Judge Arceneaux did not read the name aloud. She did not have to. She held up the old police report in the lamplight of that tent, a brittle, yellowed sheet with a coffee stain in one corner, and every person in the room turned their heads to look at Armand Boudreaux. His face had drained to the color of the tablecloth. His hand had gone slack on the microphone. His wife, a thin woman in champagne silk, stared at the floor. And from the head table, in a voice I had never heard him use, his son Preston said, quietly, “Daddy. Is it true?”
Armand tried one more time. He laughed, and it came out cracked and brittle. “That was nineteen sixty six, Judge. I was a child.” The judge said, “You were nineteen. The legal age to be tried as an adult, then and now.” She laid the page on the edge of my table. “The report was marked closed within the week by a chief of police who golfed with your father. The name of the boy was removed from the file. But the original blotter entry was never destroyed, Mr. Boudreaux. They simply forgot to burn the second copy.”
I looked at the paper, and I looked at Armand, and something came back to me that I had not thought of in fifty nine years. I was lying in the road, with my legs wrong and the sky very blue, and a boy was kneeling beside me. A tall, white faced boy with wet eyes. He was saying, “I am sorry, mister, I am sorry, I am sorry,” over and over, and he was holding my hand. Then a man in a suit had come, and taken him by the collar, and pulled him away. I had forgotten the face. But I remembered the voice.
A man can build an empire on top of a lie, but he will never feel standing on solid ground until he kneels in front of the one he wronged.
“Mr. Fontaine,” Armand said. His voice shook so badly I could barely understand him. “I have heard the sound of that stop sign hitting the road every night of my life. My father paid for a new car, and a lawyer, and a chief of police, and told me that nothing had happened. I believed him because I wanted to. I have built my whole life on top of that morning.” He put the microphone down on the table. He did not ask for forgiveness. He stood in front of two hundred people with his arms hanging at his sides and simply said, “It was me.”
The judge spoke next, gently. “The statute of limitations expired many years ago,” she said. “I have no gavel here, and I did not come to punish anyone. I came because a man was laughed at tonight who had earned the right to be saluted. I wanted the people in this room to know who he is.” She turned and looked at me. “That is all, Mr. Fontaine. It is for you to say what happens now.” Then she sat down, and the whole tent waited, and I heard a baby cry somewhere far off.
I am ninety years old, and my knees do not obey me, and I took a long time to rise. Celeste moved to help me, but I shook my head. I leaned on my cane and walked across that floor, past the chandeliers and the champagne towers, to the place where Armand stood. He was a head taller than I was, a rich man in a tuxedo, and he looked like a frightened boy. “Son,” I said, “I saw your face in 1966. I have never forgotten it. You were just as scared as the children.” And I held out my hand.
He took it in both of his. His whole body shook. He sank, right there, onto one knee on the dance floor, in front of every person he had ever done business with, and he bent his head over my hand and wept. I put my other hand on his shoulder. Preston came across the floor and knelt beside his father. Then Celeste, in her wedding dress, came and put her arms around the two of them and me, and I thought, the Lord is surely here tonight, and He is wearing a bow tie.
It was the bandleader who broke the spell. An old Cajun with a squeezebox, he looked at me, and I nodded, and he struck up a waltz. “Granddaddy,” said Celeste, laughing and crying together, “you are going to dance with me.” I told her my hip would never allow it. She told me I could lean. So I did, and we moved in a slow circle across the boards, her white train sweeping behind us, my cane hooked over her arm. Two hundred people clapped on the beat, and the judge, danced with the groom.
A week later, Armand Boudreaux came to the little house on Myrtle Place with his hat in his hands. He asked if he could sit on the porch, and we drank sweet tea and said nothing for an hour. Before he left, he told me he wanted to pay for a crossing guard at every elementary school in the parish, with wages and uniforms and flashing lights. I told him I would only accept if it carried no name but a child. We settled on a fund called The Crossing.
In the fall, the school board renamed the corner of Johnston Street and Myrtle Place Fontaine Crossing, and they invited me to the ceremony. I expected a few dozen people. Instead, there were three hundred grown men and women standing along the curb, doctors and plumbers and teachers and cooks, every one of them a child I had walked across that street. Some held old stop signs they had saved. Judge Arceneaux stood at the front in her robe, and when I came around the corner, she raised her hand to her forehead and saluted once more, and so did all three hundred of them.
Every school morning now, I still stand at that corner at half past seven, in my orange vest and my old cap. The new sign has a little light on top, and a bell, and the children say good morning with their whole faces. And every morning, at seven twenty five, a long black car pulls up at the curb and a tall man in a gray suit gets out. He carries the second stop sign, and he does not say much. He just stands beside me and helps the little ones across, one hand at a time, as if he had been doing it all his life.
