“Mr. Chambers, I never signed that letter, and I would like to see the fax itself,” I said. The tournament operations official, a gray haired man in a polo shirt with the club crest, handed me a single sheet that was still curling from the machine. Across the top ran the little gray header that fax machines print, with a phone number and a name. The name was not the name of my company. It read, Fairchild Surgical Associates. The number was the office line of my brother in law. I read it twice, and I set the page down very gently, so that I would not tear it in half.
Preston stepped forward before Chase could speak. A surgeon is used to delivering bad news, and his voice was calm. “Booker, I sent it,” he said. “Chase asked me to. He said you were too tired to handle the contract anymore, and that a quick cancellation would let him negotiate a better rate for the new company.” He looked at the grass. “I used the fax of my office. I copied your name from an old file. I told myself it was just paperwork.” Mr. Chambers put a hand to his forehead. “Paperwork,” he said, “that left three hundred portable units unpumped at a major golf tournament.”
“Preston Fairchild, I sat in a waiting room with your wife for eleven days in 2003,” Gloria said, and her voice carried across the whole grounds. “Booker paid forty thousand dollars so you could keep your license. You called him the potty man at every dinner after that.” Chase stepped between them. He is thirty one, tall and handsome, a boy who has never been told no. “Uncle Booker, I was trying to take over the contract because you retired,” he said. “You sold your company. I had a right.” I answered quietly. “You had a right to ask, son. You did not have a right to sabotage a tournament and put my name on it.”
A bright yellow rubber glove left on a pump truck gave one uncle the weekend to bring his nephew back to the yard in Grovetown.
The first thing I did was not punish anyone. I took out my phone and called the drivers who once worked for me. Eleven of them said yes before I finished my sentence. By midnight, six trucks were rolling toward the course, and by dawn, all three hundred units had been pumped, scrubbed and restocked, with fresh paper, soap and a sprig of mint on every shelf. Mr. Chambers walked the long row at sunrise with a clipboard and a face like a man seeing a miracle. When he reached the last unit, he turned to me and said, “Mr. Tillery, I have never seen anything like it in thirty years.”
I gave my terms for the family on the clubhouse porch, with the first tee times already beginning. The Peterbilt, the second pump truck, the forty units and the binder would be back in my yard by Friday. Chase would sign a written apology to the tournament committee. Preston would pay twelve thousand dollars toward the damages. And both of them would report on Saturday morning at six, in coveralls, and spend the day cleaning units on the course. I handed Preston a pair of yellow rubber gloves and a hose. He took them without a word, and a ripple of laughter ran along the fairway.
Preston worked all of Saturday beside Chase, in the heat, in a pair of boots two sizes too big. By noon his face was red and his hands were shaking. By three he had stopped complaining, and by five he and Chase were arguing about the best way to angle the hose. A golfer in a pink visor stopped at the end of the row and asked Preston if he was the new sanitation supervisor. Preston looked at me over the plastic roof of a unit. “Sir,” he said, with a straight face, “it is the most honest job I have ever held.” Gloria laughed so hard she cried.
At the yard, that Monday, the old crew was waiting by the gate in the early light. There were eleven of them in work boots and faded caps, with thermoses in their hands. A big man named Earl, who drove my first truck in 1989, stepped up and looked me in the eye. “Boss, we never really left,” he said. “We just stopped getting calls.” I could not speak. I walked down the line, shaking each hand, and by the time I reached the end, my face was wet. Gloria stood at the office window and she was crying too. Behind her, the new sign said, Tillery Sanitation, Again.
The money consequences came quickly and fairly. Preston sold his boat and wrote a check for the full twelve thousand. Chase repaid eighteen thousand dollars over two years, working weekends as a route driver for my old crew, in a company jacket with his name stitched on the pocket. The first payment came in cash, folded inside a card that read, Thank you for the second chance. I tucked it into my wallet next to the photograph of my father. The tournament committee renewed my contract for three more years, and Mr. Chambers sent a case of cold lemonade to the yard.
In the name of my father, Abner Tillery, who passed twenty six years ago and who cleaned outhouses in Georgia for forty years without one complaint, I started the Abner Tillery Crew Fund. It pays for commercial licenses, steel toed boots and a first month of wages for young men and women in Richmond County who want to work in sanitation and have no one to vouch for them. In the first year, we placed twenty nine new workers. A boy of nineteen, in a brand new orange vest, shook my hand and said, “Mr. Tillery, I will not be late.”
On Sunday, Preston came to the house with a covered dish and a bottle of sparkling water. He stood on the porch for some time before knocking. When I opened the door, he took a deep breath and said, “Booker, I owe you more than a hose and twelve thousand dollars.” I let him in. We sat at the table, the two of us, and Gloria brought coffee and pound cake. After a long quiet, he looked up and said, “May I call you Mr. Tillery?” I told him that the potty man would be just fine, and we both laughed until the coffee went cold.
