The door opened on a dim, quiet room that smelled of coffee and carpet cleaner. There were no slot machines in it, only a green felt table under a low lamp, and at the table sat a tiny old man in a black suit, with a cup in front of him and a cane across his lap. Beside him, in a blue work shirt, with his hands wrapped around a cup of his own and his eyes red from no sleep, sat my son. Bobby Ray looked up and saw me and half rose from his chair. “Mama,” he said. “Mama, I was going to call. I only just got here.”
I stood in the doorway with my four hundred dollars in an envelope and my purse clutched to my chest. I had pictured a hundred terrible things on the drive down. I had not pictured my son drinking coffee with the man. The old man gestured at the empty chair. “Mrs. Marchbanks,” he said, in a soft, dry, gentle voice. “My name is Lucian Broussard. They call me Deacon. Please sit. You have come a long way, and I have waited a longer one.” His eyes were pale and tired. He was perhaps eighty five. I sat.
Bobby Ray told it first, because he said it was his to tell. Earline had called him the night after the funeral and told him what his father had done. He had driven to the casino at five that morning without telling his wife, because he could not stand to hear it from anyone else. He had walked into the high limit room and said to the man in the black suit, “How much is left on the debt?” And the old man had looked at him for a long time and said, “Sit down, son. You are square with me, not one penny short. I need to explain something about your father.”
A debt that is paid in full can still be paid again for twenty years, if the man paying it is trying to buy back something no money can reach.
Deacon spoke slowly. He had once been a banker in Natchez, he said, until a scandal, and then a lender of the sort that does not appear in a phone book. In 1999 he had lent thirty thousand dollars to a boy who wagered on football. When the boy could not pay, Deacon had frightened the father, and he was not proud of it. Dewitt came every month, never late, never speaking. By 2003 it was finished. Deacon told him so, across this table. “And your husband said to me, Mr. Broussard, I would like to keep coming. Not for the debt. For the boy.”
Dewitt had explained it in six sentences. His son would gamble again, he said, because it ran in the blood of that family. He wanted to put money aside for his grandchildren, where Bobby Ray could not touch it. He did not trust a bank, and he did not trust his own wife not to worry. He asked Deacon, of all people, because Deacon was the one man who understood both money and sin. So for twenty two years, a lineman paid a loan shark to hold an account. Deacon invested every envelope. He had never taken a penny of it.
He opened a leather ledger on the green felt and turned it toward me. I do not read ledgers for a living, but I have balanced a checkbook for fifty years, and I could see the numbers march down the page, month after month, in the neat hand of an old banker. At the bottom was a figure in three accounts. Two hundred and twelve thousand dollars. One account for each of my three grandchildren, with a college name written beside it. And one more, smaller, with a line across the top. For Glenda, the Grand Canyon.
I did not make a sound. I put my hand over my mouth, and Bobby Ray moved his chair beside mine and put his arm around my shoulders. He was shaking. “Mama, I have not placed one wager in nineteen years,” he said. “I go to a meeting on Tuesdays in the basement of the Methodist church. I never told you because I was ashamed. And all that time, Daddy was out here paying for my mistakes.” I held his face in both hands. I said, “He was not paying for your mistake. He was paying for your future. It is not the same.”
I turned to the old man. “Why did you ask Earline where I live?” He lowered his eyes. “Because I have a heart condition, Mrs. Marchbanks, and I was told this spring I have a few months. I wished to hand you the papers myself, in your own home, before I could not. I am sorry that it frightened you. Fear was my trade for a long time. I have not known how to make a gentle entrance.” He pushed a folder across the table. Inside were the trust documents, already signed, with a notary seal dated that very morning.
We did not talk about forgiveness. It would have been too large a word for that room. But I reached across the felt and put my hand over the cold old hand of the man, and he looked at it as if no one had touched him in a long time. “Thank you for keeping it safe,” I said. He nodded. His eyes were wet. Earline, who had been standing at the door in her navy suit all that time, came in with a plate of pound cake and set it on the table, and the four of us ate in the quiet of the back room.
In September, I stood at the south rim of the Grand Canyon in a rented sun hat, with my son on one side and my three grandchildren on the other, and the whole red world dropping away at our feet. The youngest asked what Grandpa Dewitt would have said. Bobby Ray laughed. He said, “He would have said, handled.” We stayed until the stars came out. Deacon died in October, and Earline and I buried him ourselves, in a plain suit, in a quiet church. I left a twenty dollar bill on his headstone, folded in half.