I put down my napkin. I took my hat from the hook, and my cane, and I said to Bonnie in a pleasant voice, “Would you box up that waffle, please? I will finish it later.” Then I turned to Andre Metoyer. “Judge, you told me what I need. Now tell me what I need to do.” He hesitated. I could see he had expected a quarrel. “Mr. Prudhomme, I can call the Natchitoches police,” he said. I told him I could do better. I took out my flip phone and dialed a number I have known by heart since 1991. Chief Terrence Jackson of the Natchitoches Police Department played second trumpet in my band.
He answered on the second ring. “Mr. Prudhomme? Is something wrong?” I said, “Terrence, a tow truck with my Mercedes aboard just left Front Street headed north. White flatbed, a man in a cap. I believe it is a theft.” There was a pause. Then I heard him bark into another telephone, and a siren came on in the background. “Sir, we will have it stopped before it hits Highway 1,” he said. I told him to be gentle with the box. He said, “What box?” I said, “The one in the spare tire well. It is a family matter.” And he said, “Yes, sir. Band room rules.”
Andre drove me, because my hands were shaking too much. We took his rental Cadillac across the Cane River bridge and out the Natchez highway, and we saw the flashing lights a mile off. They had stopped the flatbed at the Texaco in Cloutierville. My Mercedes was still strapped to it, green and square, with its old license plate. Chief Jackson stood beside it with his hands on his belt. The driver, a boy of twenty, sat on the bumper with his head down. And Trey, my grandson, was leaning against the fender with his arms folded and his chin up, the way he did at seven when he broke my window with a baseball.
A tow truck rolled away with a Mercedes, a retired judge asked for help, and a band director marched out to recover a secret box.
“Paw Paw, I can explain,” he said as I got out. I said I did not doubt it. Terrence Jackson opened the trunk and lifted the spare tire out, then the false floor my brother in law built in 1988. The small wooden box sat there, alone, in a bed of oily rags. I took it in both my hands. It was lighter than I expected. Celeste had asked me to keep it for fifty five years without once opening it, and now I stood in a gas station parking lot at noon with a state trooper, a judge, a chief of police, and my grandson, and I knew the time had come.
I opened it with the small brass key that hangs on my watch chain. Inside lay a thick bundle of letters tied in yellow ribbon, a baptismal certificate from the Catholic home in Alexandria, a rosary, and a deed on heavy parchment to eighty acres on Cane River. In Celeste handwriting, on a sheet of blue stationery, was a note. “Lucien, if you are reading this, I have gone ahead. The boy is Andre. He is a good man. The land was my father to me, and it is mine to give. Please give it to him, with my love, and tell him I never stopped.” I handed the note to Andre. He read it standing in the Louisiana sun, and he wept like a child.
Michelle arrived from Baton Rouge that evening and fell weeping into my arms on the porch. She had misunderstood her mother, she said. Celeste had told her only to see that the box went to the right person, and Michelle, hearing the word right, had assumed it meant a Prudhomme. She had mentioned it to Trey with a laugh, and never thought. I held her and told her that Celeste had trusted her with the hardest job and that she had done it exactly as asked, only a little late. She laughed through her tears and said, “Daddy, you always did know how to conduct.”
Trey wept, too. He told me in front of everyone that his mother had mentioned the box on the phone a month ago, that she had said Celeste wanted it to go to the right person. Trey had heard it as a hint about money. He had gone to a casino company in Shreveport with a story, and a contact there had paid him a deposit of five thousand dollars to deliver the deed. “Paw Paw, I spent half of it,” he said. “I owe you.” I put my hand on his neck, as I did when he was small. “You owe your grandmother,” I said. “And you owe this man. We are going to figure out how to pay them both.”
The casino company, when Terrence called, denied everything and then quietly abandoned the matter. The parish attorney declined to prosecute a grandson for a theft that never took place, once I asked. Andre refused to press any claim. In September the three of us stood on the Cane River land, eighty acres of pecan trees and cane, in the gold light, with the deed in my hand. Andre looked across the water to the old Metoyer chapel, white against the sky. “I have been a judge for thirty years,” he said, “and I have never once been given anything.” I told him that Celeste had given him everything she had.
Trey worked the pecan orchard that fall, shaking the trees with a long pole and picking up the nuts from the soil beside the Metoyer cousins, who laughed at his city boots. He came to the house at dusk covered with dust. I put a trumpet in his hands, one of my old ones, a Bach, and I made him play scales on the back porch while the sun went down on Cane River Lake. His lip was terrible. His timing was worse. I told him it was the best sound I had heard in a month, and he laughed, and played again.
The first Sunday in December, I came into Lasyone with Andre at my side. Bonnie was waiting at the counter in her apron. She looked at us both, my gray green eyes and his, and she began to smile, and then to cry, and then to laugh. She wrote on the check without saying a word, and slid it under the syrup. Two pecan waffles, extra butter. Two coffees, black. Under the line, in her round hand, she had written: On the house, brothers. I put the paper in my shirt pocket, next to my heart, and I did not correct her.