The courtroom of Mobile Probate was so quiet that I could hear the ceiling fan ticking above Judge Alvarez. I am Curtis Mayfield Junior, sixty one years old, bailiff of that court for twenty two years, and I had never seen a priest in the witness box. Father Daniel Broussard, white haired and steady in his black clerical shirt, laid a single sheet of paper on the rail and said, “Your Honor, this is a release of the confessional seal, signed by Philip Fontaine on the fourth of March, of his own free will.” At the petitioner table, Philip turned the color of ash.
Judge Alvarez read the paper twice, slowly, and passed it down to the clerk. Then the priest spoke what Philip had confessed to him on the first Friday of every month for six years. The checks written on the account of his mother with her signature copied by his own hand. The sale of the lake lot she had never agreed to sell. The plan, made last winter with his sister Renee in Atlanta, to have Mrs. Eloise Fontaine declared unfit so that the two of them could control four point four million dollars. The priest said it plainly, with sorrow, and looked at no one.
Renee, who had flown in the night before, stared at her brother with her mouth open. She had not known about the checks. She had believed her brother when he said their mother was losing her mind, because he had a doctor, and a folder, and a patient voice. Across the aisle sat Mrs. Fontaine herself, eighty two years old, in her navy church dress and her good pearls, with her cane across her knees. She had listened to every word without moving. Only her hands, folded on the cane, showed what it cost her.
A sealed release read in probate court gave one widow the morning to bring her son back to the truth in Mobile.
Mrs. Fontaine gave her terms from her own chair, when the judge asked if she wished to speak. She stood, which took a while, and said in a clear voice, “Your Honor, I am not incompetent, and I would like the court to say so. I will not press charges against my son, because he is my son, but he will repay every dollar he took, and he will sign over the lake lot, and he will go to the treatment program the priest has found for him. And my daughter will sit beside me from now on, where I can see her.”
Judge Alvarez took off his glasses. “Mrs. Fontaine,” he said, “this court has examined many petitions, and I have rarely seen one fail so completely, or a respondent so entirely in command of her faculties.” He dismissed the petition with prejudice and ordered the evaluation from the doctor of Philip stricken from the record. Renee began to weep quietly into her hands. Then Philip did something no one expected. He stood up from his table, walked to the rail, and said to his mother, in a voice I will remember, “Mama, I am so tired of carrying this.”
It was then that I saw the lawyer of Philip, a thin man named Vance, reach across the table and snatch the signed release from the clerk desk. He ran, with the paper crumpled in his fist, down the center aisle toward the double doors, his leather shoes slapping the floor. I did what twenty two years had trained me to do. I stepped into the aisle and put out my arm, and he ran straight into it, and went down hard on the tile with a grunt. Two deputies pinned him before the paper left his hand.
The aisle was silent again. Vance lay breathing on the tile with the release still gripped in his fingers, and I took it from him gently, smoothed it flat against my knee, and carried it back to the clerk. Father Broussard bowed his head. Mrs. Fontaine looked at me and nodded once, the way she had nodded to me every Monday morning for years when she came in for her docket, and I felt something loosen in my chest that I had been carrying since the first day of the hearing. I had a wife at home who would want to hear every detail, and I meant to tell her slowly, over supper, with the radio turned off.
The money consequences were orderly. Vance was charged with obstruction and surrendered his license, and the bank restored all of the sums Philip had taken, with interest. Philip entered the treatment program in Pensacola, and repaid the rest from his own wages over five years. The estate of four point four million dollars stayed in the hands of Mrs. Fontaine, and she signed a new will, naming Renee and Philip in equal shares, and the priest as a witness, with me as the second. She asked me to witness it myself.
In the name of her husband Lucien, who passed in 2016, Mrs. Fontaine started the Lucien Fontaine Fund, and I sit on its board. It pays for independent doctors, free legal help and family mediation for seniors facing guardianship petitions, in Mobile, Baldwin and Washington counties. In the first year the fund defended twenty six seniors and settled nineteen family disputes without a hearing. One was a retired schoolteacher from Daphne who walked out of a courtroom on her own feet, and who sent me a card every Christmas afterward.
On the first Friday of the following spring, I stood in the back of the little church in Fairhope while Philip, home from treatment and thinner than I had ever seen him, sat in the front pew beside his mother and his sister. The priest was at the altar. When the service ended, Mrs. Fontaine took his arm and walked slowly down the aisle with her cane tapping the floor, and she stopped beside me at the door. “Curtis,” she said, “thank you for the arm.” I told her it had been my pleasure.