The man who stepped out of the yellow taxi in front of my house in Beaumont on the third of December wore a gray prison jacket that was two sizes too big for him, and he carried a small paper sack in one hand. I am Wanda Pruett, seventy five years old, and I stood on the front porch in my apron with the old notebook of my husband Alvin pressed to my chest. He was tall and thin, with a long yellow face and eyes like a hawk. He looked up at the pecan tree in the back yard before he looked at me. “Mrs. Pruett,” he said, “I am Spider.”
I had read his letter forty times. You promised half, Al, it had said, in square block letters on lined paper. I am coming to collect. Now I invited him up the steps, because my mother raised me to offer a cup of coffee to any man who had come a long way. He sat in the kitchen with his hands around the mug, and the afternoon light fell across the scars on his knuckles. He told me, in a dry, gentle voice, about the armored car in 1994, the one million two hundred thousand dollars, and the three men who had planned it.
Alvin, he said, had been the driver. He had been the youngest, and the most frightened, and he had been the only one who was never caught. Spider had gone to Huntsville for thirty years and had never said his name. In return, Al had promised him half of the share of the driver when he came out. I listened, and I felt the cold sink into my bones. For fifty one years I had thought my husband was a man who repaired air conditioners. He had been that, too. He had been so much else besides.
A letter from a Texas prison gave one widow the length of a December afternoon to bring her son back to the truth in Beaumont.
I gave my terms at the kitchen table, looking Spider in the eyes. “Mr. Boudreaux, I will take you to the pecan tree myself, in front of my son Gerald and the two deputies I telephoned an hour ago, who are sitting in their car at the end of the street. If there is money under that tree, it belongs to the people it was taken from. If there is not, then we will all know what kind of man my husband really was. And Gerald, you will be there, and you will tell me what you already know.”
We went out to the pecan tree at dusk, the four of us, with shovels. Gerald, my son, fifty one years old, a loan officer, had gone pale and silent. When the blade struck the metal lid of a cash box, he sank to his knees in the pecan shells. “Mama, I dug here last spring,” he said, in a voice like torn paper. “After Dad passed, I found the notebook, and I took forty thousand dollars out of the box and put the dirt back. I have a bad mortgage. I meant to put it back before anyone knew.” He looked up at Spider. “I am so sorry.”
But as Spider reached for the lid, Gerald lunged. He snatched the steel cash box from the hole, with the cash and the letter of Alvin inside, hugged it to his chest, and sprinted across the back yard toward his truck in the alley, meaning to drive away into the night before anyone could count what was missing. His shoes slipped in the loose dirt. I cried out his name. And at the back gate, in the last gray light, stood the tall man in the gray prison jacket, who had moved faster than I would have believed.
Gerald stopped at the gate with the box in his arms, Spider in front of him with his arms hanging loose, and the two deputies coming around the side of the house with their flashlights on. The old convict spoke in his dry, mild voice. “Son, I spent thirty years in a cell because I kept my mouth shut for your daddy. I did not do it so that you could steal from your mother. Set that box down.” Gerald stared at the thin man, then at me on the porch with the lamp behind me. Slowly he knelt and put the box on the grass.
The consequences were honest and strange. The box held two hundred and twenty thousand dollars and the letter of Alvin, in which he said he had never forgiven himself, and he had saved the money to return it someday. The armored car company, now a large firm in Houston, accepted the money with the written statement of Spider and the letter, and the district attorney declined to reopen an old case against an old man. Gerald repaid the forty thousand dollars, with interest, and he gave a statement. Spider ate supper at my table that night, and he cried over the pot roast.
In the name of my husband Alvin, who passed in 2022, I started the Alvin Pruett Fund. It pays for job training and housing for people coming home from prison and for legal help for families carrying the weight of an old crime, in Jefferson, Orange and Hardin counties. In the first year we placed sixty eight people in jobs and helped forty one families. One was a sixty four year old man from Port Arthur who had come home after twenty six years, and who held his first paycheck up to the window and said it was lighter than he had expected, and heavier.
On a mild afternoon in March, I sat at my kitchen table in Beaumont, with a cup of coffee and a plate of pecan pie, across from a tall thin man in a plain blue work shirt. Spider, who now went by his real name, Larry, had a job at an air conditioning shop, and a small apartment, and a Sunday seat at my church. He ate the pie slowly, with his eyes closed. “Mrs. Pruett,” he said, “Alvin made me a promise, and you kept it.” I told him that a promise is a promise, and I put another slice on his plate.
