I carried my mother out of that garage in my arms, still in her housecoat, with her Rosary wound around her fingers, while the music thumped through the wall and four boys on the porch watched without saying a word. Marie Thibodeaux weighs about ninety pounds. She put her head on my shoulder the way she did when I was small and she was the one carrying me home from the shrimp docks. I laid her in the back seat of my truck on a pillow and a blanket and kissed her forehead, and I said, “Mama, you are never sleeping in a garage again.”
I drove to the emergency room in Houma. The doctor on duty was a woman I went to high school with, and when she saw my mother she put her hand over her mouth. Marie had a bladder infection, dehydration, bedsores, and a bruise the size of a plate on her left hip. She had been living in that garage for three months. A nurse took photographs. A social worker came with a clipboard. And Dr. Fontenot, who was crying, said quietly, “Rhonda, I will write all of this down. Every word of it. I am so sorry nobody called me.”
I did not call my brother. I did not call his sons. I made one telephone call from a vinyl chair beside the bed of my mother, to the Louisiana State Police, narcotics division, and asked for a captain named Boudreaux, a man I had once fed three plates of red beans at a church fundraiser. He answered on the second ring. I told him about the room, the plants, the list on the wall, the deputy at the top of it. The line was silent a moment. Then he said, “Rhonda, stay with your mother. We will be there before dawn.”
The people who are loved well in their youth will always be carried home in the end.
They came at four in the morning, nine officers in vests, quiet as cats. Jake and his brothers were asleep on the couch among the empty bottles. The raid took eleven minutes. They carried out thirty plants, nine trash bags of dried product, two shotguns, and a ledger. My brother Randy stood in the yard in his undershirt with his hands behind his head and tears sliding down his face. He kept saying, “I did not mean for Mama to be sleeping out there.” An officer told him, kindly, that nobody ever means to.
Royce Landry was arrested at his towing company that same morning, on a tip that Captain Boudreaux had been saving for two years. The deputy at the top of the list resigned by noon. The bartender, the nurse, and the football coach all turned out to be small buyers, and the state sorted them out in time. But Landry, who owned the loans and the lawyer and half the men in the parish, had never once been caught with his own hands in the work. Now he sat in a gray cell at the parish jail and demanded to speak to someone with a college degree.
The deed was the hardest part. A young lawyer named Natalie Guidry took the case without charging me a penny, and she stood in the Terrebonne Parish courthouse in a green suit and told the judge exactly what had happened. An old woman had signed away her house believing it was a Medicare form. A notary hired by Landry had witnessed it. A forged letter of capacity had been placed in the file. The judge, a stern gentleman with a gray mustache, looked at my mother in her wheelchair, in her good church dress, and voided the deed in four minutes.
Jake took a plea. Five years, reduced for his cooperation. His brothers each got two. Landry went to trial in the spring and was convicted of racketeering, extortion, and distribution, and the judge gave him twenty five years with no early release. I went to every day of it. I sat in the back row in a clean apron I had washed myself, and when the foreman read the verdict I felt no triumph at all, only a long gray tiredness, like the morning after a hurricane when you walk outside and count what is left.
Randy came to see me at the house in May, thin, sober for ninety days, with a bag of shrimp in his hand. He could not meet my eyes. He said, “Rhonda, I took your money and I let them put her in the garage. I will never forgive myself.” I let him stand on the porch for a long time. Then I said, “Randy, nobody asks you to forgive yourself. Mama asks you to come to supper.” He came in. My mother, in her chair by the window, held out both her arms, and my brother knelt on the floor and put his head in her lap and wept.
The last thing I had to do was find the dog. It took me three weeks. I drove to every gas station between Houma and Thibodaux with a photograph, asking at the counter. On a Saturday afternoon, at a bait shop on Highway 24, a bald man with a gray beard looked up from his crossword and said, “That little brown dog? He sleeps in the back of my truck. Hardest barking thing I ever met.” I knelt in the gravel and said one word. “Peanut.” And a small brown streak shot out from under the tailgate and hit me in the chest so hard I fell on my back, laughing and crying.
We brought him home on a cold Sunday in January. My mother was waiting on the porch of her own house, in her own chair, with her own Rosary. When the truck door opened and the little dog ran up the steps and leaped into her lap, she did not say anything for a very long time. She held him with both hands. Then she looked at me over his ears, with her old stubborn sparkle, and said: “Rhonda, baby. Go put the gumbo on. Everybody is going to be hungry.” And I did. I turned the burner on high, and the whole bayou smelled like home.