Royce held the fleet schedule out in front of him and read the bottom of it again, and I watched his lips move over the name that was printed there. It was mine, in black ink, with the name of a company above it that every person under those oaks had seen on a truck door at some point in their lives. “Jimmy Lee Tate,” he read aloud, slowly, the way he reads a name at a graveside. “Seller.” Then he set the paper down very carefully on the tablecloth, beside his Styrofoam cup, as though it might spill.
Nobody under those trees said a word. Fifty or sixty people with plates in their hands, deacons and church mothers and little girls in Sunday dresses, stood in the long shade and looked at me. “Royce,” I said, in the voice I use at the dump station, “you have called me the honey dipper for thirty five years. I never corrected you, because it is an honest trade, and I am not ashamed of it. I started that trade with six thousand dollars borrowed against the house of my mother. In March I sold it. Every truck. Every contract. Nine million, eight hundred thousand dollars.”
Charlene had her hand over her mouth. Beside her, my daughter Amber stood very still, with the fingers of her husband slipping out of hers. “I did not tell you, baby,” I said to her, gently. “I wanted it to be a Christmas present. I was going to pay off your house.” Then I turned to the young man next to her, in the new shirt he had bought with money I will not guess at. “Bryce, the truck behind your shop is not yours. Neither is the second one, nor the jetter trailer. They were on the list the buyer paid for in March. The paint on the tank says one hundred and eighteen thousand dollars. That is a very expensive sign.”
A fleet schedule with one name at the bottom was laid beside a plate of chicken under the oaks and gave one septic man the afternoon to bring a church back to its senses.
Bryce opened his mouth and nothing came. “Daddy,” Amber said, in a very small voice. “Is it true? Did you take the trucks?” Bryce said he was going to tell me. He said the company was dying, that I had said so myself, and that he only wanted to save something for the family before the bank took it. “You were going to save it,” I said, “by putting your own name on it. McLeod.” I looked at Royce. “Not Tate. Not even Bryce. McLeod.” Royce had gone as gray as the Spanish moss, and the hand on the tablecloth was shaking.
Here is the part I did not expect. The deputy sheriff who had been eating banana pudding at the end of the long table, a big sunburned man named Early, who had been a member of that church since he was baptized in the creek, put down his plate. “Mr. Tate,” he said, “I would hate to ask this on a Sunday. But did you say those trucks belong to somebody else?” I said they did. I said my yard manager Tyrone already had the paperwork. And I said that I would take the trucks home that afternoon, with Tyrone and a flatbed, and I would have no need for anybody to lose his freedom over it. Not today.
Then I did something that surprised me. I walked up to Royce, who still had not found his voice, and I took the Styrofoam cup out of his hand and drank the rest of his sweet tea. It was warm and too sweet. “Royce,” I said, “you gave me thirty dollars to park cars. I am going to keep it.” I took the twenty and the ten from my shirt pocket. “I am going to put it in a frame. Because the honey dipper is going to pay for the new roof on this church, the one the deacons have been passing the plate for since March.”
Royce stood up. He came around the table and stood in front of me, and for a moment I thought he might shake my hand like a man closing a deal. Instead, he took off his glasses, which he never wears in public, and said, “Jimmy Lee, I said terrible things.” His chin was shaking. “I said them for thirty five years. My daddy was a deacon in this church, and he used to say that every man who works honestly is doing the work of the Lord. I forgot it.” He wiped his eyes. “You never once complained. I am ashamed.” I told him that was enough. And it was.
The trucks went home on the flatbed of Tyrone that afternoon. Bryce rode along in the passenger seat, without being asked, and he washed the paint off that tank himself with a pressure washer in my yard, in his good shirt, until the red house paint ran pink down the gutter. She said, “Daddy, I am not going to leave him.” I said I did not expect her to. “But he is going to work for a living.” A friend at the national company needed drivers, and I vouched for him. Probation, eighteen dollars an hour, with the buyer watching. He took it.
The week of Thanksgiving, my phone rang at six in the morning. It was Royce. His voice was thin and strange. His septic tank had backed up into his downstairs bathroom, with fourteen relatives coming for the turkey, and none of the companies in Hattiesburg could come until Monday. “Jimmy Lee,” he said, then stopped. I waited. “Honey dipper,” I said helpfully. A long pause. “Mister Tate,” he said finally, “I would be very grateful if you could come.” I was there in forty minutes, in a borrowed truck, with a new hose. I pumped his tank in the cold. I did not send a bill.
On the Sunday before Christmas, the congregation of First Baptist stood on the lawn and watched a crew from a roofing company nail the first shingle of a new roof, paid for by an anonymous donor everyone knew perfectly well. In the fellowship hall, behind a glass case, hangs a small frame with two bills in it, a twenty and a ten. The plaque underneath reads, Love Offering. Charlene reads it every Sunday, and she grins. And Royce, who teaches the men Sunday school class, begins every lesson now with the same story, which he tells about himself, and which ends with the words, Pray for the people who do the jobs nobody wants.