“Marcus, keep your window up and your phone on,” I said, and I tapped my own pocket, where the little recorder my granddaughter gave me last Christmas sat with its red light burning. The Tahoe stopped in a spray of gravel. Kyle got out in his dealership blazer, grinning, carrying a manila folder. He stopped short when he saw Marcus Laurent in the Buick, and then he saw me beside it. “Pops, what a surprise,” he said. “I was just coming to bring you the papers for the house. You should not be out in the cold.” I told him the cold never bothered a river man.
Marcus rolled down the window two inches. “Mr. Kyle, you said you had proof about my father,” he said. “You said twenty thousand.” Kyle laughed, a short, ugly bark. “Marcus, let us not do this in front of the old man. Pops, go on home.” I stood where I was. “Kyle, you broke into my pilot house,” I said, “and you took my wife logbook, and you took a page from it, and you are trying to sell a late wife private words to a stranger.” His grin slid sideways. “That book belongs to the family,” he said.
I took the page from Marcus and opened it under the landing lamp. “It belongs to the man it names,” I said. “Cecile left it for me, and for him, and for no one else.” Then I turned the page over and read the check stub aloud. Twenty five thousand dollars, drawn in 1975, payable to the trust of Marcus Laurent, a minor. The signature at the bottom was my daddy. Kyle looked from the stub to my face. “I never saw that,” he said, almost to himself. “I thought it was a payoff. I thought your daddy was paying somebody to keep quiet.”
A son in law came to sell a secret on the landing, a retired ferryman stood his post, and an old river debt finally came due.
“He was,” I said. “He was paying Eddie Laurent for his quarter share of the Boudreau Ferry, and Eddie asked that the money go to his boy.” Marcus made a strangled sound in his throat. “My father was a partner?” he asked. “He was a deckhand who put his savings into a ferry when my daddy had none,” I said. “He was a quarter owner from 1961 on. He left town that night because a man in a gray coat, a federal man, was moving him out before a trial. He had testified against a gambling ring in Vidalia. That is what Cecile saw on the Louisiana side. Eddie got on a bus.”
Kyle went very still. “That cannot be right,” he said. “Then why did the check never clear?” I told him the plain truth. Eddie had been in hiding. Marcus had been a boy of ten, living with an aunt in Baton Rouge under another name, and no one could find him to give him the money. Cecile found the uncashed check in 1981 in my daddy desk, and she knew exactly what it was. She could not find Marcus. So she did the only decent thing she could think of. She put the twenty five thousand into the Cecile B, in his name, and let it grow.
“Marcus,” I said, “you own a quarter of everything I just sold. Forty three years of dividends rolled in with it. The sale paid out four million one hundred eighty thousand dollars. Your share sits in the account of my lawyer on Main Street, one million forty five thousand, and not one dollar of it has been touched.” Marcus put his face in both hands. In the Buick, his shoulders began to shake. Kyle backed away from the car a step at a time, and then a second headlight swung across the landing. Chief Bobby Tate, in the cruiser, stepped out slowly, the same boy I taught to swim off that dock in 1978.
The chief listened to the recording in his car, twice. Kyle stood by the Tahoe with his hands open, saying that it was all a misunderstanding, that he was only trying to help the family find closure. Bobby asked him if closure came in a manila folder for twenty thousand cash. Kyle was charged that night with burglary, extortion, and attempted theft by deception. His lawyer, a friend from the country club, did not answer the telephone until morning. Melissa came to my house at midnight in her nightgown, with mascara down to her chin. She held on to my sleeve like a girl of six.
“Daddy, I did not know,” she said. “I signed that bus ticket thing because he told me you were lonely.” I told her I had been lonely for seven years and that a bus ticket was not the cure. I held her until the clock in the hall struck one. Then I made her a cup of the chicory coffee her mother used to make, and I told her about Eddie Laurent, and about Cecile, and about the way an honest secret can stay hidden in a book for forty three years and still do right by everybody when the day comes.
On Sunday morning Marcus Laurent, Melissa, and I climbed up the gangway of the Cecile B, one last time before the new owners took her to Nashville. The pilot house still smelled of lemon oil and old rope. I opened the glued pages of the logbook and showed him what Cecile had written on the final line, a street address in Port Arthur, Texas, and a woman name, Eddie sister. Marcus held the book against his chest. “Mr. Boudreau, would you come with me?” he asked. I put on my captain cap. I said I had not crossed a river in company in a good many years.
We left at noon, the three of us, in Marcus Buick, over the Vidalia bridge that nearly ended my father ferries and ended up saving them. Marcus drove. Melissa sat in the back, quiet, holding the logbook. I rolled the window down and looked at the river sliding by, brown and slow and wide, the way it was in 1946 and the way it will be long after we are gone. Somewhere in the middle of the span, I swear I heard Cecile voice, plain as the engine. Clarence, she said. Look. He is coming across.