Mr. Prescott pulled out a leather chair for me and sat down across the desk with the folder between us, and for a good minute he just looked at me. Out the window, all of Dallas lay shining in the morning haze, a hundred miles of glass and highway. I held my hat on my knee and my muddy boots on his white carpet, and I did not care one bit. “Mr. Whitlow,” he said, “in the winter of 1979 your wife drove to Dallas alone in a station wagon and walked into my office. I had no secretary. I had a borrowed typewriter. She sat down and told me she had a plan.”
He opened the folder and turned it toward me. On the first page was a trust document, thick as a Bible, dated March of 1979. June had signed it in her round schoolhouse hand.
“Her mother had passed that year and left her forty acres of mineral rights in the Permian Basin, land nobody wanted, because the oil price was low,” Mr. Prescott said. “June told me to hold it, never sell it, and invest every royalty check in whatever I thought best. She said to tell you nothing. She said you would turn it down out of pride and spend your whole life feeding cows rather than let her do anything for you.”
I laughed, because it was true. I had told June a hundred times that a man ought to provide for his wife and not the other way around. She had never argued with me. She had just nodded and gone back to the books. Now I knew what she had been doing with those books for forty six years. Mr. Prescott flipped to the last page, and I put on my reading glasses to see the number.
There were a great many zeroes. I took the glasses off, wiped them, and put them on again. The number did not change.
Ezra Whitlow has never worn a suit except to church and to the service for his wife.
It came to just over nine million dollars. Mr. Prescott said it very gently, the way a doctor says a hard thing, and I put my hand over my mouth. Nine million dollars. I had driven a Dodge that burned oil to get there. I had patched my own boots with duct tape for years. I had never bought June the diamond ring I promised her, because there was always a note due at the bank. I asked him in a small voice why she had never spent a nickel of it on herself. He said she had spent plenty.
She had paid off our land note in 1991, quietly, through a cousin.
That was when I understood why the bank had always been so patient. Behind the trust were forty six letters, one for every anniversary since 1979, each in a plain white envelope, each addressed to me in her pencil. The last one was dated the week before she passed. Mr. Prescott said he had instructions to give them only to me, and only in person. He pushed the stack across the desk. I picked up the top envelope and my fingers did not work, and he came around and unfolded it for me, as gently as a man would handle a baby bird.
I will not tell you everything it said. It was our business. But I will tell you this much. June wrote, “Ezra, by now you are probably fixing fence in the cold. Stop. Buy a suit.
Buy the nicest one in Dallas. You are the finest man I ever knew, and I want you to wear it somewhere other than my service. Take Charles to dinner. Let somebody else feed the cows for once. And please, my darling, do not give it all away to the church the first week. Keep a little for you.” I read that line out loud, and Mr. Prescott had to look at the window.
Madison was standing in the doorway when I looked up. She had come in with a tray of coffee, and I do not think she had meant to hear any of it. Her face was wet. She put the tray down on the corner of the desk and said in a very small voice, “Mr. Whitlow, I owe you an apology. I judged you by your boots, and I am so ashamed.”
I stood up, as my granddaddy taught me to do for any lady. I told her she had a hard job and she did it the way she was taught. Then I told her that somebody once handed me a chance in the middle of a bad winter, and I would like to hand her one.
I paid for her to go to law school, every semester of it, at Southern Methodist, no strings. She cried and said she could not accept. I told her it was not charity, it was June. She had always believed in giving a young person a pair of good boots. Madison starts in August.
Mr. Prescott took me to lunch that afternoon at a steak house with white tablecloths, and I wore my overalls, and nobody at that restaurant dared say a single word, because the senior partner of Prescott Hale & Whitmore was sitting across the table pouring my iced tea.
The suit I bought was charcoal gray, tailored by a Mr. Alvarez on Main Street in Stephenville, who measured me for an hour. I wore it to the church the next Sunday, and Pastor Don asked me if somebody had passed. I said no, Pastor, somebody had finally spoken. I paid off the church roof and the note on the fire station. I gave the rest to a scholarship fund in her name at Tarleton State for ranch kids who want to become teachers and lawyers. I kept a little for me, the way June asked.
I still feed cows every morning at five.
A young man named Tyler does the heavy lifting now, and he calls me boss, which I like. On Sundays I put on the gray suit and my boots, and I drive to church, and I sit in June pew with the forty six letters on my lap, reading one a week. I figure I will finish them the same week I join her. And when I do, I plan to walk in wearing my boots, mud and all, because she never minded them in the first place.
