The Editor's Confession

Marv Kettle told it standing up, which Delphia understood to mean he'd rehearsed it standing up, probably for years, probably at night, in this office, to the desk. "Ruth Kettle," he said. "My sister. Seven years younger, and smarter than the two of us put together, and I want that in the minutes because I've never said it out loud. She married Amos Boone in Hessler in 1963, and that marriage was over in eleven months, and neither of them ever filed the paperwork, which is how a fire chief can have a first marriage nobody remembers. She came back to Fig Hollow. She was the festival treasurer from 1992 to 2003. And in the fall of 2003 she took eleven years of pie money, typed a letter to Aunt Persimmon accusing Zeke Harlow of skimming — she typed it, Delphia, in this building, on that machine, on a night I was at the printer's, and I have hated that machine for twenty-three years — and she mailed it, and she left town before the column ran." June Harlow had a hand over her mouth. Chief Boone, in the doorway, looked older than the doorway. "Persimmon printed the letter because that was her policy and her vow," Marv said. "You send it, she runs it, she signs nothing. Accountability by postmark. In 2009 she worked out it wasn't Zeke's letter — she came to me, and she'd figured out the typewriter, and she asked me one question, and I have been eating that question for seventeen years: whether Ruth typed it before or after she left. And I lied. I told her I didn't know, and she knew I was lying, because she was Aunt Persimmon and I was Marv Kettle and we both worked in the same truth for thirty years. She drafted the confession anyway. I spiked it. You'll get yourself killed, P — that's what I wrote on it, and that was true, but it wasn't the reason. The reason was that I had a sister somewhere in Ohio, and I was not going to put her name in my newspaper and hand this town a woman to hate the way it hated Zeke Harlow. Not while I was the editor. Not while she was a Kettle." He sat down on the edge of the desk, finally, like a man off a long shift. "I changed the locks in 2009 because I was afraid of her coming back," he said. "Persimmon asked me to, and I did it that day, first time I ever did anything that fast, because I thought the locks were for Ruth." He looked at Boone. "Amos. You knew where she was the whole time." "Every Christmas card," Boone said. "Unsigned. Postmarked Chillicothe. Twenty-three of them." He was holding his fire department hat in his two enormous hands, turning it slowly. "You want the books on it, I kept a set, because I'm a coward, but I'm an organized coward. Eleven festivals, the skim, the insurance claims — all of it, entered in pencil, dated, in my first wife's handwriting, in a ledger she left in the truck when she went. I've had it twenty-three years under the floor of the fire hall. Persimmon knew it was there. She asked me for it in 2009 and I said no, and she died without it, and that column you're all so worried about —" his voice caught — "she wrote me a letter once, private, not for print, after I said no. It said: 'Amos, you are a good man keeping a bad fire. That's not the same as being a good man.'" He put the hat on the desk. "I'm seventy-one, and my daughter's getting married in June, and I told Deb Kowalski about the first marriage on Tuesday and she married me anyway, in the parking lot of the Fisher's, and I have been carrying this fire for forty years, and I am putting it down." Silence, the kind a small newspaper office can hold completely. It was June who spoke, and her voice was steady, and Delphia would tell people for years afterward that this was the moment the story got its name. "Print it all," she said. "Her draft, your spike, the chief's ledger, the Christmas cards, my grandfather's name cleared in her own words — every word of it, and then run the column beside it, signed, in the editor's own name, and let this county decide who in this building is an impostor."