There are statutes of limitations on theft and assault. Legal limitations, anyway. My friend Drew Becker could explain the legalities of it, but he died five years ago while hang gliding in Sedona. Before that, he retired to Asheville, defended the accused in Indianapolis, and broke into a church with me in Knoxville when we were twenty-one. As for limitations on guilt, regret, remorse—it took fifty years, six months, and three days for it to lessen, for me anyway. I’d wonder how the preacher feels about that night, but he doesn’t feel a thing. The Reverend Lucius McNair was welcomed into the arms of the Lord on September 25, 2007 at his home in Pascagoula, Mississippi, where he pastured his flock at The Brotherhood of True Believers from 1973 to 1996 . . . He was preceded in death by his parents, Elias and Pauline, his sister Jane, his daughters Corinne and Maryanne, and his beloved wife of forty-nine years, Belinda.
In June, 1972, Drew and I were in Evansville, Indiana, home on summer break from IU. Drew was a political science major with law school in sight. I took mostly English classes and anything rumored easy: Music Appreciation, Pysch 101, a philosophy course called Moral Ambivalence (pass/fail). School was keeping me out of Vietnam. Other than that, I didn’t have a clue. When Drew suggested we take a hike on the Appalachian Trail, I thought, why not? But neither of us had a car, and our parents couldn’t give up theirs.
Long hairs, we were called. Long hairs with our thumbs out on U.S. Highway 41. Kentucky Avenue, in town. There we were, outside The Farmer’s Daughter Restaurant waiting for our first ride—me with brown hair to my shoulders and an orange JanSport backpack, an early twenty-first birthday gift from my parents; Drew with red hair down his back and a green North Face.
It was Saturday morning. Drew’s father had driven us to the restaurant and bought us breakfast before leaving us with our thumbs pointing south. We’d been standing there for almost an hour when a tan Chevy Bel Air pulled over. A young man with a buzzcut leaned toward the open, passenger-side window and said he could take us as far as Fort Campbell. His name was Stan. His uniform, the color of his car. As we crossed the Ohio River into Kentucky, Stan told us he’d been given permission to attend his father’s funeral in Vincennes. Twenty, thirty miles later, he brought up the war. “I’d give my left nut to keep from going, but my dad would roll over in his drawer if I didn’t.”
Drew and I admitted to marching against the war. Twice in Bloomington. Once in Indianapolis, where we circled the War Memorial. “I hope you march your butts off so I don’t get mine shot,” Stan said as we got out of his car at Fort Campbell. When we saluted him, he smiled and gave us the finger.
Two rides later, we were in Nashville standing on a ramp to I-40 East when a gold Oldsmobile 442 pulled over. A muscle car. After hopping from the car and popping the trunk, the young driver turned to us, grinned and said, “Jonah L. McNair,” extending his thin hand to me, then Drew.
Jonah said he lived Knoxville, and he could take us there. As we put our packs in the trunk, I saw a bumper sticker that read, Jesus Loves You. This I know and So Should You. Jonah grabbed a guitar from the backseat and put it on top of our packs. As he shut the trunk, he pointed to the sticker and said, “Don’t worry, it’s my uncle’s car. My parents need their piece of shit for work.”
Jonah couldn’t have been much over eighteen. That morning, he’d auditioned to be a studio musician at Mercury Records. He said he’d sat in with Norman Blake and seen Jerry Lee Lewis in the lobby. Jerry Lee’s nose was bandaged. He was telling everyone he broke it in a bar fight. Jonah said Jerry Lee had “balls of fire, all right.” Jonah was sure he’d hear from the Mercury people, that he’d be backing up Jerry Lee soon.
In Lebanon, Tennessee, we stopped for a late lunch at a small restaurant, as much a country store as anything. Jonah asked the hostess, who doubled as cashier, if we could sit at the table by the window. It was also the table closest to the door. We had just finished our lunches when our waitress went into the kitchen and the hostess passed our table. She was leading a man to the table farthest from ours. With no warning, Jonah stood and in a quiet, insistent voice said, “Let’s go. Now!” Within seconds, the three of us were out the door and into the car. By the time we saw the hostess on the porch, the Olds was spraying gravel from the lot.
