Royce Hampton cracked the red wax seal with his thumbnail, right there on my front porch, with Geraldine Biggs peering through the door crack in my bathrobe. He put on his half glasses and cleared his throat the way he used to in the courtroom. “Beulah, this is the handwriting of Otis, and I watched him write it in my office on the fourteenth of June, 1983. He told me it was for a day he hoped would never come.” He began to read in a deep, steady voice that carried across the whole yard. A neighbor across the street put down his garden hose to listen.
“To whom it may concern, and to my son Curtis, if it should come to this. In the spring of 1983 I saw what my own brother Lamar did to our mother, how he talked her into signing away the family farm in Marion with a smile and a pen, and how she spent her last years in a rented room. I swore that it would never happen to my wife. So this house, which my wife and I are buying with our own two hands, is placed today in a trust. The trustee is Royce Hampton. The beneficiary for life is Beulah Mae Crenshaw. It may not be sold, borrowed against, or entered by any person without her written permission.”
Royce paused for breath. “And if anyone, family or not, should attempt to lock her out of her own home, force her to sign any paper, or take any document from the green box under her bed, then the house shall pass at once in full title to the First Baptist Church of West Memphis, to be kept as a home for widows. That person shall have no further claim upon the house or upon me.” He looked up over his glasses at Geraldine, who had gone gray as dishwater. “Mrs. Biggs, I would be very careful what you touch.”
Beulah Mae Crenshaw has paid off every dime of her little brick house in West Memphis herself.
Geraldine said, in a small voice, that she had not touched a thing. She had only been told it was all right. Royce said that he believed her. Then he took out his own telephone and called the West Memphis police, and while we waited he sat beside me on the porch swing and held my hand. “Otis was never a clever man with words,” he said. “But he understood people. He understood that the ones you love the most can sometimes hurt you the worst.” I leaned my head on his shoulder and watched a mockingbird in the pecan tree.
The officer was a young woman named Davis with a kind face. She walked through the house with a clipboard and photographed the new locks, the green box, the papers on the dining table. They were loan applications, in the name of Curtis, with my signature forged at the bottom of every one. A locksmith arrived at six and replaced the brass lock with a plain one, and handed me the key. I put it in my apron pocket and felt it against my hip like a small, solid promise. Geraldine packed her bag, still in my robe. I told her she could keep it.
Curtis and LaToya drove up at eight o clock, in a hurry, with their headlights swinging across the lawn. Curtis took one look at the police cruiser and the recliner, which two neighbors had carried back up to the porch, and he started to shout. He stopped when Royce stepped forward with his cane. “Son,” Royce said gently, “I knew your father fifty years. Do you want to hear what he wrote?” Curtis read the letter on the porch in the yellow light with his mouth moving. His wife held his arm. When he reached the end, he sat down on the steps and put his face in his hands.
He told me everything. A business deal that had gone wrong, a loan from a man he would not name, a payment he could not make. He had thought of the house as a safe in the wall, forty years of equity that I would never miss. “Mama, I was going to move you into a nice apartment,” he said. “I swear I was going to take care of you.” I let him cry for a long time. Then I told him, very gently, that I loved him, and that he would not be sleeping in my house until he had been to see a counselor and told the truth to his creditors.
LaToya surprised me. She knelt on the porch boards in front of me and said, “Mama Beulah, I am so sorry. I helped him. I thought it was the only way to help my own mother.” I looked at her for a long time. I said that Geraldine would not live with me, but that she did not need to be homeless either. Within a week, I had spoken to the pastor, and Geraldine had a one bedroom in the church senior apartments, with the first three months paid out of the little jar I keep in the freezer.
Curtis kept his word. He saw the counselor every Tuesday and sold his boat. By Christmas he had paid off all but a small piece of his debt, with the help of a man at the credit union who turned out to be a deacon at my church. On Christmas Eve he knocked on my front door, and I let him in, and we sat in Otis recliner and ate a plate of tamales that Geraldine had made. She had put on a clean apron, and she said grace.
The porch swing still swings. I sit on it every afternoon with the mockingbird, in my own pink bathrobe, with my own cup of coffee, and the mug says World Best Grandma. Royce comes by on Fridays with a pie. We do not talk about the trust much. But once, when the sun was going down, he said Otis had not been afraid of his son. He had only been afraid of how much a man will do for love, or for money, and that sometimes it is the same thing.