I knelt at the lip of the hole in my back yard in Perry County, in my church dress and my garden gloves, and ran my fingers over the carving on the underside of the broken slab. Whoever made it had pressed deep into the wet concrete in the summer of 1979 with the point of a nail. Sheriff Elbert Napier. Perry County. July 1979. I am Ruby Nell Cantrell, seventy six years old, and I knew that name the way I knew the names of the hills. Elbert Napier had been the sheriff of this county for twenty four years. His son, Gary, was the judge executive now, and Gary Napier was the man who held the paper on my son Dwayne.
The badge in the ammunition can was of Elbert, and the money in the plastic bundles was the money he took from the coal companies in 1979 to look the other way on a mine that was not safe. Virgil was a young deputy then, the only honest one in the office, and he found the cash in the trunk of the car of the sheriff. He had no one to give it to. The state police were friends of the sheriff, and the circuit judge was his cousin. So Virgil took the badge and the money, poured a slab over the well that very night, and said nothing for forty five years.
Dwayne had run to his truck without a word, and I knew exactly where he was going. I stood up from the hole with a stiff knee and walked into the house and dialed the number on the card that Virgil had taped to the inside of his Bible, the number of a trooper at the Kentucky State Police post in Hazard named Sergeant Lacey Combs. She picked up on the second ring. “Mrs. Cantrell,” she said, “I have been waiting a long time to hear from a Cantrell. Do not touch anything else. I am on my way.”
A name carved under a broken slab gave one widow the length of a hot afternoon to bring her son back to the truth in Hazard.
I gave my terms to my son when he came back down the holler an hour later, with Gary Napier in the passenger seat of a county pickup. “Dwayne, I am not angry, and I am not afraid,” I said, standing on my porch. “That money was never ours. Your father kept it safe for forty five years, until someone honest could be found. It goes to the State Police and the Auditor, every dollar, and the badge of your father goes with it. And you, my son, will tell the Sergeant everything you know about the debt that you owe Gary Napier. That is the only way you walk free.”
Dwayne got out of the truck and stood in the yard, a heavy gray man in a Keeneland cap with his hands hanging. “Mama, I owe him ninety thousand dollars from the horses,” he said. “Gary said he would forgive it if I helped him get what was under that slab. He knew his daddy hid something in 1979, and he has been looking for it ever since.” His voice broke. “I told myself it was only old concrete. I ran down to the truck to call him before I understood what I was doing. I betrayed Daddy. I betrayed you.” He bowed his head.
Gary Napier had been standing silent beside the truck, a man of sixty in a pressed shirt with a county seal on the pocket. At the mention of his name, he moved quickly, crossing the grass in four strides, and he seized the ammunition can from the porch step and spun toward the road, evidently planning to throw it in the bed of his pickup. He got five feet. My neighbor, old Mr. Slone, stepped across the path with a shovel. Two church ladies from the road below put down their casseroles. And Sergeant Combs herself, in her gray hat, came walking up the holler with two troopers.
Gary stood in the middle of the yard with the olive green can in his arms, and the whole mountain seemed to wait. A mourning dove called from the pine behind the house. Sergeant Combs stopped six feet from him and held out her hand, palm up. “Judge Executive,” she said, in her flat clear voice, “you have been standing on top of that can all your life. Please set it on the porch.” Gary looked at the troopers, at the neighbors, at the old woman in the church dress. He lowered the can onto the boards of the porch as gently as a baby.
The consequences were slow and thorough. The state police opened the case again, and the Auditor of Public Accounts traced the money to the bribes of 1979. Gary Napier resigned that winter, and Dwayne gave a full statement. The circuit judge, who was new, forgave his debt as the product of an illegal lender, and ordered him into a gambling program. The one million four hundred thousand dollars went back to the school fund of Perry County. The court awarded a finder reward of one hundred and forty thousand dollars to the Cantrell family.
In the name of my husband Virgil, who passed in May, I started the Virgil Cantrell Fund. I used the reward. It pays for books and school supplies for the children of coal miners and for rides to the black lung clinic for retired miners, in Perry, Letcher and Knott counties. In the first year we gave school supplies to one thousand and four children and drove four hundred and twelve rides to the clinic. One was an eighty four year old retired miner from Vicco who had missed his checkups for six years for want of a car, and who rode in the front seat with his hat on his knee.
On the first Saturday in October, I stood in the yard of my house with a rake, and the maples on the ridge were red and gold. A new concrete patio lay where the old slab had been, poured by Dwayne himself, sober for one hundred and eighty days, with a rough little hand print pressed into one corner in the wet cement. It was the hand of Virgil, traced from an old photograph. Dwayne stood beside me, wiping his hands on a rag. “Mama,” he said, “I carved something on the underside of the new one. You will never see it.” I patted his arm. “That is how it ought to be,” I said.
