“Read the name on the line, Mr. Arceneaux,” the agent said, and he laid the transfer form flat on the table in front of me. I read it out loud, slowly, because I wanted every person in that room to hear. “Gulf Crest Marine Holdings, L.L.C.” A fork rang against a plate at the far end of the table. The vice president visiting from Houston, a silver haired man named Mr. Prescott who was the boss of my son, had set his silverware down very gently. “That is my company,” he said, and the words came out thick, as though someone had pressed a thumb on his throat.
Mr. Prescott took a long moment to speak. “Bert, I need you to understand that I did not know,” he said. “Darren came to me in March and said that the lease was his by inheritance. He said his father wanted to retire and sell the rights. We agreed on three hundred eighty thousand dollars, and my company paid fifty thousand as a deposit on Tuesday.” He closed his eyes. “Our attorney handled the paperwork. I never saw the signature page. I trusted your son.” The agent nodded. “The notary says that Mr. Arceneaux was never in the room,” he said. “She stamped it at her kitchen table.”
Darren stood up so fast that his chair fell over. “Daddy, I can explain,” he said, and then he could not. Megan looked at him with her mouth open. Remy, my seventeen year old grandson, rose from the end of the table with his phone in his hand. “Granddad, I found the email on the family computer last week,” he said. “I was afraid to tell you. I was afraid of what you would do to Dad.” He put the phone on the table. It showed a message from Darren to a lawyer in Houston, saying, Old man will sign anything if the hand holding the pen is steady. I closed my eyes.
A crab trap left beside a transfer form gave one grandfather the weekend to bring his son back to the oyster lease in Houma.
When I opened them, I had made up my mind. I gave my terms to Darren in front of his boss and his wife. The transfer request would be withdrawn that same day. Mr. Prescott would withdraw his company from the deal and demand the fifty thousand dollar deposit back from Darren. The lease would stay with Boudreaux at sixteen hundred dollars a month, paid to me directly. Darren would repay the fifty two thousand, eight hundred dollars in four years. And he would make a full statement to the agent that very night, because the state of Louisiana does not forget a forged signature.
Darren broke then. He sat down on the floor of the dining room, against the wall, and put his head in his hands. “Daddy, I owed money to a man in Lafayette,” he said. “A card game, and then another one. I had a hole. I thought I could pay the lease back before you ever noticed.” I knelt beside him, which cost me, at seventy seven, and I put my hand on the back of his neck. “Son, I would have given you every dollar if you had come to me ashamed,” I said. “You came to me with a pen instead.” He wept like a child, and Megan, to her credit, did not leave.
At dawn the next morning, Remy and I took the old skiff out onto the lease. The sky over the marsh was pink, and the water lay like glass. Boudreaux was already out on his boat with his tongs, a thick, weathered man in a straw hat, and when he saw me he stood up and nearly tipped himself in. “Mr. Bert, they told me you had passed away,” he said. “They told me the lease was being sold to a company in Houston.” I laughed. “It would take more than my family to get rid of me,” I said. He grinned and handed me a fresh oyster, and I ate it standing in the boat.
Megan stayed behind after the others had left. She stood in my kitchen doorway in her coat, a small woman with tired eyes, and she said, “Mr. Bert, I did not know. But I should have asked about the money long ago.” She sat down across from me at the table. “I would like to pay the first installment myself. Out of my paycheck.” I looked at her for a long moment. “Child, that is not your debt,” I said. “No, sir,” she answered. “But it is my family.” I poured her a cup of chicory coffee, and we sat there together until the sun came up over the bayou.
The money consequences came without drama. Darren sold his truck and the bass boat, and he told Mr. Prescott everything over two long afternoons. His company let him go, but they did not press charges. He took a job working nights on a shrimp boat out of Dulac, a job that smelled of diesel and brine, and his first payment arrived on the first of the month, in an envelope with his thumbprint on it from the fish scales. In the memo line, he had written, Not enough yet. I put it in the cigar box on my dresser, next to the picture of Odile.
In the name of Odile, who passed eight years ago and who could open a dozen oysters before most men had found the knife, I started the Odile Oyster Fund. It pays for boats, licenses and the first season of gear for young fishermen in Terrebonne Parish who come from families with nothing. In the first year, we put fourteen new captains on the water. A boy of eighteen, in white rubber boots, held up the first sack of oysters he ever harvested and said, “Mister Bert, my grandpa would have cried.” I told him I was crying for him.
In September, Remy started at Nicholls State in Thibodaux, studying fisheries biology, on my dime. On the Sunday before he left, the two of us sat on the back dock with our lines in the bayou, and he said, very quietly, “Granddad, I am going to come back and run the lease.” I looked out across the water, at the old crab traps stacked up under the cypress, the ones I designed in a shed with a coffee can and a coat hanger. “Then we had better keep it in good order,” I said. A heron lifted off the water and flew toward the sun.
