The name on the last marker was Deacon Harlan Mayfield, and when Pastor Coleman read it aloud in his office, in the lamplight, I felt the floor tilt. Harlan Mayfield was the chairman of the camp board. He had sat in the front pew of the church for thirty years. He had shaken my hand in the church kitchen a hundred times. The marker was signed by Russell, but the line for the guarantor read Harlan Mayfield, Treasurer of Camp Galilee Ministries. Pastor Coleman dialed the number from memory, and said only, “Harlan, I need you at the church. Now.”
The deacon arrived in nineteen minutes in his Sunday blazer, and he stopped in the doorway when he saw Russell and me. Pastor Coleman laid the six markers in a row on the blotter. “Harlan,” he said, “you are the guarantor on all of them.” For a moment the deacon said nothing. Then his shoulders sagged, and out it came. A man from the Horseshoe in Tunica had approached him three years before, a host who paid him a finder fee for every church member who signed a marker using the name of a ministry. He had steered Russell. He had told him the camp account was a safe place to borrow.
“I told myself it was only paper,” said Harlan Mayfield, with his hat in both hands. “I told myself the camp had plenty. I told myself Evangeline would never need the scholarship fund that year.” Tears ran down his face. Russell sat very still beside me with his Bible on his knee. Nobody said a word for a long time. Outside the window, in the dark, a mockingbird sang. “Forty one thousand dollars,” Pastor Coleman said at last, softly, “from the children, Harlan. From children who could not afford to come to camp.”
A casino marker found under a blotter gave one mother the evening to bring her son back to the camp in Oxford.
I gave my terms with the Bible of Eugene on my lap. “Harlan, you will resign from the board tonight, in writing. You will repay the forty one thousand dollars to the scholarship fund, with interest, from your own pocket, and you will tell the whole story to the congregation on Sunday morning. Russell, you will resign from your church in Memphis, and you will go to the program at Baptist Memorial that Pastor Coleman has found. You will repay your share, a little each month, to the children. And I will go on directing Camp Galilee until I am too old to climb the hill. Pastor, will you write that down?”
Russell dropped to his knees on the carpet of the pastor, and the Bible fell from his knee. “Mama,” he said, “I stole from the children. I held the arrow of the smallest child in the camp and showed her how to aim, and then I went home and gambled her scholarship. I do not know how I can ever face Daddy.” He pressed his forehead to the leg of my chair, and I felt him shake. “I told myself that you were slipping so I would not have to see that I was the one falling. I am so sorry. I am so sorry, Mama.”
Harlan Mayfield, seeing his chance in the confusion, swept the six markers off the blotter and lunged for the door. His hand was on the knob when a figure stepped between him and the frame. It was Russell, who had risen from his knees with his face wet and his chest heaving, and who put his back against the door and spread his arms. “No, Deacon,” he said, in a voice that I had not heard from him since he was a boy of ten at the archery line. “We are not running. Not tonight, and not from this.” Harlan looked at the man in front of him and sagged.
Pastor Coleman gathered up the markers from the floor and set them in the lap of Russell, who held them as if they were a sleeping child. The pastor laid one hand on the head of Harlan and the other on the head of my son, and he prayed for a long time, for the children, for the camp, for the two weak men who had hurt them. I sat between them with my steady hand on the back of the neck of my son. Somewhere in the prayer I realized I was no longer afraid.
The money consequences were exact. Harlan Mayfield repaid the forty one thousand dollars in full, with interest, within ninety days, by selling his lake house. He resigned from the board and made his confession to the congregation, and he was not charged because the casino host was. The host and two of his associates were arrested the following spring. Russell repaid his share from his wages, a little each month, until the last dollar was returned. The four million, two hundred thousand dollars from the sporting goods company stayed in the bank, and it paid for the new roof.
In the name of Eugene, who passed in 2021, I started the Eugene Harper Fund. It pays for camp scholarships, archery gear and treatment help for families in Lafayette, Panola and Marshall counties. In the first year we sent three hundred and nine children to Camp Galilee. One was a girl of eight from Batesville who had never been away from her grandmother. On the first day she hit the target on her fourth try with the brass pin sight of Eugene, and she turned around, beaming, and shouted that she had done it, and the whole camp cheered.
Russell finished his program in the spring and came to Camp Galilee on the first day of summer. I had not asked him. He stood at the edge of the archery field in a plain shirt, with a bow over his shoulder, while the children lined up in their white tee shirts. Without a word, he walked down the line, adjusting the sight of each little bow. At the end of the row, he handed a bow to a boy who was shaking, and said, in the voice of his father, “Breathe out, and let it fly.”