The Green Ledger and the Furnace Fund

Why I Did Not Call the Sheriff

Some folks at the church asked me later why I did not go straight to the law, and a few were angry about it. So here is my honest answer, in order.

First, the scripture I just told you. I believe it. I did not believe it very cheerfully that week, but I believe it.

Second, there was nothing on paper. This is the part that surprised me most, once I started looking into it.

The money had never been in a special account. It sat in the church’s regular savings at the Farmers and Merchants, mixed in with the building reserve, because that was how we had always done small memorial gifts. The only record was the bulletin, the jar, and a hundred people’s memory. We are a country church. We trusted each other.

I did drive to the county seat that Thursday and I did stand in the hall of the sheriff’s office, and I asked a deputy I knew from the feed store a plain question, with no names.

“If a church board chairman moved church money into another account and said it was being managed, what would you do?”

He rubbed his chin. “Is it still in the church’s name?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did the board vote on it?”

“I don’t know that either.”

“Then I’d tell you it sounds like church business, Vernon, until somebody proves otherwise,” he said, kindly. “And proving it takes a prosecutor and an audit and about a year. By then your furnace is a year older.”

I thanked him and went home.

Third, and this one I am less proud of, I knew Warren. He is not a stranger. He is fifty-eight years old and he was baptized in the creek behind our church the same summer my youngest was.

His father built our pulpit. His mother, Lois, is eighty-eight and she has sat in the third pew on the left since before I was a deacon. She holds her hymnal in both hands like it might float away.

If I sent a deputy to Warren’s office, the next morning it would be in every kitchen in the county. The Teague name would be a different thing for a hundred years.

I thought a man was in trouble and had made a terrible choice, and that a congregation might still be able to do what a courtroom never could.

I could have been wrong. I want you to know that. I carried that question for three weeks.

The Green Ledgers

On Friday morning I went to see Ardith Boone, because Maxine told me to.

“If anyone knows what we raised,” she said, “it’s Ardith. And if anyone has it in writing, it’s Ardith.”

Ardith is eighty-four. She lives alone in a white frame house at the edge of Elk Fork, with a yard full of iris bulbs and a sunroom that has not seen a visitor in years except me and the mailman.

She was our church treasurer for thirty-one years, and she kept the books by hand, in ink, in green clothbound ledgers she bought at the office supply in the county seat.

I sat in her sunroom, and I told her what Warren had said.

When I finished she said one word. “Bring me my glasses.”

They were on the windowsill. She put them on and stood up slowly, and she walked to a bookcase against the wall of the sunroom and pulled a green book off the third shelf.

“There,” she said. “I wondered when somebody would ask.”

I looked at the cover. It was lettered in her slanted hand, and it said Pleasant Ridge Baptist, Special Gifts, and under that, February.

“I kept it,” she said. “Warren said he’d take the books at the first of the year, and he did. But Ina came to me at the funeral dinner and she said, Ardith, will you keep track of the jar for me? So I did.”

“You kept it separate?”

“I kept it right.” She opened the book on her knees. “Two counters, same as the church rule since nineteen and eighty-nine. Me and Ina, then me and Nell Ladd, then me and Vernon’s Maxine, one Sunday at my kitchen table when you were out of town.”

Ardith turned the pages one at a time. Every gift was there, in blue-black ink. The date. The amount. The giver’s name, if the giver had given a name.

“Every dollar was for that furnace,” she said. “I wrote it at the top of every single page, so nobody could ever say they hadn’t been told.”

“Ardith,” I said. “Would you let me carry that to the church?”

“Not until I’ve told Ina,” she said.

“Told her what?”

“That I always knew the first line in it would matter someday.” She said it and she would not say another word about it. I asked twice. She only patted the book.

I did not know what she meant. I will come back to that.