Two hours later, we arrived in Knoxville, where Drew had a friend in a UT fraternity. As Jonah dropped us off at the SAE house, he said, “See you at the Ryman one day.” If confidence were a muscle, he was in the right car. Years later, I learned that we ran out of the world’s first Cracker Barrel.
That night at the frat house, Drew and I drank so much beer we didn’t get away until noon. After hitching to Gatlinburg, we paid three dollars to pitch our tent in a private campground. By noon the next day, we’d walked past all the tourist traps, through smells of taffy, fudge, and buttered popcorn, and caught a ride to the Charlie’s Bunyan trailhead. It led up to the AT.
A troop of Boy Scouts beat us to the shelter that night. When we got there, they were luring a bear from the woods and into the campsite by dropping a trail of crackers on the ground. The Scouts’ leader, dead to the world and his green-shirt charges, was asleep on a bunk in the shelter. When the bear came into the campsite, the Scouts pelted it with rocks. As the bear backed into the woods, the Scouts started picking up rocks and dropping more crackers.
“Do you little fuckers want to stop or do you want us to stop you?” asked Drew, loud enough to wake up the leader, a heavy-set man who’d more than likely struggled with the trail. He offered two corner bunks to Drew and me, but we pitched our tent and left the bunks to the Scouts. The next five nights, we left the shelters to other small rodents.
Altogether, we hiked sixty-seven miles on the trail. We counted eight more bears, a porcupine, three raccoons, and a bobcat who was as afraid of us as we were of him. Most nights, marijuana was involved. On my birthday, I saw the Milky Way explode.

We completed our hike on Saturday. On Sunday afternoon, June 21, Drew and I had been standing for more than an hour on a ramp to I-40 West in Knoxville when a burgundy, Ford Fairmont sedan pulled over. “Well smack me in the ass and call me Sally,” said Jonah McNair. He’d been on his way to his house, his parents’ house, when at first he’d passed by. He took the next exit and doubled back to pick us up.
Mercury Records had called Jonah in for a second audition, set for eleven o’clock Monday morning. Jonah said he could give us a ride first thing tomorrow, but he couldn’t let us stay with him that night, Sunday night. “My parents would take one look at you and throw you out on your hippie butts,” he said. And the SAE house was out of his way, he claimed. But Jonah thought his uncle might put us up if we went to his house without calling.
As we walked onto the porch, Reverend Lucius McNair was standing inside the doorway to his house, as if he’d been waiting for Jonah. “Who’s your girlfriends?” he asked.
Lucius looked to be my parents’ age. Mid-forties. He was tall, thin—six-foot two or three—with black hair slicked back to his white shirt’s collar. A dark tie was held in place with a tie pin in the center of an empty white Cross. His pronounced cheekbones made it seem as though his dark eyes were looking out from deep caves. Jonah told his uncle that he had given us a ride from Nashville last week and he’d just run into us again. Nodding to Lucius, Jonah said, “Like providence. Right, Uncle?”
Lucius nodded back. “God moves in mysterious ways. Come here, boy,” he said, stepping onto the wooden porch and leading Jonah to its far end. Lucius and Jonah talked quietly for several minutes before returning to us at the door. As Lucius stepped inside, he called out, “Belinda.” As if from nowhere, a woman entered the foyer.
Belinda McNair was a small woman. She wore her brown hair in a bun, the way my grandmother did, yet Belinda seemed younger than Lucius. Her skin, the shade of her white blouse, made me think she never went outside. In the time we were there, I never saw her smile. I heard her say no more than twelve words.
“I have to make a phone call,” Lucius told Belinda. “Show these boys to their room.”
