Bishop Mayhew drew the fourth stone from the north wall of the churchyard with both hands, and the ivy let go of it with a sound like tearing cloth. He was a tall man of seventy, in a plain black cassock, and he knelt on the damp grass in front of the hole as though he were kneeling to pray. The whole parish stood in a half circle in the gray afternoon light, silent. I stood in front of them with my cane in the grass, eighty five years old, my heart going in my chest like a bird. The bishop reached into the hole and drew out eleven empty bank bags, one at a time.
They were the bags that had gone missing from the Sunday collections, eleven of them, one for each month, with the name of the bank printed on the canvas. After the bags came a small black notebook with a rubber band around it. The bishop slipped off the band and opened it, and he read the first page aloud. It was a ledger of dates, sums and initials. And the handwriting was not that of my daughter Vivian. It was the careful, looping hand of Father Thomas Ellis, who had been rector of St. Anne church for nine years.
I closed my eyes. For eleven months, my daughter Vivian, who had been the parish secretary and who had been using cocaine for two years, had been accused of stealing the collections. She had confessed, weeping, in the rectory kitchen. And I, her mother, had believed her, because she believed it. But the notebook said otherwise. According to the ledger, Father Ellis had been taking the bags himself, and had paid Vivian small sums to keep quiet, sums that went straight into her habit. The total taken was two hundred and ten thousand dollars.
A fourth stone pulled from a churchyard wall gave one widow the afternoon to bring her daughter back to the truth in Charlottesville.
I gave my terms in front of the open wall, my hands on my cane, and my voice did not shake. “Bishop Mayhew, you will do what the Church requires, and what the law requires. Father Ellis, you will go with the diocesan auditor, and then with the police. Vivian, you will come home with me, and tomorrow morning you will begin the program in Roanoke that the bishop has already arranged, and I will pay. The wall system stays with me. I have refused six million, two hundred thousand dollars for it. My husband Thaddeus would not forgive me, if I sold it now.”
Vivian had been standing at the back of the crowd with her hands over her mouth, and now she pushed through the parishioners and dropped on the grass beside the hole. “Mama,” she said, “he told me the money was for the roof. He said the bags would be missed, and that if I said I took them, nobody would look further. He gave me the first line of powder in his office, and called it a kindness. I believed him. I believed him because I wanted what he gave me.” She dug her fingers into the grass. “I have been so ashamed. I confessed to something I could not remember doing.”
Father Ellis, who had been standing frozen at the edge of the crowd in his black suit, saw the notebook in the hands of the bishop and lost his composure. He lunged forward, snatched the notebook out of the hand of the bishop, and ran for the lych gate and the road with the ledger clutched against his chest. He had gone only ten yards when the Altar Guild, eleven women between sixty and ninety years of age, in their church hats, stepped across the gravel path in a row, elbow to elbow. The oldest of them, Miss Agnes Pryor, ninety one, raised her walking stick.
“Thomas Ellis,” said Miss Agnes, in a voice as sharp as vinegar, “I taught you Sunday school, and I never taught you that.” The rector skidded to a stop on the gravel. His shoulders went slack. The notebook fell, and Miss Agnes bent with some difficulty, picked it up by the corner, and handed it to the bishop. The diocesan auditor and two officers of the Charlottesville police came up the path without hurrying and took the priest between them, and the parish parted for him in complete silence.
The money consequences were thorough. Father Ellis was charged with embezzlement and the exploitation of a vulnerable person, and the diocese restored the whole of the collections to the church treasury from its own funds. Vivian was charged with a lesser count, and on the evidence of the ledger and the testimony of the bishop, the judge sent her to treatment instead of a cell. The six million, two hundred thousand dollars for the wall system remained untouched, because I had never taken it, and the church roof was repaired in October.
In the name of Thaddeus, who passed in 2019, I started the Thaddeus Carrington Fund. It pays for stonework, wall repair and drainage for historic churchyards, and for treatment beds for families harmed by addiction, in Albemarle, Greene and Nelson counties. In the first year we repaired nine old churchyard walls and placed thirty two people in treatment. One wall, in Free Union, had been leaning for sixty years. When the last stone was set, the congregation came out and sang a hymn, in the rain, with their umbrellas.
Vivian came home from Roanoke after a hundred and twenty days, and the first thing she asked was to see the wall. We went together on a Sunday afternoon. The fourth stone had been set back in its place, clean and gray, and the ivy had been trained back over it by the Altar Guild. She laid her palm against the stone and stood quietly for a long time. Then she took my arm, and we walked slowly through the churchyard together, between the old headstones, and the church bell began to ring for evening prayer.
