The deputy in Meridian wrote the name of the insurance agent on a yellow pad and turned the pad toward me. Roy Vickery. Sixty one. A gold ring on his right hand. In Hattiesburg the year before, an old woman named Miss Ernestine had been found in her carport, struck by a car in the dark on her way home from a church supper, and her grandson had collected a hundred thousand dollars. The grandson had never been charged. The agent had never been questioned. “Staff Sergeant,” the deputy said, “I have been waiting a year for someone with your kind of nerve.”
I took no pleasure in what I did next. I called my battalion commander in Germany, a colonel I had served under for six years, and asked for emergency leave and a favor. Within the hour, an investigator from the Army Criminal Investigation Division in Atlanta telephoned the Meridian sheriff, and the sheriff telephoned the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, and by evening I was sitting in the kitchen of my grandmother with two agents in plain clothes, a bowl of grits between us, and a plan that I had designed with my own hands the way I used to plan a convoy.
The plan was simple. Grandma Hattie would go to work at the truck stop that Friday as she always did. She would walk out to her car at the end of her shift as she always did, a little after six in the morning, carrying her lunch pail. Darius would be waiting in the parking lot for her paycheck. And Roy Vickery, who had been asking so many questions about which door she used, would very likely be waiting too. Six agents would be hidden around the lot, and I would be standing in the shadow of a diesel pump, in the oldest civilian clothes I owned.
No soldier is ever too far from the one small woman who first taught her what to fight for.
I asked my grandmother whether she was afraid. She was folding a dishtowel, and she put it down very carefully. She said, “Baby, I buried a husband and a daughter and I raised you alone on the pay of a motel maid. I am not afraid of a man in a gold ring.” And then she said, in a smaller voice, “But I am ashamed. I let that boy take my money because I thought he loved me.” I knelt in front of her chair and took her hands, those thin brown hands that had scrubbed a thousand motel bathtubs. I said, “Grandma, there is nothing shameful in being loved wrong.”
Friday came gray and cold. At ten minutes past six, my grandmother walked out of the truck stop in her blue smock and her good coat, with her lunch pail swinging, and she did not look around. Darius stepped out from behind a pickup with his hand out. She gave him an envelope with nothing in it but a folded sheet of newspaper. He did not even check. He turned to walk away, and from the far end of the lot a tan sedan came rolling out of the dark with its headlights off, picking up speed, aimed straight at the small figure in the blue smock.
I will not describe what I did in the next three seconds, because I do not remember it. I only know that I ran faster than I had ever run in two tours, and that I reached my grandmother and pulled her sideways into the grass an instant before the sedan went past, and that the sedan veered, and hit a concrete post, and stopped. Agents poured out of the shadows. The door of the car opened. A white haired man in a nice suit stumbled out with blood on his lip and a gold ring on his hand, and a young agent put him on the ground.
Roy Vickery sat in the interview room in Meridian for nine hours. He said nothing until a prosecutor from Hattiesburg walked in with a thick file. Then he began to talk, flatly and without emotion, like a man reading a grocery list. Eleven names, he said, over seven years. Lonely old women with grandchildren who needed money. He had paid each grandson a share of the policy. Darius had been the twelfth. He gave the dates and the places, and where each woman had walked, and what time. When he was finished, the room was so quiet that I could hear the clock.
Darius cried in the hallway in handcuffs. He said that he had not known about the car, only about the policy. He said that Vickery had told him it would be quick and painless, a heart attack in her sleep. I looked at my cousin, three years older than me, who had taught me to ride a bicycle when I was seven. I said, “Darius, you counted her money and called it love.” He had no answer. The court gave him eight years for fraud and conspiracy. Vickery will die in prison in Parchman, convicted on twelve counts.
The Army sent my allotment back in full, with interest, and the Social Security office restored fourteen months of stolen benefits within a single hard fought week. My grandmother quit the truck stop that Saturday morning, took off her blue smock, folded it neatly, and handed it to the night manager with a smile. He gave her a plate of pie. I took the rest of my leave, three weeks, and spent every day of it in her kitchen, painting the walls yellow, fixing the porch step, and learning to make her cornbread the way she made it.
On the night of her eighty second birthday we held a party at Mt. Zion Baptist. Seventy people, three cakes, a gospel choir, and a banner that said HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MISS HATTIE. I gave her the card I had carried from Germany. She read it slowly, with her glasses on, and then she looked at me over the top of them. “Keisha,” she said, “you drove through places that tried to kill you and you came home and saved an old woman at a gas station.” I said, “Grandma, you taught me that was the only mission worth having.”