The young man holding the baby in the photograph was Lieutenant Eugene Tate, and every person in Florence knew his face. It hung in the vestibule of First Methodist, in a heavy oak frame beneath a brass plate. Eugene Tate, 1918 to 1942, Lost in Action, North Africa. He was the son of the richest cotton family in Lauderdale County, and a stained glass window in the sanctuary had been given in his memory. I had walked past that photograph ten thousand times on my way to Sunday school. I had never once thought to wonder who was in the other picture, the one that Mavis kept.
I read the letter in the empty sanctuary, with the pastor standing quietly at the back. It was one page, in the delicate script of a woman who had been a schoolteacher. Loretta, the baby in the photograph is your father, Walter. I am his mother. Eugene and I were married at the courthouse in June of 1940, in secret, because his family would not have a mill girl for a daughter in law. When he was lost in the war, they refused to claim me or the child. My sister Ruth, your grandmother, raised Walter as her own, and I let her. I sat in the third pew because that is where Eugene asked me to marry him.
I looked at the third pew on the left. It was a plain walnut bench, with a faded cushion and a hymnal rack, and I had never given it a single thought in sixty five years. I sat down in it, where she had sat, and I looked up at the stained glass window of Eugene, glowing red and gold in the afternoon light. All those Sundays, all those hymns, my great aunt had been sitting in the same spot, looking at the memorial to her husband, in a church where no one knew she was his widow. I put my hand over my mouth and let the tears come.
A letter hidden beneath a church pew gave one great niece the weekend to bring a forgotten widow home to Florence.
The pastor, Reverend Ellis Pruitt, a gentle man in his sixties, came and sat beside me. He told me how Mavis had come to him in her last year, ninety one years old and very clear. She had brought him the envelope and asked him to hide it under the board. “She said, give it to Loretta when I am gone, but only if she asks the right question,” he said. “She wanted you to find the board yourself.” I laughed through my tears. That was Mavis. She had stood in the aisle with her purse for thirty years and had never once been understood. She had waited, in her own way, for someone to ask.
I took the letter to my sister Janelle in Muscle Shoals that evening, and we read it aloud in her kitchen with a plate of fried pies between us. Janelle is sixty two. She was still, for a long time. “Daddy always said he had a feeling about Aunt Mavis,” she said finally. “He said she looked at him funny at the Fourth of July picnic. As if she were counting his fingers.” Her eyes filled. “She was. She was counting them, Loretta. Every year, to be sure he was still whole.” We held hands across the table, two grown women, and cried over the fried pies until they were cold.
Whit Tate, the great nephew of Eugene, called me on Wednesday. He is a lawyer in Huntsville, and the head of the Tate family trust, a smooth voice on the telephone. He had heard from a church member, he said, and he wished to be clear. The family had no record of a marriage. If I intended to make a claim, he would contest it with every resource. I told him I had a letter in the hand of Mavis, a photograph, and the copy of a marriage license from the Lauderdale County courthouse that I had found that morning in the probate office. There was a long silence on the line. “I will call you back,” he said.
He called back on Friday, and his voice had changed. He had searched the archives of the trust, and found a sealed folder, written by his grandfather in 1952, that no one had opened. In it was a letter acknowledging the marriage, and a provision. If any child of Eugene and Mavis should ever come forward, the family should honor them with a share of the cotton trust, in memory of a son they had wronged. “Ms. Hale, I am ashamed,” said Whit Tate. “We have owed your family this for seventy years.” I had to sit down on the arm of the sofa. I said that I would be glad to come to Huntsville with my sister.
The money consequences were handled with grace. The trust acknowledged Walter Hale as the legitimate son of Lieutenant Eugene Tate, and awarded his children, my sister and me, a share of seven hundred and forty thousand dollars. We gave a third of it to the church for the restoration of the old sanctuary. We gave a third to the school of the Lauderdale County mill families, where Mavis had taught for forty years. And we kept the last third in a family account, in the name of Walter, for any grandchild who wished to go to college.
In the name of my great aunt, Mavis, who passed in July and who sat in a pew for thirty years, I started the Third Pew Fund. It pays for legal help, record searches and counseling for families in Lauderdale, Colbert and Limestone counties who are claiming the names of fathers and mothers never acknowledged. In the first year, we helped eighteen families. A man of seventy, in a pressed suit, laid an old military dog tag on the desk and said, “My mother told me my father was a soldier.” I asked him to tell me the name, and I wrote it down.
On the first Sunday of September, the Reverend Pruitt read the letter of Mavis aloud from the pulpit, to a full church, in a quiet and steady voice. When he finished, there was a silence like a held breath. Then the oldest member of the congregation, a woman of ninety four in a purple hat, stood up and walked down the aisle to the third pew. She laid her hand on the walnut. “This pew belongs to Mrs. Tate,” she said, loudly. And the whole church stood. A small brass plate was screwed to the pew that afternoon. It read, Reserved for Mavis, who waited. I sat in it, and I put my hand on the hymnal.
