Pastor Holloway read the letter aloud in his office, slowly, with the door closed and the muffled laughter of the bake sale drifting down the hall. It was one page, in the blocky hand of my husband, dated the fourth of March, 2018. “Pastor, in the autumn of 1979, the building fund of Calvary Baptist was short by thirty eight thousand dollars,” it began. “The treasurer then was Gerald Thibodeaux. The bank was ready to take the church by Christmas. I paid the note from my overtime savings, every cent, and I asked you not to tell the congregation or the family. His wife was expecting a child. That child is Brittany.”
I sat down in the chair across from the desk with the jar of preserves still in my hand. Fifty years. For fifty years Lucien had walked past that roof, and the pews, and the stained glass window of the Lamb, and never said a word. He had sat in the fourth pew every Sunday of his life, a few feet from the family of the man who took the money. “Sister Inez, there is more,” the pastor said quietly. He turned the page toward me. “If any of that family should ever speak ill of Inez, Pastor, let her ask you to open this. And let it be known that I forgave them a long time ago.”
Pastor Holloway took off his glasses and pressed his fingers against his eyes. He was seventy two, and he had known my husband for forty one years. “I have kept this in a drawer for five years, Inez, and I have not slept well,” he said. “Gerald Thibodeaux passed in 2015, and I thought it better to let the past keep its secrets. But I cannot let that sign stand in my fellowship hall, with the figs of Lucien underneath.” I set my jar on his blotter. I wiped my wrists, which were aching, with my apron. “Pastor,” I said. “I do not want the church to hear this. I want to ask for two people.”
A brown envelope kept in a church file drawer gave one widow the Saturday to bring a daughter in law back to the fellowship hall in Beaumont.
They came together, André in his deacon tie and Brittany in her pink cardigan, and sat side by side on the leather sofa. I gave my terms from the chair by the window. “Pastor will read you a letter that Lucien wrote,” I said. “It will not be read to anyone else. When he finishes, you will take the sign off my jars with your own hands, and you will put them on the front table with the others. And you will bring me a chair, because I am going to sit by them all morning.” Brittany smiled the thin smile of a woman who has never been told no. “Mama Inez, this seems a little dramatic,” she said.
Pastor Holloway read it again. I watched the face of Brittany. At the name of her father, she stopped breathing. At the sum, her hand went to her mouth. By the last line, the pink had drained out of her face and left it the color of paper. “Daddy never told me,” she whispered. “He told me he built that roof himself. He was so proud.” She looked at André, then at me, then at the floor. “All these years I sat in the church that Lucien saved. I put up a sign that said my food was better. I called you old. Mama Inez, I am so sorry.” André was weeping openly beside her.
Then Brittany ran. She jumped up from the sofa, flung the door wide, and fled down the hall in her good shoes, past the nursery and the choir room, toward the double doors of the parking lot. She meant to leave, I think, and never come back. But Mrs. Holloway was standing at the doors with a laundry basket in her arms, because she had followed us at a distance and guessed. She put the basket down square in the way, with a jar of figs in each hand. “Brittany Bertrand, you are not going anywhere,” she said gently. “Come and sit with Inez. I will make the coffee.”
She came back. She knelt on the carpet of the office in front of my chair, with her mascara running and the tears falling on the hem of my dress. “Mama Inez, I have been so cruel,” she said. “I thought if I made you small, I would feel big. I did not know the Lord had been paying my family debt with the money of your husband.” I took her face in my two crooked hands. I told her that Lucien would not have wanted her ashamed. I told her he would have wanted her to carry the jars, and she nodded and sobbed, and then she laughed, a wet, surprised little laugh.
The bake sale ran another hour, and by noon every jar was sold. Brittany took down the DAY OLD sign herself, folded it in half and put it in her purse, and then she stood at the table and sold my preserves at twenty dollars a jar. Pastor Holloway bought four. Mrs. Holloway bought six. The elders, to whom he told the story in two quiet sentences, bought the rest and wrote checks for more. The church board voted that the new roof be dedicated to Lucien Bertrand, and returned my twelve thousand dollars as a gift in his name, to start a fund for the widows of the parish.
In the name of my husband, Lucien, who passed in 2021 and who planted three fig trees in 1971, I started the Fig Tree Fund. It pays for legal help, grocery cards and counseling for older church members in Jefferson, Orange and Hardin counties who are being pushed aside by their own families. In the first year, we helped twenty nine widows and widowers. A woman of eighty six, in a hat with a feather, sat in the office and said, “My daughter in law says I am not much use.” I handed her a jar of preserves, and my chair.
In July, when the Brown Turkey figs hung purple and heavy in the heat, Brittany came to my yard at seven in the morning with four buckets and a straw hat. We picked until the sun was high. My wrists ached, and she took the ladder and went up in her tennis shoes. In my kitchen, we made thirty jars with the recipe of Lucien. Brittany sliced the lemon peel and tied each ribbon herself, and when we finished she set one jar on the windowsill in the light. “That one is his,” she said. The figs glowed like rubies.