First, Drew and I returned with Jonah to his car. As Jonah opened the trunk, he said his uncle needed the Olds that night, but we could take it to Nashville tomorrow. Lucius planned to pick up Jonah in the morning and return by six o’clock. After breakfast, we’d take off. Drew and I carried our packs into the house, where Belinda said, “Follow me.”
Belinda led us upstairs to a room with twin beds. The faded pink walls held pictures of two young girls—a year or two apart in age, I guessed. The girls had a 1950’s look: hair in curls, dresses with bows. Though a dozen or more stuffed animals lined a shelf above the beds, I assumed the girls were grown and gone from home. Standing just outside the room, Belinda said, “Dinner in an hour.”
We ate dinner in the kitchen. Pork chops, as I remember. Lucius wanted to know where we went to school, what we were studying, what our fathers did for a living. How we felt about the war. Dinner was as much an interrogation as a meal. In response to our thoughts on the war, Lucious asked if we would fight under any circumstances. “A fist fight, even. To defend yourselves.” I said I would. Drew said he had and that he would again.
When we finished dinner, Lucius explained he would be leading a Sunday night service in Sevierville. Before he left, he pointed to an antique wooden icebox beside the kitchen counter and asked me to hand Belinda a dishtowel. “The handle on the right, top shelf,” he said. We offered to help with the dishes, but Belinda said, “No mind.”
I gave no thought to Lucius leaving his wife alone with us. These were different times. On that trip, two separate women gave rides to Drew and me. A young woman with a nose ring took us from Gatlinburg to the trailhead. On the return trip, a middle-aged woman took us from Gatlinburg to Knoxville. Before we got in the car, she said, “I can tell you two are thoroughbreds. Get in.”
We told Belinda goodnight and went upstairs.
Drew had brought a deck of cards. At night in our tent, we’d played Go Fish for five dollars a game and kept a running tally. By the end of the trip, Drew was up ten dollars. That night in Knoxville, we must have played twenty hands before we heard a car outside, followed by footsteps coming upstairs. We must have played ten more hands before turning off the lamp between beds, but just after four o’clock in the morning, the light was back on.
He hadn’t bothered to knock, at least loud enough for us to hear. “Wake up, boys,” said Lucius, standing between our beds and looking down, a small duffel bag in one hand. “I have a favor to ask.”
Wearing a white shirt and the same Cross tie, it seemed as though he might have been up all night. Lucius said he wanted us to go to his church, two blocks away, and take the cash from the safe in his office. Without giving us a chance to respond, he said he’d give us the safe’s combination and a key to the church. He said no one would see us, and we’d be back within a half-hour. The bedside lamp lit his face like a stage light. His black hair glistened.
I thought it must be a test, that we’d fail if we said yes. “You can’t be serious,” I said. Lucius knelt to the floor and grabbed my arm with his free hand.
He said he couldn’t be more serious. He said to think of it as money owed to him. Then, still on one knee, he released my arm and pulled two pair of latex gloves, a key, and a flashlight from the duffel bag. “Or think of it as payment for dinner and this room, Lawrence Nichols,” he said, dropping the contents of the bag on my bed. I remembered telling Jonah my full name, but I didn’t think that I’d told Lucius.
Lucius said we should unlock a first-level window before we left the church, to make it look as though someone got in that way. We could keep a hundred dollars each and leave the rest—along with the key, the gloves, and the flashlight—in the icebox I had opened. “I know exactly how much money is in that safe. And I know your names. So don’t get any funny ideas.”
“Won’t they think you took it?” asked Drew.
According to Lucius, there were four other people in the church who knew the combination. More than twice that many had a door key. It would be impossible to pin the theft on any one of them, least of all him. “And it couldn’t be too hard for someone to crack an old wall safe, could it? Half the church knows it’s in my office,” he said. Drew was worried someone might suspect us, but Lucius said as far as he was concerned, we never left his house. “You have my word.”
