The deacon from First Baptist turned the white envelope over in his big hands and read aloud the return address in the corner. “Hargrove and Pell, Attorneys at Law, Sacramento, California.” He lowered it slowly and looked at me down the length of the Easter table. I am Lorraine Tatum, seventy eight years old, and I sat at the end of the dining room in Albany, Georgia, on a TV tray, with a plate of ham on my knee and the ceiling fan clicking above me. Courtney had drawn her foot beneath her chair, and her face had the stiff polite look of a woman at a church supper who suddenly realizes she is the one on the menu. The deviled eggs sat untouched, and a fly walked across the ham. “Open it,” I said, “because it is addressed to you as much as me.”
He slit the flap and drew out three pages. The first was a letter from the lawyers of the nut company, confirming the purchase of four thousand acres of Tatum Orchards for seven million, three hundred thousand dollars, and noting a list of personal property excluded from the sale. Item eleven was a railroad pocket watch, Hamilton, 1912, engraved H.T., insured for forty eight thousand dollars. The second page was a photograph of the watch lying on the counter of a jeweler on Slappey Boulevard, a day before it was to be cut for a charm.
The third page was a statement. Bobby had signed a document in March authorizing himself as the agent of his mother to remove personal belongings from the farmhouse before closing, and he had taken, over four weeks, the watch, a silver service, two quilts and a box of letters. Courtney had sold the silver in Atlanta for nine thousand dollars. She had worn the watch as an anklet in the dining room under the table, so that her mother in law would see it every Easter and never know. Her father read, and his face turned to stone.
A pocket watch worn as an anklet gave one orchard widow the Easter dinner to bring her son and his wife back home in Albany.
I gave my terms from the TV tray, with the ceiling fan clicking. “Courtney, the watch goes back on its chain this afternoon. The silver you will buy back from the dealer in Atlanta with your own money. I will not call the sheriff. I will ask only that you and Bobby sit down at my kitchen table tomorrow with a woman I know from the church who counsels people who cannot stop spending. And Bobby, you will tell the truth to your wife about the farm, which was never going to be yours to sell.”
Courtney burst into tears. “I buy things when I am scared,” she said, in a thin little voice. “Handbags and shoes, and I sell them again to pay the cards. I have forty three thousand dollars on credit cards that Bobby does not know. When he told me about the farm, I thought it would all go away. I took the watch because it was so beautiful, and because I wanted to feel I deserved something.” Bobby stared at his wife as though he had never seen her. Her mother had gone to stand behind her chair and laid her hands on her shoulders.
Then Courtney bent, tore the watch from her ankle in one wrenching motion, and bolted from the table, the chain trailing, plainly meaning to throw the thing out the kitchen window into the pecan trees. She got as far as the back hall. The door to the kitchen swung open, and in the doorway, with big dishes of pecan pie and cobbler held out before them like shields, stood three ladies from First Baptist in their Easter hats, who had come to help carry in dessert. Courtney ran straight into a lemon meringue and stopped, dripping.
The oldest of the ladies, Miss Eunice, who is ninety, calmly set the pie on the washing machine. “Child,” she said, “you have meringue on your nose.” She bent, with a creak, picked the golden watch off the floor and wiped it on her apron. Then she carried it down the hall in both hands, as if it were the offering plate, and laid it in my lap. Behind her, Courtney sank against the wall and wept, and the ladies gathered around her, patting her arms and murmuring, the way women do at the church door.
The consequences were mild by the standards of what might have been. Courtney repaid the silver within the month, and the dealer in Atlanta returned it with a note about family. The forty three thousand dollars of credit cards I paid, directly, with the first check from the orchards, on condition of counseling. The seven million, three hundred thousand dollars from the sale I placed in a trust for the grandchildren, with the deacon as witness. The watch hangs from a nail in my kitchen, where it ticks beside the clock.
In the name of my husband Hollis, who passed in 2020, I started the Hollis Tatum Fund. It pays for scholarships for the children of pecan farm workers and for credit counseling for couples, in Dougherty, Lee and Worth counties. In the first year we sent twenty two students to college and counseled sixty four couples out of debt. One was a packing house clerk from Leesburg who had been hiding eleven store cards in a shoebox and who now teaches a budgeting class at her church.
The following Easter, we all sat at the big table in the dining room in Albany, the full twelve seats and the thirteenth, an extra, in the middle for me. Courtney carried in the ham. Bobby said the blessing. At the end of it, everyone said Amen, and then he said it again, softly, looking at me. I put my hand over the pocket watch, which I wore on its chain, and it ticked against my chest. The mockingbird sang in the pecan tree outside, and the afternoon light came slanting through the curtains onto the table, and every plate was full.