My brother Wayne pointed at the amount written on the newest envelope, and I looked, and the floor of my father bedroom seemed to tilt under my feet. It said, Brenda, 2023, and under the name, in the neat hand of Daddy, four thousand dollars. The others, the thirty names that ran back for forty years, held five hundred, eight hundred, perhaps twelve hundred at most. “Russ,” said Wayne, in a hollow voice, “look at it. He gave her more than any of them. He gave her more because he knew what I am.” He sat on the edge of the bed, very slowly, a big man of sixty with trembling hands.
I stood in the upstairs room in Hannibal with the crowbar in one hand and the letter in the other, and I read the page again. “Preacher, I will keep quiet about us as long as the money keeps coming. My husband would ruin us both.” I had read it as the threat of a woman with a secret. I read it now as the whisper of a woman with a plan. Us did not mean the preacher and the woman. It meant the woman and the hidden money, and the bus ticket it would buy. Daddy was not a man being blackmailed. He was a man being trusted.
Wayne told me the rest in a voice I did not know. For nine years, he said, he had not been kind to his wife. He had never hit her, but he had broken every dish in the kitchen, and he drank, and shouted, and she had grown smaller and smaller in the house. Daddy had seen it at Sunday dinner. He had said nothing, but he had put an envelope in the wall with her name on it. “All those women,” said Wayne. “Thirty one wives of men like me. And Daddy sat in the pulpit every Sunday looking at us, and he never once said a word.”
An envelope pulled from a plaster wall gave one son the afternoon to bring his brother back to his wife in Hannibal.
I gave my terms on the bedroom floor, with the envelopes spread around us like fallen leaves. “Wayne, we are going to do what Daddy would have wanted. We will find every one of these women who is still living, and we will see that their envelopes reach them or their daughters, with no questions asked. Brenda is first. You will give her the one with her name on it, in front of me, and you will tell her she is free to use it as she sees fit. And then you are going to the anger counselor in Quincy that Pastor Gill recommended. You will go, or I will drive you.”
Wayne put his face in his hands. “I thought Brenda was just quiet,” he said. “I thought that was her nature. I never once asked what the quiet cost her. I yelled at her about the dishwasher, Russ, for twenty minutes, last Tuesday.” His voice cracked. “Daddy hid this in the wall because he knew I would never have heard it in a sermon. The only way he could reach her was with money, and the only way he could reach me was by passing and letting me find it. I hate that he was right.”
Then Wayne did a terrible thing, out of pure shame. He jumped up, gathered the Brenda envelope and the pile of letters in his arms, and ran down the stairs and out into the yard toward the burn pile behind the garage. He had a book of matches in his shirt pocket. He did not reach the pile. Thirty one women, or their daughters, in church dresses and sensible shoes, who had come that afternoon for the memorial lunch for the Preacher, stood in a line across the yard with their hands clasped, silent, and Wayne ran straight into the middle of them.
The oldest of them, a tiny woman in a lavender suit named Darlene, put out one hand and touched his sleeve. “Wayne Pike,” she said, “your father paid for my son to go to college, and he never once said my name out loud. Give those to your brother.” Wayne looked at the women and the women looked at him. The papers slipped out of his arms and scattered on the lawn, and the wind lifted one or two of them. Nobody moved to grab them. He sank to his knees in the grass and wept like a child.
The money consequences were quiet. Brenda received her envelope that evening in the kitchen, with Wayne standing in the doorway with his hat in his hands, and she held it for a long time without opening it. She said she needed a week to think. She stayed. Wayne entered the counseling in Quincy, and three months later, Brenda said she would stay a while longer to see. The remaining envelopes, forty six thousand, eight hundred dollars, were returned to the families by name, in person, over the spring.
In the name of Daddy, Amos Pike, who passed in January, I started the Amos Pike Fund. It pays for emergency housing, bus tickets and counseling for women leaving unsafe homes, in Marion, Ralls and Lewis counties. In the first year we helped sixty one women and their children. One was a young mother of twenty six from Palmyra who came to the door at midnight with a baby in her arms and a plastic bag of clothes. By morning she had a room and a locked door, and she slept for fourteen hours.
Wayne stood in the yard of the old parsonage in June, in a clean shirt, sober, watching Brenda hang laundry on the line. She wore a yellow dress. He did not go to her. He stood where he was, with his hands at his sides, until she looked over. Then she raised a hand, small, to him, and he raised his. I watched from the porch with a glass of tea. The plaster had been patched in the upstairs wall. The sun was warm, and a breeze moved the sheets.