A hundred dollars back then is worth what, seven, eight hundred dollars today? And we had a preacher’s blessing, so to speak. Lucius told us the key fit the church’s northside door. He gave us directions to his upstairs office, and said the wall safe was behind a picture of Jesus Knocking at the Door. He told us the safe’s combination and asked me to repeat it. Before we left, he told us to remember to lock the church. “And when I see you at breakfast, act like nothing happened.”
One year later, with an English degree and a feeling of persistent guilt, I returned home and got a job selling cars at a Chevrolet dealership. On a Saturday afternoon in May, 1979, I looked out on the lot and saw a young woman standing by a turquoise Chevette. “It matches my eyes,” she said as I walked up. Cynthia and I were married one year later. We have one son, Stephen. I have never told either of them about that night in Knoxville.
The church, a Baptist church, was bigger than I expected. Even in early morning darkness, I could see that it filled an entire block. Drew and I looked up and down the empty sidewalk, then entered through the northside door. As Lucius had said, a stairway rose to our left.
Drew carried the duffel bag. I held the flashlight that lit our way upstairs. At the top, we turned right into a hallway. We passed two doors on the right and one on the left. At the next right-side door, I lifted my light and read, Reverend Lucius McNair. And below that, in smaller letters, I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved . . . John 10:9
Two chairs faced a large wooden desk, empty but for a telephone, a green-shade lamp, and a large black Bible. Behind the desk, book-filled shelves lined a dark-paneled wall. In the farthest corner of the room, a brown leather chair and matching footstool sat beneath a wall lamp—where Lucius read, I guessed. If he were to look up, he’d see Jesus knocking.
I aimed the flashlight as Drew lifted the picture from the wall and lay it on the footstool. “28-14-32,” I said, shining the light on the lock as he turned.
I once read that hearing and vision share a neural source. When I’m at home, sitting in my chair, reading a good book, sometimes I don’t hear Cynthia say she’s going wherever: yoga class, the library. When I get up from my chair, I call out and wonder where she is. It’s called inattentional deafness, as when two young men, so intent on a wall safe, don’t hear someone walking down a hallway; so intent on removing cash and stashing it into a duffel bag, they don’t hear someone walk into a room. I don’t remember what he said, but whatever it was, it was loud enough to hear.
He couldn’t have been much older than us. White. About my height, five-ten, blonde hair just past his ears. He was almost as stocky as Drew and I combined. The fact that he’d said anything meant he didn’t fear us.
In my psych class, I learned that the amygdala is responsible for fear-related reactions—the part of the brain that signals fight or flight. Mine signaled both. With no thought, I took two steps forward, back-swung the flashlight to the right side of his head, and hurried past him as he fell. I was almost to the door when Drew said, “Wait.”
My hand that held the flashlight was shaking. With the light shaking, too, it was hard to tell if he was breathing. A line of blood ran down his face. Drew knelt to the floor and said, “We can’t leave him like this.” I was about to disagree when the man took a short breath, squinted up into the light, and tried to sit up.
We couldn’t get out fast enough. We ran down the hall, down the stairs, and out the northside door. It was still dark as we ran to Lucius’ house, where we took two hundred dollars from a duffel bag that must have held a couple thousand. We put the gloves, key, and flashlight into the bag, stuffed the bag into the old icebox, and hurried upstairs. I wanted to grab our packs and leave immediately, but Drew said that would only make us look suspicious. “To who?” I asked.
“To Belinda, for all we know. Or Jonah,” said Drew. “And who’d give us a ride this time of day, besides the police?” The day had barely lightened.
Drew thought the guy might not be able to describe us. He’d been hit in the head, hard enough to forget what we looked like, hopefully. And wouldn’t Lucius be the first person the police would call? If anyone suspected us, he’d say we were here the whole time. He had as much to lose as we did. More.
We spent the next half hour listening for the phone to ring, or worse, a police car pulling up to Lucius’ house. It didn’t take long for Drew to have doubts too. We’d been in such a hurry to get out, we’d neither unlocked a church window nor locked the door we’d entered. I brought up my shirttail relatives who lived in Montreal. I had a cousin who avoided the draft by going there.
