What Wendell told the man from Antioch, I learned in the fellowship hall of the church in East Nashville, with fifty guests sitting stunned over their banana pudding, was this: “Come to my birthday party on Saturday night, and bring your paper.” The attorney in the bow tie, Mr. Hollis, read it from his own notes. The man from Antioch had telephoned Wendell last Thursday, looking for my husband. Wendell had listened to him politely, written down the sum, and then asked him to be a guest of honor. He wanted the debt settled in front of the family.
I sat in my seat at the head table with my hands in my lap, forty four years old, in the pearl necklace I had worn to impress these people. I was no longer drunk. Across from me, Chase had pushed his chair back from the table, and his face was a dull mottled red. At the back of the fellowship hall, near the coffee urn, a heavyset man in a gray overcoat had risen from his folding chair and was holding a manila envelope. He did not smile. He nodded to Wendell, and Wendell nodded back, kindly, as to an old acquaintance.
“Son,” said Wendell, in the soft voice of forty four years of quiet, “this is Mr. Dalton. You owe him sixty four thousand dollars for the poker game in Antioch. He came to me on Thursday because you were not answering his calls. I am going to pay him tonight, in front of your wife and your church, and then I am going to ask you for something in return.” He did not raise his eyes from the table. “I have never asked you for anything in my life. I would like you to sit down with me at the end of this evening and talk.”
A birthday toast raised in a fellowship hall gave one daughter in law the evening to bring her husband back to his father in Nashville.
I gave my terms, standing up at my place at the head table with my napkin still in my hand, and my voice cracking. “Wendell, before anyone says anything, I owe you an apology that I do not know how to give. I made a joke about a man who has been the kindest person in my life, and I did it because I was ashamed of my own husband. I am sorry. And Chase, you are going to the meeting at the Methodist church on Thursday, and I am going with you, and I am not going to pay one more dollar to any man in Antioch.”
Wendell looked at me across the table. “Courtney,” he said, “it was a good joke. I have heard worse, from better people. What I mind is the idea that a janitor has nothing to leave anybody. I left my son the thing I thought would matter, which was an example. I cleaned the same floors every night for forty four years so that he could have a clean one to stand on. And then he stood on it and lost the lake lot.” He smiled, sadly. “I do not blame him. I blame the cards. They told him he was lucky.”
Chase could not bear it. He shoved back his chair, scattering a paper plate and a plastic fork, and bolted for the kitchen door, intending to slip through the fellowship hall kitchen and out the back before the man in the gray coat could reach him. He flung the swinging door open. Three ladies of the church kitchen committee, Sister Odessa, Sister Pearl and Sister Mae, each over seventy, each holding a ladle, stood side by side at the serving window. They did not say anything. They just lifted the ladles.
Chase stopped in the doorway, looking at the three ladles. Sister Odessa tilted her head. “Chase Ballard,” she said, “I fed you collard greens at your daddy wedding. Sit down at your own father party.” He stood there for a moment with his chest heaving. Then, in front of all fifty guests, he let out a long breath, turned slowly, and walked back to the table. He sat down next to his father. Wendell, without looking at him, put one worn hand on the back of his neck.
The money consequences were simple. Wendell paid Mr. Dalton the sixty four thousand dollars by check, took a signed receipt, and informed him, in a calm voice, that if Chase were ever seen at a card table in Antioch again, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation would receive a letter. The estate of three million, six hundred thousand dollars was given to the church as promised, and the pastor, weeping, announced it would fund a new wing and a scholarship fund. Wendell kept the little house in East Nashville.
In the name of his wife Louise, who passed in 2014, Wendell started the Louise Ballard Fund, and I sit on its board. It pays for college scholarships for the children of janitors and custodians, and for gambling counseling for families, in Davidson, Williamson and Rutherford counties. In the first year we sent twelve young people to college and counseled forty one families. One was a girl from Murfreesboro whose mother cleaned offices at night. She wore a gray uniform to the interview, with the name stitched on the pocket, and she got the scholarship.
Chase kept his promise and went to the meeting on the following Thursday, and every Thursday after. On the first Saturday of spring, he drove his father to the church to look at the new wing. I rode in the back seat. Wendell sat in front, in his gray uniform, which he had insisted on wearing, with his name stitched on the pocket. At a stoplight, he turned around in his seat and looked at me for a long moment. “Courtney,” he said, “do you know any good jokes?” I laughed until I cried, and so did he.