Mr. Dalton did not need a microphone either. Ninety four years old, with a voice worn thin as paper, he lifted the oxygen tube from his nose and set it on his knee as if putting down a glass. “Bill,” he said, “sit down. I have been carrying this for forty nine years, and I will not carry it into the ground.” The ballroom was so quiet that I heard the tank hiss beside him. Bill Cantrell lowered the microphone and sat on the edge of a chair. His mouth moved. He said nothing at all.
“On the night of the second of May, 1975, I set a fire,” Mr. Dalton said. “Not the boy. I did. I had taken money from the athletic fund for six years, and your father, Bill, lent me the nerve and the matches, because the school board president held the insurance rider on that gym and had raised it from forty thousand to four hundred thousand dollars that winter. It was supposed to be an empty building. It was supposed to be a Friday night. We did not know that Walter Hensley had gone back to fetch his lunch pail.”
Nobody moved. A waiter in the doorway set his tray down on the floor, slowly. “I saw the light under the gym door at nine,” I said. I did not know I was going to speak. My voice came out thin and strange. “I was in your office, Mr. Dalton, emptying your wastebasket. I heard shouting in the hall, and then I saw Bill run past the window with his shirt over his face. When I opened the bottom drawer of your desk to put away your ashtray, there was an envelope of cash, and this ring, still warm. His ring.”
A truth buried for forty nine years does not die; it waits in the lining of a purse for a woman brave enough to open it.
“I took the ring to my daddy,” I went on. “I thought he would know what to do. Instead he called the man who came to our porch. The man took the envelope and gave my daddy a new truck, and I was told what would happen to us if I ever said a word. I was seventeen. I did not know how to be brave. I kept the ring in the lining of every purse I have ever owned, because I could not bear to throw it away, and I could not bear to use it. I am sorry, Lonnie. I am so sorry.”
Lonnie Sizemore had not moved. He stood at the back of the hall in his brown suit with his hands at his sides, and he looked at me for a long moment, and then he smiled, a small, tired smile that I remembered from the eleventh grade. “Betty Jo,” he said, “you were a child. I do not blame a child.” He walked down the aisle between the tables, past two hundred silent people, until he stood before the wheelchair of Mr. Dalton. “I came to see you two weeks ago,” he said gently. “Thank you for coming tonight.”
Sheriff Harlan Cole, my old boss, who had been sitting at table nine with his wife and his dessert, stood up with his napkin still in his hand. He had been a deputy in 1975. He walked slowly to the front of the room. “Mr. Dalton,” he said, “I heard every word. I am sorry, sir, but I will have to take a statement.” The old principal nodded. “Of course,” he said. “I wrote it down years ago.” Behind him the staff of the club were quietly holding the doors, and the man who had been filming the slideshow lowered his camera with a shaky hand.
The statement ran to nineteen pages. Mr. Dalton gave it from a hospital bed three days later, and he died in October without ever standing trial. But the pages were enough. The prosecutor of Raleigh County opened the case, and the confession was joined, after a week of silence, by a second, unexpected voice: Bill Cantrell walked into the office of the prosecutor with his lawyer and told the rest. He had struck the match at the urging of his father, and he had run when he heard the scream.
Bill resigned from the state senate on a Monday morning, in front of the cameras, with his voice breaking. His billboards on I 77 came down one by one. He pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and arson, and a judge who had known his father sentenced him to twelve years. He was sixty eight years old. He did not look at me when it was read, and I did not need him to. I only looked across the aisle, where Lonnie sat in the same brown suit with the hands of an old man folded tight in his lap.
The conviction of Lonnie was vacated in January. The governor himself signed the order. The state of West Virginia, after eight months of argument, agreed to pay him two million dollars for forty nine years of his life, which is not a fair price and was never meant to be. He bought a small white house on the edge of Beckley, with a porch, and a garden, and a chair where a man can watch the evening come down without anyone telling him when to go inside.
On the day of the ceremony at the courthouse steps, a podium had been set up with a microphone, and a hundred people stood on the lawn. Lonnie came up the steps in a new gray suit. Before he spoke I stepped forward, took a clean handkerchief from my purse, and wiped the dust from that podium, slowly, from one end to the other. “For the sake of old times,” I said. Everyone laughed, and this time it was warm. Then I stepped aside, and Lonnie took the microphone, and he thanked the girl with the bucket.