Just after five-thirty, we heard an upstairs door open and footsteps in the hall. Minutes later, we heard a car start. Lucius was on his way to pick up Jonah. Soon, we heard more footsteps. Belinda was going downstairs.
Twenty years ago, when I entered the digital age and Lucius would have entered his mid-seventies, I started searching for his obituary. Because of what he’d forced us to do (I’d convinced myself to think of it that way), I was halfway hoping to find it. But that morning in Lucius’ kitchen, he greeted Drew and me like we were long lost friends. He was standing at the sink beside Belinda, not two feet away from where we’d put the money. “Rise and shine,” he said to us with an energy I hadn’t heard until then.
“The early bird gets the grits,” said Jonah, grinning with a mouthful of them.
As we ate breakfast, Lucius and Jonah talked about the audition. Jonah said he’d be asked to sit in with Mercury musicians for two songs. He wouldn’t know which songs until then. He hoped they chose standards. Then he’d be asked to play a solo version of a song of his choice. He was planning to play “I’ve Got a Tiger by the Tail.”
“It’s plain to see,” said Lucius, “you’re about to make us proud.”
Leaving Knoxville, Jonah would explain that Lucius and Belinda’s daughters had been killed in a car wreck. Belinda was driving. Corinne was in the front seat, Maryanne in back. When Belinda ran a stoplight, a pickup hit the passenger-side of her car. Corinne was killed instantly, and Maryanne suffered for two days. Jonah Lucius McNair was born five years later. Jonah said that, in some ways, Lucius had been more of a father to him than his own.
“Are you boys watching your time?” asked Lucius. It was not quite seven o’clock.
We finished breakfast quickly, grabbed our packs from upstairs, and met Lucius and Belinda at the front door. When Drew and I thanked them for letting us stay, Lucius put his arm around Belinda, smiled, and said, “You boys are welcome anytime.” I still had no way of knowing if Belinda knew anything. “Bye, for now,” she said.
It’s almost two hundred miles from Knoxville to Nashville, about a three-hour trip. The drive seemed to take less than half of that. After explaining his cousins’ deaths, Jonah asked, “So, how’d it go last night?” Drew was in the front seat. I was in back. Drew turned toward Jonah and said we’d gone to our room and played poker until midnight, then slept until morning.
“Bullshit,” said Jonah. “Thanks to you guys, I’m a hundred dollars richer.”
In the miles between Oak Ridge and Nashville, we learned that, after her daughters’ deaths, Belinda withdrew into herself. A few years later, she was hospitalized for six months and sent home with a cocktail prescription of antidepressants. When that didn’t help, Lucius thought a move to her hometown of Pascagoula might. Belinda’s parents, her two brothers, and her sister still lived there. A small Pascagoula church had recently offered a pastorship to Lucius, but it paid much less than the church in Knoxville. The house where we stayed was the church parsonage. With no house to sell and a promise of less income, Lucius needed money to move. He had confided all this to Jonah. The theft had been Jonah’s idea.
With his eyes moving from the road to Drew and back, Jonah said he’d offered to do it himself, but Lucius said no. It could ruin Jonah’s life if he were caught. But Lucius said he’d pay Jonah a hundred dollars if he found someone they could trust. When Jonah saw us standing on the ramp in Knoxville, knowing we’d run out of the Cracker Barrel, no questions asked—and the church safe was full of Sunday offerings—he knew we were the answer to Lucius’ prayers. When we told Jonah we’d been seen, that I struck a man who tried to stop us, he said, “That must have been Matt Fletcher.”
Jonah said Matt Fletcher had been a long-time church member. He had accepted a scholarship to play football at UT, but his knee blew out his freshman year. When he dropped out of school, Lucius insisted the church hire him. Matt had been the church maintenance man the past two years. “What time were you there?” asked Jonah. Around five o’clock, we said.
Jonah seemed surprised that Matt had been there that early. And why hadn’t he called the police by the time we left town? “They would have called my uncle first thing,” said Jonah. “I hope you didn’t kill him.”
