“…somebody who has been waiting thirty years to get that land back,” Russell said, and he smiled the way he used to smile when we were boys and he had hidden my shoes. I did not smile back. I stood in his boat showroom in Thibodaux, with the smell of new vinyl seats and gasoline in my nose, holding the paper with the closing date circled in red. “Who is it, Russell?” I asked. He shrugged, stuffed his hands in his pockets and said, “Ask Daddy. He knows. He is the one who took it from him in the first place.”
I drove straight to the garage behind Russell house, where my father lay on that sagging army cot under a stack of old shrimp nets, with a fan blowing hot air across his face. He was eighty four years old and he weighed about as much as a bag of oysters. When he saw me he tried to sit up. I got down on my knees on the concrete and put my arms around him, and he smelled like mildew and bayou water. “Curtis,” he whispered. “Cher, I told them. I told them not to sell the Dularge land. I told them.”
I carried him to my truck myself. Russell wife stood in the kitchen window, watching, and did not come out. I laid Daddy across the back seat on my work jacket and drove the forty minutes home to Houma with the air conditioner on high. Somewhere past Gibson he reached forward and tapped my shoulder. “There was a man named Alcide Broussard,” he said. “In 1994 I won his daddy land in a card game, and I should have given it back the next morning. I was proud. I kept it. That man has hated me for thirty years, and he has every right.”
Two old men, a deck of cards, and a debt of forty acres that nobody had forgotten for thirty years.
Alcide Broussard turned out to be a retired schoolteacher of seventy one, with a white mustache and a little house in Gray. I found him on his porch the next morning, shelling peas in a metal bowl. I did not know what I would say. I only knew that if the man who wanted our land was going to take it, he would have to look me in the face. I said my name. He set the bowl down very slowly. “Doucet,” he said. “I wondered when one of you would come.” Then he surprised me. He asked if I would like a cup of coffee.
We sat on his porch for two hours. He told me his father had lost forty acres of cane land on a single hand of bouree in the summer of 1994, drunk and brokenhearted after his wife passed, and had never forgiven himself. Alcide had watched his father shrink into a quiet old man on that porch. “It was never about the money,” he said. “It was about being able to tell Papa, before the end, that the land was back in the family.” His father had passed in 2009. He had been saving for the day ever since.
Then I showed him what Russell had done. The power of attorney, the missing checkbook, the rented house, the cot in the garage. I set it all down on the little table between us, the papers shaking in my hand. Alcide read every page. When he finished, he took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes for a long time. “Mr. Doucet,” he said, “a man named Russell approached me in March. He told me your father wished to sell and was too proud to say it. I believed him. I would never have bought land from a frightened old man in a garage.”
He picked up his phone and called his lawyer in Houma, a sharp tongued woman named Ms. Guidry, and told her to stop the closing. Then he called the title company. By two in the afternoon the sale was frozen, the money was held in escrow, and a sheriff deputy I had gone to school with was sitting in Russell showroom taking a statement. I will not tell you everything Russell said when they put the power of attorney under his nose. I will tell you that he cried, and that for the first time in my life, I did not feel sorry for him.
The judge in Terrebonne Parish revoked the power of attorney within the week and ordered Russell to return the rent money, every dollar of it, plus the deed box and the checkbook. He kept his boat business, but he lost his standing in the parish, and in the family. My father sat through the hearing in a wheelchair, in his old white shrimping boots, which were the only shoes he trusted. At the end he looked across the room at his younger son and said quietly, in Cajun French, that he forgave him. Russell could not meet his eyes.
Then Daddy did something I will never forget. In the lawyer office, with Alcide Broussard sitting across the table, he picked up a pen with a shaking hand and signed the forty acres back to the Broussard family, for one dollar and a promise. Alcide wept openly. He pulled out his wallet and tucked a worn photograph into my father palm, a thin man with a wide grin, standing on the very same land, holding a sack of cane. “That is Papa,” he said. “Thank you for bringing him home.”
We kept the house on Bayou Dularge and the old dock. My father lived three more years, in his own bed, with the window open and the sound of the water outside. On Sunday afternoons Alcide would drive over with a pot of gumbo, and the two old men would sit on the porch and play bouree for matchsticks, arguing loudly about every hand. I never once saw either of them win more than the other. When I think of those afternoons, the sun low and orange on the bayou, I think that is what forgiveness looks like. It looks like two old men and a deck of cards.