I had been married for forty one years to a man who saved everything, and I had never once looked in the places he saved it. Lisa Tran told me the rest in my car, in a parking lot in Mobile, where the sun was beating on the hood, and I sat with my hands on the wheel and let it all go through me like cold water. At the end she said, “He told me you would be angry. He said, she will be angry about the account, and then she will be angry about the train, and then she will be fine. Nancy always lands on her feet.”
I laughed. I could not help it. It was the exact thing Roger would have said, in the exact voice, with a praline in his hand. “Where is the rest of it?” I asked. “Where did he save the orders?” Lisa pulled a small brass key from her cardigan pocket and laid it on the dashboard. “A safe deposit box at the bank in Hattiesburg, across the street from the crew room. Box 311. Two keys. He gave me one in 2009. He kept the other in the lining of his conductor cap. Did you ever notice him wearing the same cap for seventeen years?”
I had. I had washed that cap by hand, on Saturdays, for seventeen years, and thought nothing of the stiff patch in the band. The next morning I took it from the closet where it still hung, and opened the patch with my sewing scissors, and the second key fell into my palm. At the bank in Hattiesburg, a young teller led the two of us down to the vault. Lisa and I put in our keys together and turned them at the same moment, like two women opening a church door.
A quiet man who keeps one hidden account for the truth may leave his widow the loudest voice in the courtroom.
The box held three things. A thick blue folder with the letterhead of the railroad: dispatch orders, dated the twelfth of March 2008, signed by a vice president, Lamar Dutton, instructing the crew of train 417 to run with thirty three cars when the track could safely carry only fifteen. A cassette tape, labeled in his boxy printing, Dutton, phone, April 2008. And a long letter, six pages in blue ballpoint, addressed to me, which began, Nan, I am so sorry I did not tell you, and which I could not read in the vault. I folded it into my purse like a hymnal.
The tape was a recorded call. Roger, tired and polite. Then another voice, smooth, familiar to anybody who had ever watched the local news: “Roger, you are a good man. You have a pension coming. Nobody was hurt. The track failed. That is what the report says, and that is what the report will say. If you start telling people otherwise, I can promise that you will never run a train again, and that your wife will wonder why.” Lisa put her hand on my arm. “He gave this to me in 2009,” she whispered. “He said, if I die, take it to someone brave.”
Nobody in our family is brave, I thought. We are the kind of people who pay our taxes and bring a covered dish. But I thought of my husband, who had sat on a stool in a crew room for seventeen years, eating his sandwich, with all of this in his cap. And I thought of three houses on a gravel road in Lamar County, with children who had drunk the water. “I will take it,” I said. “I will take it to whoever you tell me. I was a medical records clerk for twenty nine years. I know how to hand over a file.”
Lisa took me to see her employer, a federal whistleblower lawyer in Jackson named Ellis Carmichael, a white haired man in suspenders who had spent his career suing railroads. He read the orders, he listened to the tape, and he took off his glasses. “Mrs. Whitlock,” he said, “your husband has handed me the only thing I have never been able to get: the voice of the man himself. The Federal Railroad Administration has been waiting seventeen years for a file like this. And so have the families in Lamar County.” He rose and shook my hand with both of his. “You had a very good husband.”
The grand jury indicted Lamar Dutton in the spring, for conspiracy, falsifying federal safety records, and endangering the lives of the residents along the Hattiesburg line. The attorneys of the railroad, a row of dark suits, tried to claim that the tape was forged. They did not account for a retired phone company technician who testified that the call had come from a number in the home of Dutton himself. The jury found him guilty on every count. The judge, a firm woman, said that no corporation in America is so large that it can pay a man to bury a train.
The railroad settled with the families of Lamar County for forty one million dollars. Eleven children whose well had been poisoned, and their parents, and a retired schoolteacher with a failing liver, received their checks at a church in Purvis, in a basement with folding chairs. I sat in the back row. Nobody there knew my face. A woman with a cane stood up and thanked a man named Roger Whitlock, whom she had never met, and the whole church applauded for a long time. I looked at my hands. They were the hands Roger had held for forty one years.
The last praline was still in the freezer. I had found it in his bag after the funeral, in its little paper sleeve, from the final trip to New Orleans, and had not been able to eat it, or throw it away. On the day of the verdict I took it out and cut it in two with a butter knife. Lisa and I sat on my porch swing, in the late sun, with a pitcher of tea between us. I gave her the bigger half. “He always said the best things in life come from New Orleans,” I told her. She laughed. We ate it slowly, in the quiet, and it was sweet.