Jonah dropped us off in Nashville. I never saw him again. But not long after I read of Lucius’ death, I searched Mercury Records discographies and discovered J. L. McNair played rhythm guitar on the Jerry Lee Lewis album, Sometimes a Memory Ain’t Enough. I also found him credited on Born Yesterday, an album by The Everly Brothers. More than likely, Jonah did play at the Ryman. People live lifetimes and are remembered for so few things.
Despite the guilt I always felt, part of me was glad to see that Lucius and Belinda moved to Pascagoula within a year of the theft. I hope things went better for them. For Belinda, anyway.

He was breathing when we left. For fifty years, I told myself that. For fifty years, I watched his his breaths grow shallower.
I started having dreams in which I kill him. The flashlight morphed into a gun, sometimes a knife, sometimes my hands. I have a friend who is an amateur archeologist. Twice, I’ve gone with him to search newly harvested corn fields near the Ohio River. (The farmers had given him permission.) In addition to several Mississippian-era arrowheads, we found what my friend called a hammerstone, a stone with which arrowheads were struck and shaped. We also found a fragment of a pot that had been made in the shape of a head. You could make out a partial nose. A left eye stared back. What had lain beneath the ground had risen to the top.
I would have searched obituaries for Matthew Fletcher, but I was afraid of what I might find. My address app listed two Matt Fletchers in Knoxville, but neither one was close to my age. There were nine more who lived in Tennessee. A seventy-two-year-old Matthew Fletcher lived in Franklin, just outside of Nashville.
There were more than eighty Matthew/Matt Fletchers on Facebook. But one profile picture showed an older white man wearing a Titans cap and jersey. He lived in Franklin. He went to college at UT.
He rarely posted. The best I could determine was that he was married with two kids, several grandkids, and a golden retriever named Cash. Looking forward to having Christmas Eve dinner with the Oak Ridge Boys, he posted last December. They were performing in the Tennessee Ballroom, the dinner theatre at the Opryland Hotel.
Cynthia had always said she’d like to see the hotel at Christmas. The decorations were supposed to be outstanding. Our son, Stephen, was spending Christmas with his wife’s family in Seattle. If I were ever to confront my past, this was my chance. I managed to get a room and tickets to the dinner show on short notice. Cynthia, who thought I’d done it all for her, was thrilled.
You could have strung the hotel’s decorative lights from Nashville to Charlie’s Bunion and back and decorated every Cracker Barrel on I-40 along the way. We checked into our room with time enough to shower and change. When we got to the Tennessee Ballroom, I stepped ahead of Cynthia and, in addition to giving the hostess my name, asked where Matthew Fletcher was seated. “Table 19,” the woman said, pointing to a table on a chart. A young man showed us to our seats.
The Oak Ridge Boys could have been rapping, for all I knew. The chicken might as well have been catfish. All of my attention was focused on the table in front of us and to our left.
I’d put on forty pounds since 1972. If this was the Matt Fletcher I’d struck, he’d lost that much weight. His blonde hair had grayed and thinned. He was sitting with a small, olive-complected woman with gray-highlighted black hair. After finishing her dinner, she reached for his hand following each round of applause. If this was the Matt Fletcher, how seriously had I hurt him? Why hadn’t he called the police immediately? Had they arrested anyone? Possibly, the answers to my questions sat fifteen feet away.
The Oak Ridge Boys closed with “Oh Holy Night” and an encore of “Silver Bells.” As everyone began to leave, I pointed to the man in the blue sport coat and told Cynthia he looked familiar. As he walked by our table, I called out his name. When he stopped, I asked if he’d ever lived in Knoxville.
“For thirty-two years,” he said.
“Did you play football at UT?”
“Yes and no. I hurt my knee my freshman year. Why?”
I told him my name and introduced Cynthia. After meeting his wife, Miranda, I asked to speak to Matt alone. “It won’t take long,” I said. “I’ll be up soon,” I told Cynthia.
