I held the letter up to the afternoon light behind the old depot in Maben, with the two animals dozing in their harness at the hitching rail and my son sitting on the wagon seat, and I read the shaky writing from the top. It was addressed to Ruel, and it was written in the unsteady blue ink of an old woman, and it began, “Dear Mr. Ruel, I am writing this while I still have the strength.” I looked at the name at the bottom. Hattie Lowe. Everybody in Webster County over sixty knew that name.
Miss Hattie had taught second grade at the colored school in Eupora before the integration and then at the consolidated school afterward, for forty two years. She had taught my husband to read his numbers. She had taught half the county. She was ninety one now, in a nursing home in Starkville, and I had not seen her since the funeral. I put on my reading glasses and kept going, one line at a time, while Wade watched me with his hat in his hand.
In 1999, she wrote, her late husband Hosea had two yearlings at a sale barn in Kosciusko that he could not afford to feed. Ruel had bought them both. But Hattie, who had a soft spot for any animal that was not wanted, had put up half of the price out of her own egg money, and had asked him to put her name on the bill of sale as a co owner of the one called Repeat. She had never intended to take him. She only wanted to know that he was safe.
“The second name on the bill of sale is hers,” Wade said slowly. “I thought it was a clerk mistake.” I shook my head. I turned to the last paragraph and read it aloud, and my voice shook on the numbers. “I am an old woman, Mr. Ruel, and I do not have many months. When I pass, I want my half of Repeat to go to my great grandson, Tyrell. He is eleven years old, and he loves these animals more than any child I have ever known. Please see that he gets to drive him.”
A promise made over a pair of yearlings can last for twenty years, if two honest people remember to keep it.
I folded the letter and held it against my chest. Ruel had received it three weeks before he died, I now understood, and had gone out to the barn that same evening to tell the pair. He had not mentioned it to me. He had always been a man who liked to settle a thing quietly. “Wade,” I said, “your father meant to arrange it, and I believe he was waiting for the right moment. He never found it. That is the whole of the matter.” My son looked at the ground.
“Mama,” he said, “I came to tell you the man in Starkville was right. One of them was not Daddy to keep. I was so ashamed. I thought maybe I should let him go.” His voice cracked. “But I read the letter, and I knew I could not.” He lifted his head. “And I know now what you meant, when you said I made a mistake about what you were worth. I was wrong, Mama. About everything. I am sorry.” He climbed down from the wagon, put his arms around me, and wept on my shoulder.
The next morning, the two of us drove to Starkville in his truck, with Kendra in the back seat. She had not said a word the whole way. At the nursing home, a nurse led us down a bright hall to a room with a flowered quilt on the bed, where a tiny woman in a pink cardigan sat in a chair with her hands in her lap. When she saw me, she smiled. “Verdie Mae,” she said. “You came about the animals.” I knelt by her chair and took her hands, which were light as paper.
We talked for an hour. She told me about Hosea, and about the day in Kosciusko, and about the way a long eared animal looks at you when it makes up its mind. Kendra stood in the doorway, with her handbag held tight in front of her, and listened. Then, to my astonishment, she walked across the room and knelt on the other side of the chair. “Miss Hattie,” she said, “I was going to sell those two for meat. I do not know how to say how sorry I am.” The old woman patted her cheek.
“Child,” she said, “we all have our hard days. Come meet my Tyrell.” He was in the hall, a thin, solemn boy with a Bible school shirt, and when he heard who we were, he hardly dared to breathe. He had never seen a team up close. We drove him back to the farm that very afternoon. When he put his hand on the nose of Repeat, the old fellow lowered his head and blew a long breath into the child palm. Tyrell burst into tears, and Pete reached over and lipped at his hair.
We worked out the arrangement at my kitchen table that evening, with Miss Hattie on the telephone. I would keep both animals at my place, and Tyrell would come every Saturday to learn to drive. She would sign over her half to him, in writing, with a lawyer to witness. The fair would be their stage, in the summer. Kendra baked the first pie and brought it out to the barn. She said very little, and I did not press her. Some people take a while to arrive at their own kindness.
At the county fair in August, the wagon was painted fresh, with the sign of Ruel on the side, and a small new line beneath it. Pete and Repeat, Wagon Rides, Five Dollars. Tyrell sat on the seat beside me in a straw hat too large for him, holding the lines. He drove a full circuit of the grounds, six hundred yards, with the whole fair standing to watch. When he reined in, he turned to me with a shining face. “Mrs. Verdie,” he said, “they listened.”
