Jerry Petty held the sheet of paper in the light of the sinking sun, and I watched his Adam apple move up and down. He is a heavy, well barbered man of sixty one, an elder at Calvary Baptist, with a rich Sunday voice and a habit of laying a hand on a shoulder while he talks. He did not lay a hand on anything now. “Eight million, two hundred thousand dollars,” he read, in a flat, small voice. “Lonnie Hux. You sold the house moving company. In April.” He looked up. “All thirty four of the men?” I said that every man had kept his job, and a raise. Out on the field the gospel quartet stood frozen on the flatbed with their mouths half open.
Wade did not run. I will say that for him. He stood at the end of the judges table in his good church shirt, a lanky, nervous man of thirty six with a crew cut and a prominent Adam apple of his own, and he looked at the ground like an altar boy. “Mr. Lonnie,” he said, “I can explain about the truck.” “You took a Kenworth and four dollies on Saturday night,” I said, “and a beam set and a jack system, and told Ricky I had okayed it. I did not. They belong to the buyer.” I kept my voice low. “Son, I trained you. I put you on your first jack. I just want to know why.”
Rhonda had come across the grass, in her good blue dress, with the hat she wears to funerals. She stood at my elbow and said nothing, and her hand found mine and held it. Wade drew a breath. “Mr. Jerry told me you were going under,” he said. “He told me in March, after the Sunday service. He said the insurance would eat you alive, and that the buyer would take everything, and that a smart man would get his hands on something before it was gone. He said he would put up the first year of coverage, and let me use the name. Petty Structural. He said, you are family, Wade.” He swallowed. “I wanted to be family.”
A thirty dollar love offering and a ribbon lay on a church judges table and gave one house mover the evening to bring his nephew in law back to the crew.
Every head on that field turned toward the man at the judges table. I will not forget the sight. Jerry Petty, who has led the singing at Calvary for twenty two years, who anoints the sick and signs the church checks, stood with his mouth working and nothing coming out, and the first place ribbon lay at his elbow in the dust. “Lonnie,” he said finally, “I only meant to help the boy.” “You meant to help the boy to my truck,” I said. “Is that the help you mean?” He dropped his eyes. In the whole of that church field, with three hundred people watching, I swear you could hear the smoke settle.
The pastor, a young man named Reverend Cobb in a short sleeved shirt and a tie, came forward from the fellowship tent. He had been listening, as pastors do, from the edge. He did not take sides. He stood with his hands folded in front of him, a calm, thin figure in the evening light, and said, “Brother Jerry. Brother Lonnie. I think there are some things best said out loud, and some best said in my office. Which would you choose?” Jerry looked at me. And I understood, with great surprise, that he was asking me, that he was putting his whole name in my hands.
I thought of the rotten way the thing had been done. And I thought of the face of Rhonda, turned up to me, asking nothing. “Reverend,” I said, “I would be glad of the office.” Jerry flinched. “But I think the people here should know I do not intend to ruin anybody. I am only going to ask for what is mine. Wade, you will return the truck and the dollies tonight.”
Wade nodded, relieved and ashamed in one breath. I turned to Jerry. “You will tell the board of the church how you spent the love offering you handed me this morning. Thirty dollars.” He blinked. “Because I know you took it from the plate.” A murmur ran through the crowd. Jerry paled. “It was the offering for the missions fund,” he said, in a whisper. “I borrowed it. I meant to pay it back.” “That is what Wade said about my truck,” I said, as gently as I knew how, and let the silence do the rest.
He confessed it in the office, with the door open. I did not hear it, but Reverend Cobb told me afterward, in his careful way, that Jerry had been borrowing from the church fund for four years. A little for the agency, a little for the lake house. It was never thousands. It was always just a few hundred, and just once. He wept. He offered to resign. The board, to their credit, accepted the resignation and the repayment in the same breath, and said that the matter would be handled within the church. There was no police. There was only a long, hard silence, and a man who would never again hold the key.
Wade returned the equipment at dawn, in the rain, with Ricky waiting under the floodlight at the yard on Highway 70. He drove the lowboy himself and refused to let anyone else back it in. When it was parked, he stood in the mud with his cap in his hands and asked whether there was any work for a man who had done what he had done. I said yes. I put him on the ground crew, under Ricky, at the wage of a first year helper. He laid ties and shored footings for a year in the heat without a word of complaint. In the second spring, I handed him the keys to a lowboy and said, “Go on, then.”
The cook off the following year was held in the same field. I tended the smokers again, from five in the morning till dark, because I like the work. The quartet sang I Will Fly Away. When the judges announced the winner, it was Rhonda, with her mustard sauce, and she hugged me with sauce on her cheeks. At the end of the night, as I was putting out the last fire, Jerry Petty walked over from the parking lot. He did not speak. He handed me a folded bill. It was a twenty and a ten. “The love offering,” he said, and went away.