Pastor Grant held the receiver to his ear and said, in the calm voice that has comforted half of Marshall, “Mr. Dupree, this is Pastor Grant of Greater New Hope. Jamal is here with me. I believe the church can settle what he owes. Come to the back door of the fellowship hall in half an hour, and bring the marker.” He hung up. Then, to my surprise, he picked up a second phone, the one his wife uses, and dialed the number of the chief of police of Marshall, who sits in the third pew every Sunday. I did not hear what he said. I only heard the word, Now.
While we waited, Jamal told the truth, all of it, in a voice so small I had to lean close. He owed Marcus Dupree eighty thousand dollars from the casino in Shreveport, in markers he had signed over two years. The fourteen thousand dollars of the building fund had gone to the man in the first week of September, to buy time. He had taken it from my purse while I was in the bathroom, and he had watched me come back and not find it. “I watched you look, Grandma,” he said. “I watched you look under the table. I will see that for the rest of my life.”
At ten past two, a black Charger pulled up to the back door of the fellowship hall, and a thickset man in a leather jacket got out with a folded paper in his hand. Chief Dwayne Hollis, who has sat under Pastor Grant for thirty years, was standing beside the water fountain in his Sunday suit with two officers behind him. When the man held out the marker and asked for his money, the chief stepped forward and said, “Mr. Dupree, you told a pastor you knew where an old woman lives. In Texas, that has a name.”
A kitchen camera app gave one grandmother the Sunday to bring her grandson back to his choir in Marshall.
I gave my terms in the office while it happened in the lot, with the video still on the screen of my phone. “Jamal, you will take off that robe and hang it up yourself. You will go to the counseling center in Longview on Monday, and you will go every week until they release you. You will work at the rib fry on the first Saturday of each month, in the kitchen, in an apron. And you will tell the whole congregation what you did, standing up, from the pew where you sat. After that, if you want to sing, the choir will have you. I will not stop loving you. That was never on the table.”
Jamal got down on his knees on the carpet of the pastor, which at twenty eight is a long way down, and put both hands over his face. “Grandma,” he said, “I have been stealing from you with a smile. I sat in the choir and sang about mercy, and I went to the casino and lost your money, and I came home and ate your food. You raised me after Mama passed. You took me to Wiley. You taught me to read the Bible, and I used the same hands to take your savings.” His voice broke. “I do not deserve to be your grandson.”
Out in the lot, the man in the leather jacket tore his arm out of the grip of the first officer and bolted for his Charger. We heard it through the open window of the office, the shout, the scrape of boots. He got three steps. Sister Clara Mae Jones, eighty one years old, the mother of the choir, had been waiting in her white robe by the back door with the officers, because the pastor had asked her to pray for them. She planted her walker in front of the door of the Charger like a fence and said, loud enough to carry across the lot, “Son, you are not going anywhere.” He stopped. The officers cuffed him against the hood.
When it was over, Chief Hollis came into the office, took off his hat, and stood by the door. Jamal had stopped weeping. He sat on the floor with his back against the desk of the pastor. I knelt in front of him, which my knees did not enjoy, and I took his face in my hands. I told him that the Lord had never asked me to be foolish, only to be loving, and that I was going to be both. Then I kissed his forehead, and the pastor put a hand on his bowed head and began to pray, and the chief said amen.
The money consequences were small compared with the fear. The eighty thousand dollars in markers were void, because they were gambling debts and because the man who held them was charged with threats. I replaced the fourteen thousand dollars of the building fund out of my own account that same afternoon, and the new fellowship hall broke ground in the spring. The five million, five hundred thousand dollars from the barbecue sauce company stayed in the bank, and the name on the jar, Ophelia Washington, went into every grocery store in Texas.
In the name of Elijah, who passed in 2021, I started the Elijah Washington Fund. It pays for college scholarships and gambling counseling for young people in Harrison, Panola and Gregg counties. In the first year we sent nineteen students to Wiley College and Texas College. One was a girl of eighteen from Carthage who cooked in the trailer of her uncle and had never seen a campus. She called me on her first night in the dorm to say that she had a roommate, a bed, and a window. I told her to open it and listen for the choir.
On the first Saturday of the next month, Jamal stood at the long table under the tent behind the church, in a white apron, with a pair of tongs in each hand. The line wrapped around the block, as it always did. He turned the ribs, brushed on the sauce, and served each plate with a smile I had not seen in two years. When a deacon asked him how he was, he said, “Humbled, sir.” At the end of the day he scrubbed the pans and sang under his breath, a quiet old hymn that I had taught him when he was seven.