Sperry moves on to a comparison of the James L. Chaffin signatures on the two wills. It’s likely that the first will was indeed signed by Chaffin, as there are two witnesses. Sperry’s job now is to see if the writer of the second will, which had no witnesses, is also James L. Chaffin. The task is complicated by the fourteen years that span the two documents. Handwriting—especially signatures—often changes over time.
Nonetheless, Sperry has reached a conclusion. “There’s an old axiom we have,” he says, peeling off his gloves. “You can’t write better than your best.” In other words, I could never do a convincing forgery of my mother’s signature. My mother had beautiful, gliding, even penmanship, and mine has always been rat scrabble. She could forge mine, but not vice versa. Once you reach your “age of graphic maturity”—usually sometime in your teens—you’ve hit the peak of your ability and are unlikely to get much better. If anything, your writing gets worse: Handwriting deteriorates with old age and its decrepitudes—bad vision, stiff fingers, hand tremors.
In the Chaffin case, the situation is backward—and thus suspicious. The skill level in the signatures on the 1905 will is substantially worse than in the 1919 will. Which doesn’t make sense if it’s the same writer. Sperry pulls up the 1905 signature, written when Chaffin was in his fifties. The letters are awkwardly formed and there are hesitations—not the type of hesitations that suggest forgery, but the type that suggest this person is not a highly skilled penman. That seems likely, given the state of education in Davie County around that time. According to James W. Wall’s History of Davie County, illiteracy was common among rural families in the mid-1800s. In 1860, when James L. Chaffin was fifteen, only 690 of 1,230 school-age boys in Davie County were enrolled in public schools, and the school year was just a few months long (in winter, when the fields lay fallow). Lester says Grandpa Pink only went as far as third grade, and had a total of nine months of schooling. It’s likely his father would have had even less.
“Now look at the later will,” says Sperry. “The letter formations are much more fluid. Look at the fs. How much less awkward they are.” And here Chaffin would have been seventy. “If the J. L. Chaffin signatures on the 1905 will are representative of that particular writer’s skill level, and I see no evidence that they are not, then that writer could not have written the signature on the 1919 will.” It would seem to be a fake.
Sperry also finds some of the language of the second will suspiciously sophisticated for a nearly illiterate farmer. “Wit” is legalese, as is the phrase “both personal and real estate divided equal.”
Sperry highlights a line in the 1919 will. “Look at the wording here,” he says. “He wants his property to be divided between his four children ‘if they are living at my death… and if not living give share to there children…’ Let’s say the 1919 will was forged and backdated by Chaffin’s other sons in an effort to get the land back from Susie Chaffin after Marshall died. We know there was some ill will between her and the other brothers. With that clause in place, she’s technically out of the picture: The will leaves Marshall’s share of the land to their son, not to her. So let’s imagine the scene on the day of the trial. The family goes to lunch—which is a matter of record—and the brothers sit her down and spell it out: ‘We’ve got ten witnesses prepared to vouch for this signature. You’ve got your choice, Susie. You can go in there and agree that it’s his handwriting and we’ll cut you a one-fourth share—even though you’re not entitled to it in this new will. Or you can let the jury decide, and risk losing it all.’”
Sperry’s theory makes some sense. And if the forger’s intent was to corner Susie and force her hand—rather than actually convince her of the second will’s authenticity—then the breezy, unconcerned handwriting makes sense. Why bother fooling her, if you’ve got her where you want her?
WHOEVER CHOSE THE epitaph for the gravestone of James L. Chaffin would seem to have had a twinkle in his eye. It says: THY WILL BE DONE. Lester and Ruby Jean and I are out at the Ijames Baptist Church cemetery, visiting the family plots.
Lester has wandered over to the grave marker of a local acquaintance. “He shot hisself on the back porch.” He continues on down the rows, narrating death in the flat, evenly paced tones of a stock report. “There’s that baby died in the four-wheeler accident. And Thom’s son there: struck by lightning on a combine—” Ruby Jean cuts him off. “Look at this, Mary. Man put his two wives on the same tombstone. Wonder how they’d have felt about that!” Three stones down is the grave of one Flossie Gobble. You don’t have to meet some people to know you’d like them, and Flossie Gobble is one of those people.
I tell Lester and Ruby Jean about what the handwriting expert found. I am careful to add that Sperry compared Pink’s signature on the court papers with the questioned James L. Chaffin signature, and it isn’t a match.
“So Grandpa Pink didn’t do it,” says Ruby Jean. She sounds relieved. I don’t add that he must have played some role in the brotherly ruse—unless we buy the scenario of John or Abner Chaffin dressing up in the overcoat and playing ghost.
“Hunh,” says Lester. “Do you feel good about it?”
I tell him I’m not surprised by Sperry’s conclusion about the signatures, but I am disappointed. I would have loved to have evidence, even shaky, nonconclusive evidence, that the ghost of James L. Chaffin was real. Next I relate Sperry’s theory about the brothers confronting Susie Chaffin over lunch. In repeating it, the story sounds hopelessly oversophisticated for a bunch of dirt farmers’ sons. And why would they bother with the ghost, the overcoat, the slip of paper? Why not simply claim to have found the second will in the Bible?
“Well,” says Lester, toeing an upended flower pot. “It’s hard for me or you or anybody else to try to interpret the few facts we’ve got.” I think he means, I wish you and your fancy-pants forensics man would stop trying. But he’s too polite for that.
The car is quiet on the drive back to Mocksville. It’s late on a Saturday afternoon. Families are sitting in kitchens and on porches, trading gossip, shucking corn, shooing flies. Tomorrow the churches will fill with men and women who hold no doubts about the existence of the human soul and its joyous postmortem journey, men and women who could not care less about the hog sausage opinions of a forensic document examiner and a writer from California. To them, these things are simple and certain: The Chaffins are honest folk. The soul is real. Flossie Gobble lives on.
Alas, for me, a belief is not something you are born into or that you simply choose to adopt one day. Belief, for me, calls for plausibility. And so I continue my wanderings. I have one more stop: a research venture taking place at the University of Virginia. I have saved this for last, because it represents what I think is my best chance for a speck of evidence that people leave their bodies when they die.
12. SIX FEET OVER
A Computer Stands By on an Operating Room Ceiling, Awaiting Near-Death Experiencers
ON THE FAR WALL of an operating room in the University of Virginia Hospital is an enormous photograph of an alpine meadow. The sky and grass are the vivid, lit-up blues and greens of travel posters and ads for allergy drugs, and wildflowers are thick as snow. The beautiful scenery is intended to calm the surgical patients who come here. In the case of a patient I’ll call Wes, the flowers have their work cut out for them. Wes is about to be momentarily—ever so briefly—almost killed.