 when he drove a pickup the wrong way on Interstate 80 outside Elko, drunk, at two in the morning. In the car he hit was our daughter Carrie, twenty four, coming home from her shift at the hospital.
Forgiveness is not a door a woman opens once, but a road she walks every week, in the same direction, until somebody else is willing to walk it with her.
I had come home from the funeral of Carrie and did not speak for a year. Vera told me so later. I remembered the courtroom as a gray blur, a boy with his head down, twenty six years. I remembered that Vera did not shout. I had shouted. After the trial, I told her I would never say that name in my house again, and she looked at me with her tired eyes and agreed. I thought it was the end of it. It was only the beginning for her.
Tonya gave me one more thing, a small blue notebook that Vera had left in the box. It held the copies of her replies, written in the round hand of a Sunday school teacher. She had answered him every week for twenty six years. She wrote to him about the herd, and the grandchildren, and the way Carrie used to sing in the kitchen. She had sent him a Bible, and he wrote to say he read it twice. In one entry she wrote, Burl is a good man who is still in the worst hour of his life. Be patient with him if you ever meet him.
I drove to Ely the next morning. It is a hundred and sixty miles of sagebrush and a long sky. I sat in the visitor room at the prison with my hat in my hands. A gray haired man in a blue uniform was brought in, slow, with one shoulder lower than the other. He was forty eight and looked sixty. He saw me and stopped in the doorway. “Mr. Kittredge,” he said. His voice cracked. “Is she…” I told him Vera had passed in June. He put both hands over his face, and his shoulders shook, and I let him cry.
We talked for two hours, the man who killed my daughter and me. I will not tell all of it. He told me he had not had a drink in twenty six years. He told me that her letters were the only thing that kept him alive in the first five. He said, “Mr. Kittredge, I never asked her to forgive me. I only asked if I could keep writing.” I said that was the thing about my wife. She never made anyone ask twice.
He had a parole hearing in November. His lawyer was a young woman who did not expect anyone to come. The board would want to hear from the family of the victim, and for twenty six years nobody had. I told him I did not know what I would say. I said I had not forgiven him, that I did not think a man could do it in a morning. But I said I knew the woman I was married to, and I would not do less than she had.
In November, I stood up in a small beige room in Carson City, in my good jacket, with my daughter beside me, and I read a letter to the board. It was short. It said that my wife had written to Thomas Reese every week for twenty six years, and that I had read what she said, and that I believed her. It said I could not speak for Carrie. It said I could speak for Vera. When I sat down, my daughter took my hand, and she did not let go.
Tommy was paroled in January. I met him at the gate in Ely with a thermos of coffee and a clean coat. He did not know what to say. Neither did I. We drove to the cemetery in Elko, to the two stones side by side, Carrie and Vera, with the wind coming off the ranges. He stood with his hat in his hands. Then he said it, in a rough, small voice, the thing Vera must have read a thousand times. “I am still sorry.” I said, “I know, son. She knew.”
