Hattie Robichaux caught me under both arms before I reached the floor, and she half carried me to a folding chair behind the coat rack, where the cold from the air conditioner fell on my neck. “Miss Ida, breathe,” she said. “I should not have told you here.” She put a paper cup of water in my hand and knelt in front of me in her good church dress, with her reading glasses on a chain. “The name on the certificate is Marcus Elijah Landry the Second,” she said. “And his father is Marcus Landry, who used to sit in my Sunday school class. I taught that boy his books of the Bible. Does Simone know I am telling you?”
I knew the name. Everyone at First Baptist knew it. Marcus Landry was the boy from Cedar Grove who sang tenor in the youth choir and worked weekends at the car wash, and who, six years ago, had walked my granddaughter Simone to her senior prom and gone off to the Navy a month later. I had seen the two of them on my porch swing, holding hands, shy as deer. Then Simone had married Derrick Delacroix, the son of Patrice, and nobody had said another word about the tenor. I turned the paper cup around in my hands. “Hattie,” I said, “where is that boy now?”
Hattie said he was stationed in Pensacola, a mechanic on the flight line, and that he had written four letters to Simone since the baby was born. None of them had been answered. She did not say why. She did not have to. I looked through the gap between the coat rack and the wall, across the fellowship hall, and I saw Patrice Delacroix in a lavender suit moving among the round tables with a smile that she wore like a corsage. I stood up, slowly, on knees that did not wish to hold me. I said, “Hattie, call the Navy.”
A magnolia brooch and a kitchen table in the back gave one great grandmother the length of a single afternoon to bring her family back to the truth in Shreveport.
I gave my terms in the kitchen, where Patrice had put me, standing at the steel counter in my white Sunday hat with the silk roses. I told Hattie that Marcus Landry would be brought to First Baptist that afternoon, if she had to drive to Pensacola herself, and I would pay for the gas. I told her that nobody would leave the fellowship hall until the baby had been blessed by his rightful name, in front of his rightful mother. Hattie nodded. She was already dialing. Then I took off my magnolia brooch, held it to the light, and pinned it back under my collar, higher than before.
Marcus Landry came through the double doors at two thirty in dress whites, still smelling of the airplane, with his cap in one hand and a small stuffed bear in the other. He had taken the first flight from Pensacola to Shreveport after Hattie reached his chaplain. The room fell silent in a ripple. Simone saw him and set down her plate. “Marcus,” she said, and her voice broke. “I wrote you. I never got a single letter.” He said, “Simone, I never got one either.” They both turned, slowly, and looked at Patrice Delacroix, standing at the head table with the baby in her arms.
Patrice did not deny it. She said her son deserved a family with a name and a future, and that a boy in the Navy had neither. She said she had taken the letters from the mailbox of Simone, and the money orders he sent, and she had put them in a shoe box. “I did it for the baby,” she said. “I did it for all of us.” Then she looked at the certificate in the hand of Hattie. She snatched it, meaning to hurry through the kitchen door and out to the back lot and tear it into pieces over the dumpster, and she swept toward the double doors in her lavender suit with the baby held high on her shoulder.
She did not get past the Mothers Board. Eleven women in white hats and white gloves, the oldest church mothers of First Baptist, had risen from their table without a sound and lined up across the doorway, shoulder to shoulder, like a choir about to begin. Mother Odom, who is ninety three, held up one gloved hand. “Patrice,” she said, “give that baby to his mother.” Patrice stopped. The baby let out a small sleepy sound, and she looked down at him. Slowly she turned and placed him in the arms of Simone. Then, as the church mothers watched, she sat down on a folding chair and covered her face.
The baby was blessed that afternoon by Pastor Williams, under his full name, Marcus Elijah Landry the Second, though Simone asked that Clarence be added in the middle. Derrick Delacroix, who had known the truth for a year and had not known how to say it, stood beside them at the front of the room. He is a good man who had been raised by a hard woman, and in the weeks to come he did what a good man does. He stepped aside from the certificate, kept his place as a friend, and let the child be known by his father. Patrice came to my porch with a pound cake in October. I let her in.
In the name of Clarence, who passed in 2015, I started the Clarence Fontaine Fund. It pays for hot Sunday dinners, van rides to church and warm coats for elderly members of small congregations, in Caddo, Bossier and Webster parishes. In the first year we served eleven hundred dinners. A man of eighty eight, who had not been to church since his wife passed, rode the van to Highland Baptist on the first Sunday, wearing a suit that had gone out of fashion in 1978, and he sat in the front pew and sang every verse without the book.
Marcus took a job at Barksdale Air Force Base in the spring, and he and Simone married on a Saturday in May, in the same fellowship hall, under the blue baby rattles that had never been taken down. I sat in the first row, in my white hat with the silk roses, and my magnolia brooch. When the baby was placed in my lap, he reached up with both small hands and took hold of the brooch. I said to him quietly, “That is from your great grandfather, little man.” Then he laughed, and I swear it was the laugh of Clarence.