I did not go to the police that morning. I went to my sister. I drove across Amarillo to the little house on Hawthorne Street where Paula lives with a cat and a sewing machine, and I let myself in with the key she gave me at Christmas. She was sitting at her kitchen table in her robe, her hair uncombed, with a cup of coffee that had gone cold. She looked up at me and did not seem surprised. She simply held out her hands, palms up, like a woman waiting to be arrested.
“Tell me all of it,” I said. I sat across from her and laid the videocassette on the table between us. Paula stared at it. Then she told me, in a flat dry voice, in the order she had told it to herself a thousand times in the dark. She had found the tape in 2004, rummaging for Christmas decorations in the hall closet. She watched it alone on the old VCR in the living room of Mama. She had gone home and been sick. And then she had gone back, because she had to know.
“Mama told me the whole thing in the car,” Paula said. “She was driving me to the grocery store, and she said it as calm as a recipe. Daddy had been hitting her for twenty two years. She had hidden it, the bruises, the broken wrist, the winter he put her in the hospital with a cracked rib. He said that if she left, he would find her. Sharon, you were gone from the house. I was still at home. And Mama said to me, Paula, I could not bear for you to be next.” Her voice broke. “So she planned it. For a year.”
A tape that survives the years will tell the truth that even a family has agreed to forget.
I put my head in my hands. I thought of the man I had remembered, the big laughing man with the camcorder who bought me a bread machine, who fixed my car on Sunday afternoons. I had loved him. I had also been away from home and had never seen what was happening in that house. All those Christmases, the tension in the air that I had put down to the cold. I had believed my mother when she said he was unhappy. And I had believed that a woman who irons dish towels and plays the organ could not possibly be a killer.
“What happened to the body?” I asked, finally. Paula looked down at her coffee. “She never told me,” she said. “Only that he would never be found.” Then she lifted her eyes. “But Sharon. There was one place on the property she never let anyone near. The old storm cellar, behind the hall closet door, in the back of the garage. She had a padlock on it. She paid for the concrete herself. Every Easter she planted lilies on top.” We looked at each other across the table, and at that moment we both understood.
I called a detective I knew from the school district, a woman named Reyes, whose children I had driven for years. She came in thirty minutes and watched the tape in the kitchen of my sister. When it was done, she sat for a long time without speaking. Then she said, “Sharon, you understand what this is. A woman in a nightgown. A man in a cowboy hat taking a set of keys. We cannot prosecute a dead woman. But we can find your father. Do you want me to?” I took a deep breath. I said, “Yes.”
They dug up the cellar floor on a gray Thursday in November. A crew of six from the Potter County sheriff stood in the garage in rubber boots and coveralls, sifting through dirt with trowels, while Paula and I sat on folding chairs by the door. At half past two, one of the men called out. The anthropologist knelt, brushed, and slowly lifted something wrapped in a plastic tarp. Inside, with a silver belt buckle still intact and a wedding ring on a finger bone, lay what remained of my father, Bill Tillman.
The man in the cowboy hat was found two weeks later. His name was Wade Pruitt, and he was eighty one, living in a trailer outside Tucumcari. He had been a cousin of Bill Tillman, and a drifter, and my mother had paid him two thousand dollars to drive the truck west and abandon it. He had done it, and kept quiet, and then spent twenty years blackmailing Paula for a few hundred dollars a month. In an interview room he cried and said that he had never touched Bill. He had only wanted the money. He was charged with extortion and conspiracy.
We buried my father properly on a bright December morning, in the cemetery on Hillside Road, beside his mother. About forty people came, old friends from the feed store, a pair of aunts from Oklahoma. I read the eulogy myself. It was the hardest thing I have ever done. I said that Bill Tillman had been a loud, funny, wounded man, who loved his daughters and hurt his wife, and that neither fact cancelled the other. I said that my mother had done an unforgivable and understandable thing. When I finished, Paula took my hand.
We sat together afterward in the kitchen of Mama, with the china on the table and the quilts folded on the chairs. I had thought I would feel anger toward her. Instead I felt a strange gentle grief, as if for two people at once. Paula said, “Sharon, do you hate her?” I said, “No. I think she did the one thing she knew how to do. I hate that she had to.” Paula leaned her head on my shoulder. We were sixty four and sixty years old, and we sat there like two little girls.
I kept one thing from the box of tapes, a tape labeled in the handwriting of Daddy: Easter 1992. The real one. I put it in the old VCR that Saturday and pressed play. And there they were, in the bright spring sun on the lawn, my father holding the camera, laughing, my mother in a yellow dress carrying a basket of eggs, the two little girls running through the grass. For a moment, just a moment, none of it had happened yet. I watched it to the end. Then I said goodnight to all of them, and I turned it off.
