The first thing that fell out onto the desk was a photograph, small and curled, of a young man in an Army uniform leaning against a pickup truck with his cap tipped back. He had the chin and the wide gentle eyes of Neal, and he was laughing at whoever held the camera. On the back, in the schoolteacher print of Aunt Lou, were four words. Marcus Dell, summer 1974. Neal turned it over and over in his hands. He did not say anything. His lips moved, once, as though he were trying out a name.
The second thing in the envelope was a letter, four pages long. Mr. Burris cleared his throat and went to stand by the window, and I took it, because Neal could not. Aunt Lou wrote that she had met Marcus Dell at a church picnic in Port Gibson, when she was twenty four and had never been kissed. He was a sergeant, two years younger than she. He promised to marry her in the fall. He died in October of 1974, in a truck accident at Fort Polk, and he never knew about the child.
She wrote that in 1975, a girl who was not married and carrying a baby was not welcome at Zion Hill, and her own mother had told her she must go away. So she went to Memphis and gave the baby to a good preacher family, because she was too young and too afraid and too poor. She wrote that she had cried every night for a year, and that she had never once regretted giving him a chance. She wrote that she had come home and told no one but the Lord and Mr. Burris.
A woman can love a child so much that she gives him away, and then spend thirty one years giving him five dollars at a time.
Aunt Lou had followed him from a distance. She learned from the agency that he was named Neal, that his new father was a pastor in Memphis, and that he grew up going to church. She sent the first five dollars in 1994, when he turned nineteen and entered divinity school, because it was all she could spare from a teacher salary. She never wrote to him. She never wanted to disrupt his life. She only wanted him to know, without knowing, that somebody was in the back pew praying.
Neal sat down in the chair behind the desk and put his head in his hands, and his big shoulders shook. I went around the desk and put my arm around him. I had known the man for six years. I had brought him pound cake, and sat in the front pew with him on Sundays, and never once guessed. He said, into his hands, “She was in the front row every week. She watched me preach. She never said a word.” I said she had said every word. She had said it with the plate.
The last page of the letter was addressed to both of us. Aunt Lou wrote that Marcus Dell had a sister named Gloria Banks who still lived in Vicksburg, and that she had met her once, at a funeral, and Gloria had the eyes of Marcus. She wrote that the money in the account was for whatever the boy needed, and that she hoped he would use it to help another boy. She signed it the way she signed every report card. With love and high expectations.
We drove to Vicksburg the next Saturday, Neal and I, in my old Buick. Gloria Banks was seventy six and lived in a white house with a wraparound porch and a swing. She came to the door in her housecoat, and when she saw Neal she put both hands over her mouth. She did not say a word. She went to the sideboard and returned with a framed picture of a young soldier by a pickup truck. It was the same photograph, and the same laugh.
They talked until dark. Gloria had five children and eleven grandchildren, and she told Neal that every one of them would want to meet him. She said she had always wondered if her brother had left something of himself behind. Neal said he had been asking the same question for fifty years. She pressed his hands. “You have the Dell hands,” she said. “Big and good for lifting.” He laughed and wept at once, and I sat quietly in the swing, feeling like I was watching a prayer be answered.
On the first Sunday of September, Reverend Atchley stood in the pulpit at Zion Hill and told the whole story. He told it plainly, without shame, with the photograph held up in his hand. When he was done, the church sat in silence, and then old Mrs. Tolliver in the third row began to hum, and the choir took it up, and the whole congregation rose. When the plate came down the pew, I put in an envelope marked For the boy. Inside was five dollars. It was my turn.
The savings account became the For The Boy Fund. Neal runs it with Mr. Burris, who at eighty four refuses to retire as treasurer. Every year it sends a young man from our county to college, one who has no one else. The first scholar is a quiet sixteen year old named Jerome. He sits in the front pew every Sunday, beside a tall preacher with big gentle hands, and nobody in Natchez has to ask who he belongs to.