The card said four things, in the cursive I have used for seventy years. At the top was a verse about those who speak lies and those who love truth. Underneath, in a smaller hand, I had written the number of the loan from the payday lender in Columbia, the date it was signed, and the words, This is not my handwriting. At the bottom I had added one more line, and it was the line that made the head deacon put down his coffee. It said, I forgive you, Marcus, and I will not sign. Every deacon who read it looked at my son, and my son looked at the floor.
The young deacon was Special Agent Nathan Cole of the Attorney General office. He told the room, quietly, that three months earlier a complaint had come in from a lender in Columbia about a loan with a signature that did not match the bank records. He had gone through the signatures on file at Mount Zion and found the pattern. There were three loans. One carried my name. One carried the name of Sister Odessa Pruitt, who is ninety. One carried the name of Brother Lucius Hale, a widower of six years. All three had been signed in the same hand, and all three had been delivered to the car lot of Marcus.
Marcus did not deny it. He pressed his big hands flat on the table and said he had meant to pay every dollar back before anyone knew. He had borrowed against the houses of three old people who trusted him because they trusted me. The head deacon, Thaddeus Boone, seventy seven, whom I have known since we were teenagers, rose slowly to his feet with his cane. The room waited. He did not shout. He said, “Marcus, you stood at that door every Sunday and shook the hands of the people you were robbing.”
An index card written in cursive gave one mother the Sunday to bring her son back to his faith in Spartanburg.
I gave my terms from my chair, with the fountain pen of Clarence still in my hand. “Marcus, you will resign as deacon this afternoon, in writing. You will tell Agent Cole everything he asks. You will sell the car lot if you must, and repay the three loans in full, starting with Sister Odessa. You will go to the meetings in Spartanburg on Tuesday and Saturday nights, and you will take me with you the first time, so I can see the room. And I will go on writing my cards. Nobody in this church is going to take that from me, least of all my own child.”
Marcus broke then. He put his forehead down on the table and wept the way he wept at the age of six, when he dropped the watch of his father in the creek. “Mama,” he said, “I could not stop. I told myself every Saturday night that it was the last one. When the money ran out I borrowed, and when the borrowing ran out I signed your name. I practiced it on the back of church bulletins. I used the cards you gave me as a pattern.” He looked up, his face wet. “You wrote me a note every Sunday of my life, and I forged you with it.”
Then he did a foolish thing. He snatched the folder of loan papers from the table, pushed back his chair, and ran for the double doors of the fellowship hall. He had almost reached them when Deacon Boone, who is seventy seven and walks with a cane, stepped into the doorway and laid the cane across the frame like a gate. Marcus is two hundred and forty pounds. He stopped anyway. “Son,” said Thaddeus Boone, very gently, “I taught you to ride a bicycle in this parking lot. I am not going to let you ride away from this.”
Agent Cole took the folder without a word, and took my son by the elbow without roughness. I stood up on my bad hand and my good one, and I walked to Marcus and put my arms around his thick neck. I felt him shaking. “I am your mother,” I said. “That did not stop when you picked up a pen that was not yours.” The four remaining deacons stood and joined hands around us, and the head deacon prayed, and somewhere in the prayer I realized that for the first time in eight years I was not afraid for my son.
The money consequences were firm. The three loans were voided by the lender once the forgeries were proven, and Marcus repaid the fees from the sale of his car lot. He pleaded to one count, cooperated fully, and received probation with strict conditions. Four million, nine hundred thousand dollars from the greeting card company stayed in an account under my name alone. A tenth of it I set aside for Sister Odessa and Brother Hale, who needed nothing, but I wanted them to hear that I had thought of them. They each sent me a pound cake. I have eaten both.
In the name of Clarence, who passed in 2020, I started the Clarence Richardson Fund. It pays for large print Bibles, hot meals and rides to church for seniors in Spartanburg, Cherokee and Union counties. In the first year we served three hundred and twelve people. One was a man of ninety four in Gaffney who had not left his house since the winter. A volunteer drove him to church on Easter, and he sat in the third pew and held one of my cards in both hands. He kept looking at it, he said, to make sure it was real.
Marcus finished his program on a Tuesday in the spring, a year and a day after he first sat in that folding chair. He came to my house with his sponsor and a paper bag, and he asked if I would write a card for him. I took out my best index card and the pen of Clarence, and I wrote the verse for the day, and underneath, in my smallest cursive, Hold on, baby. He read it on my porch, folded it in four, and tucked it in his wallet, behind his driver license, where a man keeps what he cannot afford to lose.