I opened the envelope with my thumbnail, and my hands shook so hard the paper rattled. Inside were three things, a cassette tape, a key to a safe deposit box at Northern Lakes Bank, and a letter in green ink. “Siggy, if he called, then I am gone and it falls to you. I am sorry I kept this from you for forty years. It was Paul who was driving. He was seventeen, he had two beers at a graduation party, and a man named Walter Haugen was walking home on that gravel road. Paul stopped. He stayed. He is no coward. But I was afraid.”
The letter went on for two pages. Earl Brandt, a young county deputy then, was the first man to reach the scene after Marjorie, and he saw the face of Paul in his headlights. Walter was alive and breathing, and Marjorie rode with him to St. Mary hospital in the ambulance herself. Earl told her he could make the report say a stranger had driven off, if the family paid him. “I agreed, Siggy, because I thought the calling of a pastor would be ruined before it began. I was wrong to agree, and I knew it on every fifteenth of the month.”
I drove to Superior that night with the tape on the seat beside me. Danny opened his door in his socks. Paul was already there, because he had left Fargo the minute I called, and he sat at the kitchen table with his hands flat. I laid the letter between them. “Which one of you was in that car?” I asked. Paul looked at the floor. Danny looked at me. “Both of us, Dad,” Danny said. “I was fourteen. I was in the back seat. I have known for forty years, and I never knew how to tell you.”
A widower in Duluth learned that his pastor son had been the driver in an old accident, and with the recordings of his late wife he ended a forty year blackmail and brought the family peace.
Paul wept, and I held him, and I said what a father says, which is that I was angry and I was also his father. Then Danny pushed an old shoebox across the table. Inside were bank receipts. “Since 2009, Mom let me pay half,” he said. “One hundred and twenty five dollars every month, in cash. That is what the Sunday calls were. She read me the amount and I read her the date. I was ashamed to tell you, Dad, because I thought you would say I was buying back my own sobriety.” I told him that no father could ask for a better son.
Late that night, back home in Duluth, I sat alone in the sewing room of Marjorie with the lamp on and read the last page of her letter again. “Do not let Danny think this was his fault,” she wrote. “He was a boy in a back seat, and he carried it into every bad year he had. When you can, tell him the quiet years since he got sober are the proudest of my life.” I found my own handkerchief in the desk drawer, ironed in thirds, and I used it. Then I went upstairs and slept for the first time in sixteen nights.
Before I left, I played the tape for them. Marjorie had recorded the calls of Earl Brandt since 1991 on a little machine she kept in the sewing room, and on the first cassette his voice came through clear as a church bell. “Two fifty on the fifteenth, Mrs. Moen, or I tell the sheriff your boy was driving.” There were eleven more tapes in the safe deposit box, each labeled by year in green ink, and a ledger of every payment. Paul said quietly, “Mom built a case against him.” “She was a nurse,” I said. “She charted everything.”
Monday morning we sat in the office of Sheriff Karen Lindgren in the courthouse in Duluth, the three of us, with the tapes on her desk. Paul told the whole story from the start, and he put his own name first. Lindgren listened for ninety minutes. “Mr. Moen, the time limit on the accident ran out long ago,” she said. “But extortion that goes on month after month is a new crime every month. And on November 16th he told you to mail cash to a post office box in Hibbing by Friday.” She almost smiled. “So let us mail it.”
Friday I sent an envelope of marked twenty dollar bills to Hibbing, and on Saturday morning Earl Brandt, seventy nine years old and retired, walked into the post office to collect it. Deputies Rolf Sandberg and Tina Ochoa were waiting by the boxes. In his house they found three hundred forty thousand dollars in two accounts and a notebook with two other families in it, the Kowalczyks of Cloquet and a widow in Eveleth, each paying every month. The judge gave Earl six years. He also ordered restitution, and one hundred and twenty thousand dollars came back to me.
Sunday the three of us drove to the care center in Proctor. Walter Haugen, eighty four, sat in a wheelchair by the window with twisted hands. Paul knelt in front of him and could not speak. Walter put a hand on his head. “Son, I do not remember much from that night,” he said. “I remember a boy who stayed and held my head in the dark. Marjorie came every Christmas with a fruitcake, and I never knew why. Now I do. You are forgiven. You were forgiven a long time ago.” We cried, all four of us, like children.
The next Sunday Paul stood before his church in Fargo and told it all. The board voted fourteen to one to keep him, and the one came to the door afterward and shook his hand. We put the returned money into a fund that pays the bills of Walter at the care center for the rest of his life. Last Sunday at six, the kitchen phone rang. It was Danny. I carried it into the sewing room and left the door open, and I told him all about the lake, and about his mother.
