A dentist from Springfield, Dr. Marcus Kirby, had been after that ground for two years. He hunted a lease south of us and wanted a place of his own, and he had mailed me a card every Christmas with a number on it. I had thrown away the cards. On Tuesday, the twenty-fifth of August, five days after the letter, I called him. He said thirty-eight thousand dollars, cash, closing before the middle of September. I could have asked for more. I did not have the stomach to haggle over my grandfather’s hillside.
I asked myself a hundred times why I did not just call my uncle. Here is the honest answer, and it is not a good one.
He would have done it. That was the problem. If I had walked into his kitchen and said the word IRS, my uncle would have gotten up from the table, gone to his desk and written me a check. He would have emptied what he had, and when that was not enough he would have gone to the bank and put up his own ten acres. I knew him that well. I knew it the way I know a rotten roof from the sound under my boot. He had already put seven thousand dollars into my mouth once, and I could not stand to have him pay for me a second time, at sixty-six, in retirement, on a county pension, when the man who owed him was thirty-eight years old and had gotten himself into this with his own two hands.
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And I was ashamed of the taxes. Granddad has said one sentence to me my entire life as many times as he has said grace: A Penrod pays what he owes. I owed the government thirty-one thousand dollars that I had taken out of eight men’s checks. I could not say that sentence to my uncle’s face. I could not say it to my grandfather. It was easier to sell the camp and say nothing, and to promise myself I would explain it all after the closing, when it was done and could not be argued with.
Tamra begged me to call him. She said it twice, once at supper and once in the dark. I told her I would tell him in person the Saturday after the closing. The Saturday came and went. That night she said, “He will not hear it as a reason, Jared. He will hear it as a door you shut.”
She was right. She is right about most things, and I am glad she is still here to tell me.
We closed on Friday, the eleventh of September, in the office of a title company in the next county seat. The cashier’s check was thirty-eight thousand dollars. I put thirty-one thousand into the IRS on Monday the fourteenth, and the lien was never filed. On the way out of the bank I took the other seven thousand, which was what was left, and I did not put it in my account. I put it in a plain envelope in the glove box of my truck.
I could not tell you exactly why. I think I knew, the way you know a thing you refuse to look at, whose money it was.
The night before the closing I drove out to the camp alone with a flashlight. I took one thing off the wall. On the second nail from the stove there was a faded blaze-orange cap with the bill folded flat, the cap Granddad hung there in the fall of 2003 and nobody ever moved. Granddad would not let anybody touch it. I took it down and put it on the dash of my truck, where it still sits. I am not going to apologize for that one. It was his.