The letter from the Illinois Department of Corrections said that Clifford Rusk would be released on the thirtieth of October, and that he had listed the house of my mother in Ottumwa as his residence. I was holding it in the bedroom closet with the hatbox open at my feet and the second marriage certificate in my other hand. The date on the letter was nine days away. I did something I had not done since I was a girl. I sat down on the floor of the closet in the wedding veil of my mother and cried, quietly, for the woman she had been.
When I stopped, I called the one man in Ottumwa I trusted, a retired Wapello County sheriff named Leo Brandvold, now eighty two, who had known my mother at church for forty years. He came in his Buick within the hour and sat at her kitchen table with the cherry pie recipe in front of him. I laid out everything: the check, the note, the marriage certificate, the newspaper clipping from 1993. Leo read all of it twice. When he looked up, his eyes were wet. “Diane,” he said, “I think I know what your mother was doing on those Fridays.”
He told me what he knew. In the spring of 1993, a charming man named Clifford Rusk had arrived in Ottumwa and swept a lonely widow off her feet. Within weeks they were married at the courthouse in Davenport, and within months my mother had found out what she had married. Rusk was a thief. He had robbed a gas station in Fairfield in September, and a night clerk named Earl Garvey, a mechanic working a second job, had seen his face. A week later, on Highway 34, Earl Garvey drove into the river.
A woman who carries a secret to the grave may bake it into a pie and still deliver the truth.
“Bernice came to me that October,” Leo said, “white as a sheet, and told me she thought her husband had done something terrible. I took her statement. I could not prove it. No witness, no car, no weapon, nothing. Rusk told me she was hysterical, and I let it go. A month later, he robbed a bank in Illinois and was arrested, and he went away for thirty three years. Your mother never spoke of it again. I thought it was over.” He paused. “I did not know she had started baking.”
That was the real meaning of the pies. My mother, a woman of impeccable manners and unshakeable decency, had married a murderer. She could not prove it, and she could not forget it. So every Friday for thirty three years, she had baked a cherry pie, wrapped it in a clean blue towel, and driven out to the grave of the man she believed her husband had killed. She had never told a soul. She stood there for five minutes, praying. She was carrying the weight alone, because she believed it was hers to carry.
Leo made a telephone call to the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation. An agent named Darlene Tubbs arrived the next day, a tall woman in her forties with a laptop and a patient face. She took the check, the note, and the certificate. She listened to every word. At the end she said, “Mrs. Fisk, I have a cold case in my files from October 1993. A man in a river. A car with a scrape on the right rear bumper that was never matched. And I have a prisoner who is being released on Thursday from Joliet. If your mother is telling the truth, I need a few days.”
She found them. Agent Tubbs located the Fairfield gas station tape, which had been logged as evidence and never viewed. She found the paint scrape, preserved in a box at the state crime laboratory in Ankeny, and matched it to a 1988 sedan registered, in the spring of 1993, to Bernice Rusk. And she found one more thing, in the garage of the house of my mother, under a canvas tarp in the back corner: a rusted bumper, stained with river water, that my mother had quietly bought from a junkyard in 1994 and hidden for thirty years.
Clifford Rusk walked out of the Joliet gate on the thirtieth of October at eight in the morning, in a cheap gray suit, carrying a paper bag. Agent Tubbs and two Illinois state troopers were waiting at the curb. He saw them and gave a small tired smile, as if he had been expecting it. She read him the warrant for the murder of Earl Garvey. He said nothing. He got into the back seat of the car. In the whole of the transfer to Iowa, the husband of my mother said only one sentence: “Bernice always did bake a good pie.”
I went to find Joyce Garvey on a Saturday. She was eighty five years old, in a white frame house in Fairfield, with a hearing aid and a view of a bird feeder. I sat beside her on the sofa and told her all of it: the pies, the check, the note, the river. She put her hand over her mouth and did not speak for a long time. Then she turned and looked at the old cashier check I laid in her lap. “Fifty thousand dollars,” she whispered. “For my Earl.” And she began, softly, to laugh and weep together.
She asked to be taken to the cemetery. Her three sons, all in their sixties, carried her wheelchair across the grass to the flat gray headstone in the back row. I set down a cherry pie, lattice topped, in a blue towel, baked that morning from the recipe of my mother. Joyce reached out her thin hand and touched the stone. She said, “Earl, there was a woman who brought you pie every Friday. Thirty three years. I did not know. I did not know anybody remembered.” Her sons stood with their heads bowed.
Rusk was convicted that spring of the murder of Earl Garvey and sentenced to life. The sentencing was short. At the end the judge, a woman who had grown up two streets from my mother, said that Bernice Holloway had shown a quiet courage that deserved to be remembered. I drive out to the cemetery now every Friday, in the Buick of my mother, with a cherry pie. Joyce meets me at the stone in her wheelchair. We cut it into slices on paper plates, the two of us, and we eat it together, and we do not say very much, and the pie is always gone by Saturday.
