Attorney Odom did not wait for me to finish my sentence. She was already on her feet, pulling her coat off the hook, calling to her assistant to get the number of the Birmingham fire marshal and the district attorney on two lines. “Mrs. Banks,” she said to me, “the policy began at midnight last night. The sound of that is not a coincidence. We are going to the house of your mother, right now, and we are going to take the sheriff with us.” I did not say a word. I took the hand of Mama, which was cold, and held on.
We drove in two cars. I drove Mama, who sat in the passenger seat with her pocketbook in her lap, singing in a thin voice the first line of a hymn and then stopping. A deputy of the sheriff met us at the curb of 8th Avenue. It was four in the afternoon. The yard was quiet. The porch light was off. The car of Leon was in the driveway, with the trunk open, and there were two red plastic cans on the grass beside it. I knew what was in them before I smelled it.
Deputy Marcus Lee, a broad shouldered man of thirty, walked up the path with his hand on his holster and knocked on the door. “Sheriff. Open up.” Nothing. He knocked again. Behind the door, we heard a scrape, and the voice of a woman, my sister, high and cracked: “Leon, someone is here.” Then the voice of a man: “Be quiet.” Deputy Lee put his shoulder to the new brass deadbolt, and the wood of the door splintered. It was a thin door. My father had hung it in 1978.
A mother who sleeps in the back pew of her church is never really locked out of the house that love built.
Inside, the living room smelled of gasoline. I saw the sofa where Mama had napped, the piano that nobody had played in ten years, the photographs on the wall. Every picture had been taken down and stacked in a box by the door. Denise sat on the floor in the middle of the room with a matchbook in her hand, her face streaked and swollen. Leon stood by the kitchen, holding a can. When he saw the deputy he dropped it, and the fumes rose in a cloud. I thought: do not let anyone strike a match.
“Denise,” I said. I do not know where I found the voice. “Put it down, baby sister.” She looked at me with her big brown eyes. She was fifty one years old, and she looked ten. “I did not want to,” she said. “Leon said it would be fast. He said that nobody would be inside. He said Mama would be fine in a home.” The matchbook shook. “Cheryl, I did not know she would sleep at the church.” I knelt on the wet floor and held out my hand. After a very long moment she placed the matchbook in it.
Deputy Lee put handcuffs on Leon, who said nothing, and on Denise, who said everything. She sat in the back of the cruiser with her head against the window and told the deputy how it began. A debt at the dog track. A man who knew a notary. A plan to take the house, insure it, and burn it, so that the money would clear everything. She had agreed to the deed. She had not agreed to the fire. But she had agreed to look away, and she said so, three times, to anyone who would listen.
The fire marshal arrived within the hour and confirmed that the gasoline had been poured along the baseboards of three rooms. Another ten minutes, he said quietly, and we would have lost the whole block. I went out on the porch and sat on the top step with my head in my hands. Mr. Willis, the church janitor, who had followed us in his truck, sat beside me and offered me a sandwich wrapped in wax paper. I took it. He said, “I told you the Lord would put the right person in the right pew.”
The notary was arrested that week. The quitclaim deed was declared void by the court in November, and the house of Mama was restored to her name. The insurance company cancelled the policy, and its investigator took a statement from me that ran forty pages. Leon pleaded guilty to attempted arson, forgery, and exploitation of an elder, and was sentenced to eight years. Denise cooperated fully, and received probation, a requirement of counseling, and an order to stay one hundred yards from the home of her mother for two years.
Mama did not want her daughter to go to prison. That was the whole of her statement to the judge. She stood in the second row, in her church hat, and said, in a clear voice, “I raised two girls. One of them made a terrible mistake. I want her to have a chance to be sorry.” The judge, a woman with gray in her hair, nodded and lowered her glasses. Denise, in a plain blue dress, turned around and mouthed a single word to Mama. Mama mouthed it back. I will not say what it was. It belonged to them.
I sold my truck in the spring. I took a job as a dispatcher for a local freight company, home every night. Mama has the little house, with a new lock, an old brass key, and a porch light that burns until dawn. On Sunday mornings the two of us sit in the third pew, and she sings alto, and I sing nothing at all, because I cannot carry a tune. Mr. Willis sits behind us. At the end of the service, he stacks the hymnals, and he winks at me, once.
In September, Denise came to the church for the first time in two years. She sat in the very back pew, under the window, in the spot where our mother had slept for eleven nights. Mama saw her from the choir loft. She did not stop singing. But she lifted her hand, slowly, from the rail, and opened it toward the back of the room, the way you open a hand to a bird that you do not want to frighten. Denise put her face in her hands. The choir sang on.
