Winston Hale did not run. He did what men like him always do first, which was to laugh. “Captain, you have had too much sun on the river,” he said, and sixty guests waited to see whether they would be told to believe him. Nobody laughed along. Behind the captain, the singer of the jazz trio had put down her microphone and was crossing the deck, a tall woman in a silver dress, gray at the temples, pressing both hands flat against her ribs as if she were holding herself together. I knew her before she reached my chair. I had last seen that face at nineteen, wet with sleet.
“Miss Loretta,” she said. “My name is Renee Tolliver. You gave me your own sweater that night, the green one with the pearl buttons. I still have it in a drawer.” I could not speak. She knelt beside my chair, in front of all of Memphis, and took both my hands in hers. “I have sung on this boat for six years,” she said. “I did not know who owned this cruise until tonight, when I read the name on the program. I told Earl in the wheelhouse. We have waited thirty four years for someone to say it out loud.”
“Say what?” whispered Monique, who had come to stand beside my son, pale as paper. Renee stood and turned to the room. “My mother, Dorothea Tolliver, kept the books at Hale Funeral Home on Lamar Avenue. In February of 1991 she found out that this man was billing the county for burials that never took place, and burning the unclaimed dead at night to cover it. She told him she would go to the sheriff. I was in the back office when he struck her. She never stood up again.”
A kindness done in the dark for a stranger can wait thirty years and still be the brightest light in the room.
“That is slander,” Winston said, and his voice cracked in the middle of it. “I will have every one of you in court.” The captain took a cell phone from his coat. “Then let us not waste the time of the judge, Winston. Last spring I heard that the new district attorney had opened a cold case unit, and I wrote down everything I saw, under oath, with a lawyer. Detective Sarah Whitfield has been waiting on the dock in Memphis since I radioed ahead ten minutes ago. All she lacks is the one person who looked you in the eye that night and lied for us.” He turned to me.
Sixty faces turned toward my chair. My knees were weak, and my son took one arm and Monique took the other, and I stood. I have carried trays for thirty one years. I know how to stand up straight when my feet hurt. “It was a Tuesday,” I said. “Ten past three. He wore a white suit with blood on the cuff of the right sleeve, and he asked me for black coffee, and he asked whether the cooler was locked. I said yes. It was not. I poured him a cup, and I told him I had not seen a soul. I have never been so frightened, and I have never been so sure I was doing right.”
Earl restarted the engines, and the old paddlewheel turned for the Memphis bank under the string lights, and nobody danced. Winston sat down at the head table with his white suit gone gray in the lamp light and did not say another word. Darnell stood behind me with his hand on my shoulder the whole way. When the boat touched the dock, a gray haired woman in a blazer and four officers were waiting at the foot of the gangplank, and the people of Memphis society, in their pearls, parted like water to let them through.
The investigation took eleven months. In a locked storeroom behind the third funeral home, the detectives found the old cremation logs and forty two sealed boxes, each marked unclaimed, each with a name. One of them read Dorothea Tolliver. Renee carried the box home to Little Rock in her own arms. Forty one other families received telephone calls that year, some from grandchildren who had never known where a grandmother had gone. The county reopened the books, and the sheriff of 1991, long retired, gave a statement through the office of his lawyer.
The trial lasted two weeks. I sat in the second row each day in my church dress, and Renee sat beside me, and on the last day the jury needed only four hours. Winston Hale was sentenced to thirty five years for manslaughter, fraud, and abuse of a corpse. He did not look at me when it was read. I was glad. The pearls had mostly stopped coming to the courthouse by then, but Darnell was there every morning, with his tie straight and a thermos of coffee, and he poured me a cup before we went in.
Monique came to my little house in West Memphis the week after the verdict, alone, without her sisters. She stood on my porch with a pound cake in her hands. “Miss Loretta,” she said, “for twenty five years I let him speak about you in that voice, and I laughed because I wanted him to love me. I am so ashamed.” I took the cake and set it on the kitchen table. “Baby,” I said, “I know a good daughter when I meet one. Come in. I will make coffee.”
On the first Saturday in June, Earl Boone took us all out on the river again, free of charge, and the engines did not stop. Renee sang on the top deck with the sun going down red behind the bridge, and Darnell and Monique danced in front of the band as if it were the first night of their marriage. At nine in the evening Earl rang the ship bell and said, over the speaker, “Ladies and gentlemen, the waitress would like to pour the coffee.” I stood up, and the whole boat applauded, and I poured every cup myself.