The man with the gray mustache walked up the center of the pecan grove between the long tables of fried chicken and deviled eggs, and three hundred people made room for him without knowing why. He was Special Agent Tom Dillard of the Arkansas State Police, and Calvin knew him. Eleven years earlier Agent Dillard had sat across a table from my son and asked him about a bookie ring in West Memphis. I stood up beside the banana pudding in my church dress, eighty one years old, with the first spiral notebook of 1979 pressed against my chest, and I watched my son go the color of the tablecloths.
The woman in the navy suit was Dana Whitlow from the publishing house in Nashville. She had driven down that morning at my request, and she carried a leather folder instead of a gavel. Agent Dillard held up a phone in a clear plastic bag. “Mrs. Hollis,” he said, loud enough for the back rows, “you gave us the text message from the table of your kitchen in August. The one that said, Get the old lady to sign the house over, or we come to the church. We traced it to a man named Delmar Tate. He is sitting in my car at the edge of this lot, and he has been talking for two hours.”
A murmur went through the pecan trees like wind in a field. Calvin tried to speak, and nothing came. The pastor lowered his microphone. Then Dana Whitlow stepped forward, opened her folder, and read in a clear Nashville voice the title of the contract, Daily Light for Tuesday Women, two thousand three hundred devotionals, four million, one hundred thousand dollars. She turned to the crowd. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, “the woman you were told is writing gibberish is about to be the best selling devotional author in the history of our house.”
A stack of spiral notebooks carried to a church homecoming gave one widow the afternoon to bring her son back to the truth in Jonesboro.
I gave my terms standing under the pecan trees with the notebook in my arms and my voice as steady as it had been on every Tuesday morning for forty five years. “Calvin, you will go with Agent Dillard and tell him everything about Mr. Tate. Then you will go to the treatment program in Little Rock that Pastor Pruitt has found, and I will pay for it. The house stays mine. The money stays in a trust that I control. And on the day you walk out of that program, I will be standing at the gate with a plate of dinner on the grounds.”
Calvin took two steps toward me and fell to his knees in the pine straw in front of the whole congregation. “Mama,” he said, “I stood up here and called your life gibberish. I have been reading those notebooks in my head since I was a boy. You wrote one for the week Daddy lost his job. You wrote one for the week I got sent home from school. I knew every word was for me.” He put his hands over his face. “I owe nearly eighty thousand dollars to a man who told me he would come to this church. I did not know how to say no.”
It was the sight of Delmar Tate being led across the lot in handcuffs that broke the last of his nerve. Calvin leapt up, snatched the folder of papers from the table where he had left it, the power of attorney he had drawn up for me to sign, and ran for the tree line behind the fellowship hall, with the pages flapping. He did not get far. The twelve women of my Tuesday Bible study, in their Sunday hats, each holding a serving spoon or a pan of cobbler, moved together across the grass and formed a line, shoulder to shoulder, like a hedge of lavender.
Calvin stopped short in front of Sister Opal Rainey, who was ninety one and held a pan of banana pudding in both hands. “Calvin Hollis,” she said, “I changed your diaper in the nursery in 1968. Give me that paper.” He looked at the row of old faces, and every one of them had taught him a Sunday school lesson. He handed the folder to Sister Opal, and she tucked it under her arm and offered him a spoonful of pudding. He took it, and he began to cry.
The money consequences were simple. Delmar Tate was charged with extortion and illegal gambling, and Agent Dillard broke a ring that stretched from West Memphis to Tunica. Calvin cooperated fully and was sentenced to treatment and probation. The four million, one hundred thousand dollars from the publishing house went into the trust of my own lawyer, and the house on Crowley Ridge was never in danger. The first volume of the devotionals reached the shelves in March, and the women of the Tuesday study bought forty copies apiece.
In the name of Otis, who passed in 2021, I started the Otis Hollis Fund. It pays for large print devotionals for shut ins and for gambling counseling for families, in Craighead, Poinsett and Greene counties. In the first year we mailed nine hundred books and placed thirty eight people in counseling. One went to a blind widow in Paragould who had not read a page in six years. She asked the volunteer to read the first devotional aloud, and then she asked for it a second time.
Calvin came home from Little Rock after ninety days. On the first Tuesday morning of the month, I was in the fellowship hall at Central Baptist with twelve women and a pot of coffee, and he walked in with a stack of folding chairs. He set them out in a half circle, one by one, without being asked. Then he sat down in the last row with his hat in his hands. I opened the first spiral notebook of 1979 and began to read, and my son listened to every word of it.