Cynthia said she wanted to call Stephen before she went to bed. Miranda said she and Matt had grandkids in Savannah. She wanted to call them “before Santa comes.” As our wives headed for the lobby, Matt suggested we go to the hotel’s craft tavern. When he turned, I saw a scar on his right temple.
It was just past nine o’clock when we sat a table near the bar and Matt asked if I’d ever tried a drink made with bourbon and beer. After ordering two Baker’s Adams, he asked how I might know him. “Do you remember what happened on June 21, 1972?” I asked.
Much as the morning had lightened as we drove away from Lucius’ house, a look came over Matt’s face: incredulous, at first, followed by a look of recognition. Followed, thank God, by a smile. “What were you doing there so early?” I asked. “How badly did I hurt you?”
Matt said a women’s Bible study met on Monday mornings. In order to clean up after Sunday services, he always started work at seven. But late that Sunday afternoon, Lucius called and said there was something he wanted him to do. That explained the phone call Lucius made as Belinda showed us to our room.
Matt said that when he lost his football scholarship and dropped out of school, he had no ambitions or skills. If not for Lucius, he would have more than likely wound up in East Tennessee coal mines with his father. Matt owed Lucius for getting him a job and encouraging him to save money for college. In Matt’s mind, he had no choice but to go to work early, follow two young men into the church office, and take a punch before they left.
“Take a punch?” I asked.
“He thought it would make me a more creditable witness, proof that no church member broke in. He thought he’d found someone who’d hit me. I assumed he meant with a fist.” Matt had no idea Jonah was involved. “I never liked that guy,” Matt said, but he played a mean guitar.”
Over our second drink, I learned that the church treasurer always counted the money before entrusting it to Lucius, who went to the bank each Monday. If the exact amount weren’t deposited, suspicions would be aroused. The theft had to be reported. “Thanks to a concussion and ten stitches, you made me look credible, all right,” Matt said.
“What if I hadn’t hit you?”
Matt said he’d taken more than a few punches—playing football and otherwise—and he had no problem throwing one. “I figured you’d fight back,” he said, “but you didn’t give me a chance to hit first.”
Lucius had told Matt to wait until seven o’clock to call the police. Matt would have normally come to work by then, and we would have been on our way to Nashville. Lucius had filled Matt in on Belinda’s depression, of which everyone knew. Matt had been aware of the church in Mississippi and Lucius’ need for money. Money he felt entitled to. He’d told Matt to make up descriptions as far unlike us as he could. “I told them you were six-feet four or five with short hair the color of mine,” said Matt. “No one was ever arrested.”
“What would you have done if someone had been?” I asked. He had no answer to that.
A few years later, Matt enrolled at a Knoxville community college. After that, he went to UT and earned a master’s degree in American History. He taught in high school for thirty-four years. Like me, in his retirement, Matt’s done some writing: short memoirs, in my case, historical fiction, in Matt’s. We laughed at how we were brought together again. “In the final chapter of our lives,” Matt said.
As we walked through the lobby, on the way to our rooms, I asked Matt if he’d ever told his wife about that night.
“Only that I’d failed to stop a burglary, and I had you to thank for my good looks,” he said, tracing the scar on his temple. “And that Lucious gave me ten dollars for each stitch.”
Matt and I are Facebook friends.
When I got back to our room, Cynthia was in bed rereading All the Light We Cannot See, a book she’d been urging me to read for years. Cynthia said Stephen was eating dinner when she called, but he wished us a Merry Christmas. Then she asked how I knew Matt.
I had told Cynthia select parts of that trip: getting picked up twice by the same man, helping a bear, seeing a bobcat. “He was a friend of Drew’s,” I said. “He let us stay in his fraternity at UT when we hitchhiked to the Smokies.”
Cynthia closed her book and put it on the nightstand. “His wife seemed very nice. And thank you again for this. It’s everything I hoped it would be,” she said, looking all around the room before settling on me.