The old man on the porch of the mountain cabin outside Ruidoso, New Mexico, was my husband. I am Joan Parrish, seventy eight years old, of Lubbock, and I stood in the pine needles at the bottom of the steps with the Christmas card in my gloved hand and my son Danny frozen at my elbow. The man in the rocking chair had white whiskers, a plaid blanket on his knees, and two fingers missing from his left hand, the very hand in the Polaroid. He looked up with gray eyes, and he said softly, “Hello, Joanie. I am sorry I am so late.”
It had been twenty nine years since the day the Brazos took his fishing boat, or so the sheriff told me, and I had stood on the bank that afternoon with a casserole in my arms while the divers searched the brown water. I had worn black for a year. I had raised our boy on a widow check and the money from the policy. And my husband Bud sat there in the sunshine, alive, with his brother Earl standing behind his chair like a guard, and his hands trembling on the blanket.
Danny had gone the color of ash. I had not asked a single question yet, and he was already shaking his head. I turned to look at my son, forty nine years old, a man who sold farm equipment and drove a new truck. I remembered the way he had handled the papers of the insurance company at twenty, so calm, so competent, such a help to his mother. A cold bright understanding settled over me in the thin mountain air, and I felt it all the way down to my boots.
A Christmas card postmarked in New Mexico gave one widow the length of a long drive to bring her son back to the truth in Lubbock.
I gave my terms there at the foot of the steps, in the cold, with the wind sighing in the pines. “Danny, you will tell me what you did, all of it, in front of your father and your uncle. Then you will drive us all home to Lubbock, and you will walk with me into the office of the insurance company, and you will tell the truth to the first person who will listen. I raised you to be an honest man, and I will not stop trying until you are one.”
Danny dropped onto the bottom step and covered his face. “Mom, Dad owed a hundred and ten thousand dollars to a man in Amarillo who had threatened to hurt us,” he said, in a broken voice. “He begged me to help him disappear. I was twenty, and I thought I was saving the family. I took the boat out on the river with him at four in the morning and set it adrift, and I filed the claim, and the policy paid four hundred thousand dollars. I paid the man. I used the rest for the farm equipment business.” His shoulders heaved. “I have been sick with it ever since.”
Then fear overtook shame. Danny sprang up, ran to his truck, and snatched the black leather folder from the front seat, the copies of the insurance claim and the bank records of what he had done, and sprinted for the creek that ran through the property below the cabin, meaning to wash the papers away in the current. He slipped on the wet needles. He picked himself up. Earl shouted his name. And at the bend in the dirt road, a county deputy in a brown truck, called by a neighbor who had heard the shouting, rolled slowly into view and stopped.
Danny stopped at the edge of the creek with the folder clutched to his chest, the deputy stepping out of the truck in front of him and Earl hurrying down the slope behind, the clear cold water running over the stones at his feet. The deputy was a young woman, calm and polite. “Sir, I think you should hand me that folder, and then we can all sit down on that porch and talk.” Danny looked up at the cabin, where his father was struggling to rise from the chair on the arm of his brother. He held out the folder, and he began to cry like a boy.
The consequences were long and heavy. Because of the age of Bud and the fact that Danny had repaid the man in Amarillo and then confessed freely, the prosecutors in Texas agreed to a settlement. The insurance company was repaid in full from the sale of the equipment business, and Danny was given probation and eight hundred hours of community service, which he spent clearing brush along the river. Bud moved back into our house in Lubbock. We sat together on the back porch every evening, saying little, holding hands, with his missing fingers tucked inside mine.
In the name of my husband Bud, who passed quietly in the spring, I started the Bud Parrish Fund. It pays for river safety gear and search help for families of people missing on the water and for legal help for older families caught in debts and old threats, in Lubbock, Hale and Crosby counties. In the first year we gave out four hundred life jackets and helped seventy two families. One was a seventy five year old rancher from Plainview who held his settled loan papers to his chest and said he could finally sleep through the night.
On a clear December morning, I stood at the window of my kitchen in Lubbock with a cup of coffee, looking at the empty rocking chair on the back porch where Bud used to sit. Danny came up the walk in his work boots, carrying a small spruce tree on his shoulder, as he did every Christmas when he was a boy. He set it on the porch and brushed the needles from his jacket. “Mom,” he said, “I brought us a tree.” I opened the door, and I took his face in both my hands, and I told him he was still my boy.
