The man sitting on the overturned bucket beside the fresh hole was Marcus Batiste, in a clean work shirt and muddy boots, with a spade across his knees and his face wet with tears. I stood at the rusty fence in the first gray light of morning, my hand on the wire, and I knew that I should be frightened. But there was nothing in his face to fear. He looked up at me like a boy who has been sitting alone in a dark room for a very long time. “Miss Rachal,” he said. “I think my father is under here. And I think you know why.”
I climbed over the fence in my church shoes, tore my stockings on the wire, and sat down in the weeds beside him. I told him I did not know. I told him the only thing I had found was a logbook with a line in it. R.B. came at night.
Clara made me swear. I said that my mother had been a good woman, that she never raised her voice, and that if she had made my father swear, she must have had a reason that was neither cruel nor greedy. Marcus nodded slowly. “I have waited twenty four years,” he said. “I can wait a few days more.”
We called the parish sheriff together, the two of us, standing in the weeds with the sun coming up behind the old barbershop. The deputies arrived with a coroner and a small excavator. Marcus asked, politely, if they would work by hand, and the sheriff, a gentle man named Boudreaux who had known my father from church, agreed. It took the better part of the day. At three in the afternoon, under four feet of damp clay, they uncovered a plain pine box, built with care and fastened with brass screws.
A man who builds a coffin with his own hands, though no one has asked him, is not hiding a crime, he is performing a last act of mercy.
The box held the remains of a man in a good brown suit, with his hands folded on his chest and a small leather Bible beneath them. Pressed in the pages was a sheet of paper in the printing of my father. The coroner read it aloud to the small group at the edge of the pit. September 2001. Raymond Batiste came to our kitchen door after midnight, sick and ashamed, wanting to ask Clara to forgive him for an old wrong. His heart gave out on our porch. We were afraid no one would believe us.
My mother had known him as a boy. Raymond had been her first beau before she married my father, and he had left her badly, in 1963, taking her savings to go to Houston. He had come back as an old man, ruined and dying, meaning to repay her in person. She had held his head while he died on the porch. Clovis, frightened that two Black people with a dead white man on their porch at night would be accused of something terrible, had built the box and buried him on his own empty lot.
Marcus sat down on the ground beside the pine box and put his hand on the lid. I heard him say, quietly, “Daddy, I found you.” The deputies and the coroner turned away, some of them wiping their faces. When he looked up at me his eyes were red but clear. He said, “All these years, I thought he had abandoned us. I hated him for it. And all that time, he was trying to get home.” He asked me to forgive his father. I said there was nothing to forgive.
The funeral was held ten days later at the Baptist church on Second Street, with the coffin new and handsome and a hundred people crowding the pews. The old pastor of my father delivered the sermon. Marcus stood at the pulpit and spoke of a man who had made mistakes and tried, too late, to mend them. He thanked Clovis and Clara Rachal by name, and several of the older women in the congregation stood up and applauded. I wept in the second row, in a hat that had belonged to my mother.
The question of the taxes was settled by Marcus the same afternoon. He bought the lot for one dollar from the parish, as heir to his father, and he paid every penny of the back taxes out of his own pocket, plus those that my father had paid for twenty five years. He wrote a check to me, which I tore up. Then he said he wanted to build something on Lot Fourteen after all. Not a store, not a house. A small garden, with a bench and a plaque, for anyone who needed a quiet place.
It opened in the spring. Marcus and I planted the first azaleas ourselves, on our knees in the clay, and a high school class from Natchitoches planted the rest. There is a sign at the gate, hand painted. It says only, Lot Fourteen. On Sundays, after church, I bring a thermos of coffee and sit on the bench in the shade. Sometimes Marcus joins me. We do not say much. We only watch the light move across the flowers, and we feel, I think, the same thing.