Grandpa Starcher always said he'd robbed a bank in 1933, and the whole family laughed, because he was the gentlest man in the county.
He'd say it at Thanksgiving, mostly, after the pie. He'd lean back in his chair at the head of the table with his suspenders loose and his pipe unlit in his teeth, and one of the grandchildren would ask him what he did in the Depression, and he'd wink.
"Robbed the Cedar Fork bank," he'd say. "Christmas week, 1933. Got clean away."
And the table would roar. Because Grandpa Starcher wouldn't kill a spider.
He carried them outside in a jelly jar. He'd been a deacon at the Cedar Fork Methodist church for forty years, and a mail carrier, and a man who stopped his truck on the highway to help turtles across the road.
Nadine had laughed too. Every Thanksgiving of her childhood.
Nadine Starcher Hively was seventy-four now. She'd been a bookkeeper for the county school board in Cedar Fork, West Virginia, for thirty-eight years, a careful woman with a careful mind who balanced her checkbook to the penny every month and still did her own taxes in pencil.
Grandpa had died in 1978, at seventy-three. His house on Laurel Run Road had passed to Nadine's father, and then to Nadine's brother, who had just sold it. Nadine had driven over on a Saturday in August to help clean out the attic before the new owners moved in.
It was hot up there under the tin roof, and the dust lay thick as flour on everything. Old lamps. Boxes of National Geographics.
A dressmaker's dummy that had belonged to Grandma. And under the eaves at the very back, behind a stack of storm windows, a battered green steamer trunk with Grandpa's initials stenciled on the lid. W.J.S.
Nadine had never seen it before.
It wasn't locked. She knelt on the plank floor and lifted the lid.
On top was Grandpa's Sunday suit, folded neatly. Under that, his deacon's Bible.
Under that, a cigar box of photographs. And at the very bottom, wrapped in a flour sack, three things.
The first was a canvas bag, the kind banks used to use for moving cash. It was empty and soft with age. Stenciled on the side, in faded black letters, it said CEDAR FORK BANK & TRUST.
The second was a newspaper clipping, brown and brittle, folded in quarters. Nadine opened it very carefully, so it wouldn't crumble.
It was from the Cedar Fork Weekly Sentinel. December 29, 1933.
CEDAR FORK BANK ROBBED. $1,840 TAKEN FROM VAULT. NO SUSPECTS.
Nadine read the whole article sitting on the attic floor. It wasn't long. Sometime in the night of December 22, someone had entered the Cedar Fork Bank & Trust without breaking a single window or lock, opened the vault, and taken $1,840 in cash.
Nothing else was disturbed. The sheriff had no leads. The bank's president, a man named Harlan Doss, called it a cowardly act against the honest people of the county.
At the bottom of the article was a short paragraph Nadine read twice.
The robbery comes one week before the bank's scheduled auction of eleven foreclosed farms on the courthouse steps.
Nadine sat back on her heels. The attic was very quiet. A wasp bumped against the little window.
Her grandfather had been twenty-eight years old in 1933. She knew a little about that winter from her father's stories. The coal mines in the county had cut back to two days a week.
The bank had called in loans on farm after farm. Families ate squirrel and poke salad and cornmeal mush, and some of them ate nothing at all. Her father used to say he remembered children walking to school in December with gunny sacks tied around their feet for shoes.
She also knew what her grandfather did for a living that year. Her father had mentioned it once, offhand, years ago.
Before he carried the mail, Walter Starcher had been the night janitor at the Cedar Fork Bank & Trust.
He'd had a key.
The third thing in the flour sack was a ledger.
A small one, the kind you could buy at the five-and-dime, with a black cloth cover and red leather corners. Nadine knew it was her grandfather's before she opened it.
She'd seen that handwriting on every birthday card of her childhood. Big and square and careful, the hand of a man who'd only gone through the eighth grade and was proud of every letter.
She opened it to the first page.
At the top, he'd written: December 22, 1933. $1,840.
Under that, there were columns, ruled in pencil with a straightedge. A name in one column.
A number in the next. And a few words in the third.
Hollins. 7 children. $60. Coal, flour, shoes for the little ones.
Pettry. Husband hurt in the mine. $85. Doctor bill and groceries.
Widow Cottrell. $40. Seed and a milk cow.
Bragg. Farm on the auction list. $200. Two payments to the bank, so they can keep it.
Nadine turned the page. There were more. And more.
Page after page of names she'd known her whole life. Families from the hollows and the ridges all around Cedar Fork. Her Sunday school teacher's family.
The family of the man who'd run the hardware store. The family of a girl she'd gone to high school with.
Forty-one families. She counted them twice, the way she counted everything.
Next to some names, he'd written one more word, later, in different ink. Paid. The bank had been paid, by the families, with Grandpa's money, and four of the eleven farms on the auction list had been saved.
Nadine sat on the attic floor in the heat with the ledger in her lap and her hand over her mouth.
Her grandfather hadn't been joking. Not one word of it.
He'd robbed a bank to feed his neighbors. He'd given every dollar away. And for forty-five years, he'd sat at the head of the Thanksgiving table and told the truth to a room full of people who laughed.
She turned to the last page.
There was only one line on it. It was written in a shakier hand than the others, in ballpoint pen instead of pencil.
Nadine guessed he'd written it near the end of his life. It was dated March 1978, two months before he died.
I never paid it back.