The fire siren was still going when I reached the farm of Roy Lee at six the next morning. Half of Sparta seemed to be standing in the road in their coats and slippers, watching the old barn burn. The roof had already fallen in. Orange flame climbed the walls where Daddy had hung his smoker and veils, and the heat reached out across the yard like a living thing. My brother stood at the edge of it with a garden hose that could not have watered a tomato plant, and he was weeping without a sound.
I walked up beside him and took the hose out of his hand. I said, “Roy Lee, let the fire department do their work.” He looked at me with soot on his face and said, “Pearlie, I went in after them. I got three of the boxes of Daddy out before the beam came down. The rest are gone.” His hands were blistered. I saw that and forgot everything else, every cold word he had said at my fence, every stung to death by Easter. I wrapped his fingers in my scarf and held them.
The volunteer chief, a boy I once taught to spell, came over with a flashlight and a tight mouth. He said the fire started in two places at once, and in his experience that never happened by accident. A deputy found a gas can behind the corn crib and a set of fresh bootprints leading down to the creek road. Someone had wanted that barn gone, and wanted it gone before sunrise. I looked at the banker, who had come in his Sunday coat, and I knew without a word that we were all thinking the same thing.
The banker, Mr. Whitlow, drew me aside. The silver certificates in the box, he said, were not just old. Their serial numbers matched a report from the White County Bank robbery of March 1962, when two men took eleven thousand dollars at gunpoint and one of them, wounded, vanished into the hills and was never seen again. The money was never found. The sheriff of that day had spent the rest of his career looking for it. “Somebody has been hunting for this for sixty years,” he said. “I would guess they just found out where it was.”
Money hidden for love can be found by greed, and the difference between the two is only who is holding the shovel.
The deputy caught him by noon at a gas station in Crossville. His name was Dwight Mabry, forty six years old, a heavy man in a canvas jacket, and he was the grandson of the robber who had vanished. His grandmother, Lorene, had spent her whole life believing the money was somewhere in White County. She died last winter, and on her deathbed she told Dwight a story she had heard from her husband, about a farmer with a beard and a field of bee boxes who had found him on a bad night.
Dwight confessed everything in the office of the sheriff. He had driven to Sparta, seen the story in the paper about my picture with the jar of honey, and put it together: the same man, the same bee boxes, the same land. He had watched Roy Lee dig up the old boxes behind the barn the night before, and thought the money had been recovered. He set the fire to cover a theft that never happened. In the end, the only thing he burned was the memory of his own grandmother, and a barn that had stood for a hundred years.
The story that Daddy never told came out piece by piece over the next week, with the help of the note, the feed ticket, and the memory of an old woman in the nursing home. In 1962 he had found a man bleeding in the sourwood grove, a wounded robber with a canvas bag of cash. Daddy tried to help. The man begged him to hold the bag for his wife and children, then died before dawn. Daddy could not take it to the law without ruining a widow and four small children. He could not give it back to them either, because the sheriff watched them like a hawk.
So he did the only thing a careful, stubborn man could do. He hid the money in the false bottoms of his bee boxes, where nobody would look, and he spent the next thirty years quietly using a little at a time. Every school year an envelope arrived at the high school office, marked for a student whose family needed help with fees. The name changed, but the family did not. The children of Lorene, then her grandchildren. And the school secretary who handed out those envelopes for thirty three years, never knowing, was me.
The sheriff sat with us for a long time at the kitchen table, turning the note over in his hands. In the end, the law was kind. The bank had been paid by its insurance sixty years ago and wanted nothing back. The state held that the certificates were lost property, worth far more to a collector than to a vault, and agreed that what remained should be divided between me and Roy Lee, minus a share set aside for the family of Lorene. Dwight went to jail. His sister, who had nothing to do with it, cried in my living room and I gave her a jar of honey.
Roy Lee and I rebuilt the barn that summer, side by side. It was the first time since we were children that the two of us had worked on something together, and he cussed at the hammer and I laughed at him. On the last day, after the roof was on, he sat on an upturned bucket and finally said it. “Pearlie, I am sorry about the stung to death. I said it because I was afraid of losing you the way we lost Daddy. I did not know how else to say it.” I sat down beside him and said I knew.
We keep sixteen bee boxes in the field by the sourwood trees now, eight of his and eight of mine, with the old veil of Daddy hung on a nail in the new barn. The club has grown to twenty one children. I am seventy one years old, and I have been called Miss Queen Bee at the grocery store, at church, and once by a state senator. But the title I like best is the one I get when Roy Lee, passing my fence, tips his hat and calls out, “Morning, sister.” I always call back, “Morning, brother.”
