I drove to the quarry at five in the morning with a thermos of coffee and a shaking heart, and I stood at the lip of the old north pit while the sun came up over the white walls of limestone. The water was gone. At the bottom, sixty feet below me, lay a rusted steel locker half sunk in gray mud, and beside it a pair of boots. The project manager, a quiet man from Indianapolis named Ron Pryor, did not say anything. He put a hand on my shoulder and let me look as long as I needed. Then he said, “Mr. Hollowell, the sheriff is on his way.”
The sheriff came with two deputies and a man from the coroner office who carried a clipboard. They climbed down on a ladder the crew had built. I stayed at the top with my hat in my hands. After an hour, the man with the clipboard climbed back up and said what I already knew. There was a young man in that pit, he said, a man of nineteen or twenty, and in the pocket of his work shirt was a plastic card from my own company, with the name Danny Kirkland printed on it in blue ink. I sat down on the tailgate of my truck.
I thought of his mother, Alma, who came to my office every year on the second of August with a pie and a photograph, and who left every time with the same question. Did you see anything, Mr. Hollowell? And every time I said no. I had been telling her the truth, and the truth had been a lie, because I did not know what I was seeing. The sheriff, a gray man named Tom Rexroth, sat down on the tailgate beside me. “Clarence,” he said, “your son in law has a lot to answer for.”
A drained quarry pit and a steel locker gave one old stonecutter the length of a single day to bring his family back to the truth in Bedford.
I gave my terms to Sheriff Rexroth before I gave them to anyone else. I would bring Gary to the station myself, that very evening, on his own two feet, and the sheriff would not send a car to the house of my daughter. I did not want Janet to see men in uniforms in her driveway. I wanted her to see her father. The sheriff thought about it for a long time and then said yes, with one condition. If Gary ran, the sheriff would not wait. I said that was only fair, and I went home to change my shirt.
Gary was on the back deck again, in the same chair, with the same brother Dale and the same cigarette. I walked up with Janet behind me, because she had seen my face and followed me out of the kitchen. I said the name Danny Kirkland once, quietly. Dale stood up and left by the side gate without a word. Gary stayed. He put his cigarette out, folded his hands and said it all in one breath. “It was an accident, Clarence. We argued about a missing generator. He fell from the bench into the sump. I panicked. I took him to the north pit and I moved his truck to Mitchell. I have regretted it every day for thirty four years.”
When I told him the sheriff was waiting, Gary snatched the keys of my truck from the deck table, meaning to drive to the highway and never be seen again. He jumped off the steps and ran across the gravel. He did not get far. My daughter Janet, fifty five years old and not a fast woman, stepped into the driveway in her house slippers and planted herself in front of his bumper. “Gary Pruitt,” she said, “if you want to leave, you will have to drive over me.”
He stopped with the engine running, his knuckles white on the wheel. I could see the whole thirty four years sitting in his face. Then he turned the key, got out, and handed me the keys without looking at either one of us. Janet was shaking so hard I had to hold her up. “Daddy,” she said, “I did not know.” “I know you did not, baby,” I told her. We drove into town in the truck, the three of us, and Gary talked the whole way, as though the words had been waiting in his throat for all those years.
Gary pleaded guilty in the spring to hiding what had happened to Danny and to lying to the police, and the judge in Bedford gave him eleven years, which is more than most men get for less. Dale got probation. Janet filed for divorce and moved into the guest room of my house, where she cried for a month and then began to laugh again. The stone company paid the sheriff costs without complaint. Most important, the daughter of Alma, a nurse in Evansville named Marcy, got the one thing her mother had prayed for, which was a name on a stone.
In the name of Danny Kirkland, who passed in 1991, I started the Danny Kirkland Fund. It pays for safety training, steel toe boots and trade school tuition for young quarry and farm workers in Lawrence, Monroe and Orange counties. In the first year we outfitted ninety four boys and girls and paid for forty one semesters at the trade school in Bedford. One nineteen year old named Cody showed up to the first class in boots with the soles flapping. He put on the new pair, stood up straight, and said nobody had ever bought him anything he did not have to work three weeks for.
Every second of August now, I drive out to Mitchell with a pecan pie and sit on the grass by the stone of Danny and Alma. Marcy comes with her two boys. The boys wear their own steel toe boots and carry a thermos of lemonade, and they set a tiny paper flag by the stone. Janet is there too, a little gray, a little free. The north pit is a pond now, with a bench and a white sign, and the cold green water is full of the reflection of the limestone I cut with my hands.
