Salter didn’t buy it. He came up with his own scenario, which held the will to be a fake, yet salvaged the innocence of James Pinkney Chaffin. He imagined that the eldest son, John Chaffin, perhaps with the help of his brother Abner, faked the will and the slip of paper in the overcoat pocket. James Pinkney Chaffin was made the unwitting pawn in the plot, for it was he who would be moved to discover the will. This would be accomplished by making Pink believe he’d seen his father’s ghost, when what he’d really seen was his brother John dressed up in his father’s overcoat.
And there the mystery lay. Until April 2004, when yours truly decided to take a trip to Mocksville. I would talk to the descendants of the Chaffin brothers and unearth the two wills. I would hire a forensic document examiner, the best in the business. I would let science decide, once and for all, if the second will was a forgery and our overcoat-wearing ghost a fabrication.
THE DIRT ROAD along which James Pinkney Chaffin walked with his molasses and his axe handles is now four lanes wide. Yadkinville Road grew up to be the shopping mall strip, the predictable, just-outside-town plop-down of Burger Kings and BoJangles. My room in the Mocksville Comfort Inn looks out onto this road, and I try to picture old Pink shambling along with his load, vest fronts flapping in the after-blast of passing four-ton Chevys.
There are fewer farms in Mocksville today, and no farmers at all in this branch of the Chaffin clan. Pink’s grandson Lester Blackwelder is a retired Ralston-Purina salesman. He has a salesman’s smile, accessorized with a wink and a toothpick. His sincere, clap-you-on-the-shoulder congeniality served him well in his career; he and his wife Ruby Jean live comfortably in a roomy house on an upscale street. Pink’s grandson Lloyd is an engineer with Ingersoll-Rand. Neither man so much as grows lemons in the backyard. This all came as a surprise to me, having spoken to Lester and Ruby Jean by phone and having placed them—mostly because of their accents and the “might-coulds” in their speech—in homey farm kitchens with gingham curtains and eggs in wire baskets on the counter.
This afternoon, Lester and Ruby Jean and I have gone visiting. We’re sitting in Lloyd Blackwelder’s living room, and the two men are reminiscing. (Lester and Lloyd are James L. Chaffin’s oldest living descendants; Marshall and Abner have no living descendants, and John’s living descendants are the next generation down—too young to recall any details.) Lester was a teenager when Grandpa Pink used to tell him the story of the dream and the will. His mother Estelle rode in the Model T with her daddy Pink the twenty miles to John’s house, to look for the overcoat. “Dirt roads the whole way,” Lester is saying. “No windows on the car. Mama said she remembered what the coat looked like. The pocket was hand-sewed and there was dirt dobber nestin’ all over it.”
I don’t know what this means and apparently they can tell, because Ruby Jean sets down her iced tea and says, “Wasps’ nests, Mary.” Sometimes it’s just the accent that loses me. “Pie safe” required four repetitions and a trip to the kitchen.
I ask them what James Pinkney Chaffin looked like. “He was real thin,” says Lester. “Six foot. Rugged. Mustache. Not a good-looking man.”
Ruby Jean twirls the ice in her glass. “He didn’t have no mustache, hon.”
Lester considers this. He juts his lower lip. “I thought he had a mustache.”
Later, Ruby Jean finds a photograph for me: Pink Chaffin and his wife and baby daughter posing in their Sunday clothes. Pink’s striped shirt looks new and his hair is combed and pomaded, but you can see the dirt worn into the rims of his fingernails. He confronts the camera with a calm, somber, baldly direct gaze, probably the same one that so impressed attorney Johnson. He doesn’t have a mustache.
Lloyd is the younger of the two grandsons. He is dressed in Levi’s and a corn-colored polo shirt. His memories of Pink are a child’s memories; he recalls the time he sat in his grandfather’s lap, the rocker rocking so hard it flipped over backward, and the toy horses Pink made out of pieces of dried cornstalks, with tufts of cotton for the manes. Lloyd crosses the room to a glass-fronted curio cabinet and takes down a glass walking stick, twisted at the neck and bobbed into a rounded handle. “Here’s his Sunday cane,” he says. The glass is ribboned with red and blue, like stick candy. Having seen only posed sepia photographs of these people, I find it hard to add this colorful, foppish item to the grimy, monocolor tableaus of James Pinkney Chaffin that I’ve built in my mind. They might as well have shown me the man’s floral nosegay and spats.
Neither Lester nor Lloyd remembers his great-uncle Marshall, the original recipient of James L. Chaffin’s entire estate. Lloyd recalls a vague aura of ill will surrounding Marshall’s wife Susie. Susie, to refresh your memory, is said to have been the one in possession of the earlier will, the one that left everything to Marshall. Interestingly, the first will was written the year after Marshall married Susie. Perhaps Susie pressured her father-in-law into drafting the will. Lester says Grandpa Pink loved to tell the story of the apparition and the secret will, but he can’t recall hearing him say anything at all about Marshall and his wife, or the circumstances of the first will. The one thing he recalls is that James L. Chaffin lived with his son Marshall after his own house burned down, so perhaps the father felt beholden to his son. Indeed, Marshall is listed on the “informant” line of James L. Chaffin’s death certificate, which suggests a closeness between the two.
Lloyd and Lester are not open to considering that Grandpa Pink might have made up the dream and been part of a plot with his brothers to forge a new will and take back the land. That the ghost and the overcoat and the Bible were all just elements of an imaginative scam dreamed up by the three spurned brothers.
“Pink would just never have thought of that,” says Lester.
“Nope,” says Lloyd. “He would have considered that crooked.”
The old farmhouse where Pink lived when he had the visions of his father still stands, and Lloyd and Lester offer to take me there. Lester and Ruby Jean squeeze into my rented Hyundai, and Lloyd and his son Brad follow in Lloyd’s truck. Lester is driving the Hyundai, so that I can take notes while we talk. At one point he puts the left turn signal on, though there’s no road or driveway in view on our left, just an open field of tall grasses. The house sits on the far perimeter of the field, and that is where Lester is headed. “Used to be some tracks here, but not no more.” The weeds brush the underside of the Hyundai, making worrisome car-wash sounds inside the car. Lester and Ruby Jean seem accustomed to driving in fields. “Lester, there’s the old persimmon tree,” trills Ruby Jean.
“Uh-huh,” says Lester. He drives in overgrown fields at more or less the same speed as he drives on asphalt. “Grandma made the best persimmon pie, didn’t she?”
One side of Pink’s house is obscured by a thick climb of honeysuckle. Parts of the house are down to framing now, partly because it’s been abandoned so long, and partly because Lloyd pulled some boards away to make a pie safe. The men take me on a tour, pointing out the kitchen, their mama’s courting room, the bedroom, the outhouse, the earthen wells to keep the milk cool. There’s a doorway out the back wall of the bedroom. If John A. Chaffin came out here to play ghost in his father’s overcoat, that’s probably how he’d have come in. I tell Lloyd and Lester about the SPR officer’s theory. “Har,” says Lester. “I doubt that. John was just like Pink. Didn’t talk much. Didn’t go for foolishness.”