Wyatt zoomed in until the pixels swam, and I read the rest of the note aloud in the kitchen of his trailer in a voice I hardly knew. “Dee. Brenda. The man is from the paper company. They made me sign. The gun was loaded. His name is on the back of the stove. Look behind the woodpile.” Nobody in that little room breathed. Roy stood up so fast his chair went over. “She held our father at gunpoint,” he said, and his voice cracked in the middle. “She walked him up that ridge in his pajamas.” I laid my hand on his arm. “Not at gunpoint, Roy,” I said. “She stood beside the man who held it.”
We drove up the ridge before dawn in the truck of Wyatt, three of us, with a thermos and a flashlight and a tire iron under the seat that nobody mentioned. The trail was slick with frost. The cabin sat in its clearing under the oaks where it had sat since the thirties, with its tin roof and its crooked chimney and the porch rail that Daddy had held with his bare hands. I stood on the step for a moment. I could almost see him there, in his hunting jacket, looking into the lens of the camera, holding up the torn piece of paper like a man ringing a bell.
The stove was an old black iron thing, cold as a stone, with a pipe going up through the roof. Roy and Wyatt dragged it two feet from the wall with a scrape that echoed in the rafters. On the back plate, scratched into the soot with the point of a nail, in the shaky capitals of my father, were two lines: DWIGHT RANKIN. TRI COUNTY FIBER. 3 14. Under it, smaller, as if he had been afraid to be seen writing it: MAKE HIM PAY. Wyatt took a photograph. Then he took another. His hands were steady, and his jaw was set like a man at the truck of a poacher.
A father who writes his last words on the back of a stove has already given his children the land and the proof.
The woodpile stood at the side of the cabin, under a lean to roof, stacked in careful rows. Behind the last row, tucked into a gap between the logs and the wall, sat a green steel ammunition box with a rusty clasp. Inside it were three things. A cassette tape, labeled in his hand, March 14. The deed itself, the real one, the original warranty deed of 1952, with the stamp of the county. And a long letter in pencil on the lined pages of a feed store tablet. It began, Dee, if you are reading this, I did not leave the land to anyone but you three, and I am sorry I could not stop them.
He wrote it the way he spoke, in short, plain sentences. Brenda had come in February, and she had been kind. She had cooked. She had read to him. In March she had told him that a man from a paper company wanted to buy the timber, and that Daddy ought to listen. On the night of the fourteenth she had walked him up the ridge in the dark, saying only that the man wished to talk privately. At the cabin the man had put a shotgun on the table. Brenda had said, Daddy, just sign it. She had not looked at him. She had stood in the door with her arms folded, and she had looked at the floor.
The tape was the voice of a man in a hurry. Wyatt played it on the old radio in the cabin, on the table where the shotgun had been, with the three of us standing in the gray morning light. First Daddy, hoarse and breathless: “I will not sign.” Then a stranger, quiet and flat: “Mr. Pickens, the gun is loaded. You are ninety one. Nobody will be surprised.” Then Brenda, a thin voice, close to the microphone: “Daddy, please. It is only land. Just sign.” Then the scratch of a pen, and a long breath, and my father saying one thing more, to nobody. “Forgive me, Papa.”
Wyatt called the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation from the porch of the cabin, with the frost still on the rail. By ten that morning two agents were sitting in the truck bed with the ammunition box between them, and by the end of the week the agents had the name of a land agent for a paper company in Alabama who had a history of buying timber from very old men. Dwight Rankin was arrested in a motel in Florence. He had the deed, the stamp of the notary, and a shotgun registered in his own name, which he had never thought to leave at home.
Brenda was arrested at her house in Memphis on a Tuesday, in her kitchen, in a silk robe. They told me she did not argue. She asked to call her lawyer, and then she asked, quietly, whether anyone had told her sister. I was sitting in my own kitchen in Savannah, with a cup of coffee going cold, when the telephone rang. It was her. She was crying. “Dee,” she said, “I did not think he would die.” I held the phone away from my ear for a moment. Then I said, “He did not die in March, Brenda. He lived five months more with what you did to him.” And I hung up.
The trial was brief. The jury took ninety minutes. Dwight Rankin was convicted of aggravated kidnapping, extortion, and exploitation of an elderly person, and sentenced to twenty years. Brenda pleaded guilty to conspiracy and elder abuse and received eight, with the judge remarking from the bench that a daughter who stands in a doorway while a gun is on the table is as guilty as the man who holds it. The deed of March was voided. The paper company withdrew its offer, and its attorney, grayer than any lawyer I had ever seen, apologized to the three of us in a hallway.
In November, the family hunted from the cabin for the first time since Daddy died. Roy cooked venison chili on the old stove, which we had pushed back to the wall, with the name on the back plate left exactly where it was. Wyatt strapped a new camera to a tree at the edge of the clearing. The next morning, just after sunrise, we checked the card together at the kitchen table. There was a buck, a big one, ten points, standing in the frost with his breath smoking, looking straight into the lens as if he knew. Roy laughed first. Then the rest of us. “Hollis would have counted him twice,” I said.
