The man from Memphis stood behind my grandson Lamont, one big hand resting on the shoulder of the boy as if they were old friends, and the whole gymnasium of Lanier High School had gone silent. I am Clarence Odom, eighty years old, a custodian at this school for thirty four years, and I stood at the podium in a rented tuxedo with a check in my pocket for a gym that my grandson had told everyone I could not afford. The streamers hung from the rafters. The band had stopped mid song, and a trombone slid off key and went quiet. A girl in a green gown near the front lowered the phone she had been holding up, and the chaperones drew together by the punch bowl like birds before weather. Every eye in the room was turning, slowly, toward the two of them.
“Mr. Odom,” said the man from Memphis pleasantly, so that the microphone picked it up, “your grandson owes my employer eleven thousand dollars. We were told you would be happy to settle tonight.” Lamont, who was nineteen and had been the quarterback of the school, whispered, “Granddad, I can explain.” I looked at his face, so like the face of his grandmother, and I felt my heart go soft and hard at once. I had cleaned the floor of this gym for thirty four years. I had never once thought I would have to stand on it like this.
The debts were not eleven thousand. They were nearly thirty, to three different men, from a betting service that Lamont had found online during his first year at the university in Starkville. He had borrowed to cover each loss, and had finally borrowed from people who did not send reminders by mail. He had told me nothing. He had come home to Jackson for the prom weekend, with a smile and a new jacket, and the man from Memphis had followed him all the way down Highway 55.
A prom podium and a microphone left on gave one old custodian the evening to bring his grandson back home in Jackson.
I gave my terms into the microphone, because there was no use hiding it now. “Young man, I will not pay your debts. I will pay for your treatment. I have spoken to a counselor in Ridgeland, and a bed is waiting at a clinic on Monday. You will go, and you will finish, and you will sit down with the school board and tell them what you did. And to the gentleman from Memphis, I say respectfully that this is a school, not a bank. You may take it up with my lawyer, who is sitting in the second row.”
The knees of Lamont gave way, and he sat down on the polished floor in his tuxedo. “Granddad,” he said, crying openly in front of the whole student body, “I am so sorry. I told the boys you were cheap because I could not stand to tell them I was scared. I put your name on the plaque and then I tried to run from you.” I stepped down from the podium and knelt beside him, my old knees popping. “Boy,” I said, “I did not put my name on that plaque. Your grandmother did.”
The man from Memphis was not a patient one. He seized Lamont by the collar and began dragging him toward the side doors, hissing that there were cars waiting. Lamont twisted free and bolted along the wall toward the exit, the creditor lunging at his heels. They had gone twenty feet when the double doors of the gym opened and filled with the football team of Lanier High, twenty two young men in letter jackets, shoulder to shoulder, with their coach behind them. They did not say anything. They simply formed a wall. The man from Memphis hit it at a run.
He stopped, red faced, with the broad hand of a lineman flat against his chest. The captain of the team, a wide boy named Tyrese, said quietly, “Sir, this is our home field.” Two security officers, called by the principal, appeared at the elbows of the man and escorted him out into the parking lot, where a patrol car was already waiting with its lights turning. The gym broke into cheers. Lamont sat on the floor with his head on my shoulder, shaking, and the band, bless them, struck up a slow and gentle waltz. Mattie would have loved it. She always said that a school gym could hold more mercy than most churches, if you swept it right.
The money consequences were simple. The debts were turned over to my lawyer, who negotiated them down to a fraction, with the threat of a police report for the harassment. I paid only for the clinic, which cost thirty four thousand dollars, and for nothing else. The two million dollars from the sale of the family land in Rankin County went into the new gym, which the school board named the Mattie Odom Gymnasium, over my objection, and I have never been so proud.
In the name of my wife Mattie, who passed in 2019, I started the Mattie Odom Fund. It pays for scholarships for children of school custodians and cafeteria workers, and for counseling for students with gambling troubles, in Hinds, Rankin and Madison counties. In the first year we sent twenty seven children to college and placed sixteen students in counseling. One was a girl from Pearl whose mother mopped the halls of her school at night, and who now studies engineering in Starkville.
This spring, at the next prom, I mopped the gym floor myself, as I always have, and when I finished, I looked up and saw Lamont in the doorway in his clinic jacket, eleven months well, holding a second mop. He had come home for the weekend to help. We worked side by side in silence, from one end of the floor to the other. When we reached the podium, he leaned the mop against it, wiped his hands, and said, “Granddad, it is shining.” I grinned. “That is the whole job,” I said.