The Last Vat at Pike Lick

The room

I have never heard a silence like that. The steam ticked in the jacket of the vat. Out on the dock someone dropped a folding chair and no one turned.

Then Delwin Ledbetter spoke from the back, in a voice I had not heard in thirty years.

“Forty-one years, Harker,” he said. “We lost the house on Ferry Road. I drove a bread truck in Danville for nine years, and my knees are shot from it.”

“I know,” I said. “I am sorry. I will make it right if you’ll let me, however you say.”

“You have some nerve,” he said, and then he stopped, because his own voice had cracked. He turned and walked out through the dock door, and the room let him go.

Then Truett handed his daughter to his wife and crossed the floor with his jaw set. I braced myself, because my boy has my temper. He stopped three feet away. I could see him working at it.

“Daddy,” he said. “You could have told me this in the truck.”

“I know it.”

“You could have told me when I was twelve.”

“I know it, son.”

“I’d have still been your boy,” he said, and his face fell apart, and he turned away and wiped his face on his sleeve. I had not seen him cry since he was small.

I could not look for Lavada. When I finally did, she was still in her chair, with her hands folded tight in her lap, looking at me as if she were learning me over again.

The back row

Billie Gentry had not moved through any of it.

She sat by the door with the cap in her lap and her father’s gray eyes on me, and her face gave me nothing. I could not have said whether she hated me or pitied me. I think she had not decided.

When I lowered the microphone she stood. She stood with the cap in one hand. People leaned back in their chairs to let her pass, and the room was so quiet I heard her boots on the concrete.

She did not speak to me. She did not look at the vat. She walked out through the dock door into the October light, and the door swung shut behind her.

I did not go after her. I wanted to, with my whole body. But a man who has waited forty-one years to tell the truth does not get to make the other person carry it one more step, so I stayed where I was.

Tamsin was standing by the cow sign with the bone-handled knife in both fists and tears running down her face.

“Mr. Dunn,” she said. “What do you want to do?”

“Finish the vat,” I said. “It wants another hour. Nothing hurries it.”