I set the folding cot down in the lobby of the Beau Rivage at ten minutes before midnight, and the floor manager, a tall man in a gray suit with a name tag that read Hollis Trahan, stared at it as though it were a ghost. It was the original cot, the first one my husband Vernon built in 1969, with the canvas gone yellow and the hinge held with a bolt. I was eighty two years old, in my church dress and my hurricane shoes, and Brother Fairley stood beside me, holding my elbow. On the other side of a velvet rope, my son Dale sat at a card table with a stack of chips.
It had taken us three hours to find him. Dale had gambled away the money from the church generator, which he had pawned in Gulfport, and now he sat at the high limit table of a Biloxi casino with a paper marker on the felt in front of him. I could read it from where I stood. It was a marker for one million, two hundred thousand dollars, and under the line for collateral, in the handwriting of my son, were the words: Bethel Baptist Church, Gulfport, Mississippi, deed in hand. Brother Fairley made a sound like a man struck by a boat.
“That is our church,” said Brother Fairley, in a voice that did not rise. He was seventy four years old, the chairman of the board of trustees, and he had hauled water, lumber and ice for every storm since Camille. Mr. Trahan took the marker from the dealer and read it. His mouth tightened. “Madam,” he said to me, “is this man authorized to pledge the property of this church?” I looked at Dale, who was gripping the edge of the table. “No sir,” I said. “He is the pastor of nothing. He is only my son.”
A folding cot set down in a casino lobby gave one widow the night to bring her son back to the church in Gulfport.
I gave my terms standing beside the cot in the middle of the lobby, with a security guard on each side of me and the slot machines chiming all around. “Mr. Trahan, tear up that paper. The deed belongs to the trustees, and Brother Fairley has it in his coat pocket, as he has every day for twenty years. Dale, you will leave that table and come with me, and you will go to the program in Hattiesburg that Brother Fairley has already found, and I will pay for it. I will not give up the cot, and I will not sell the church. The generator is coming home, and so are you.”
Dale stared at the cot as though he had not seen it in forty years. “Mama,” he said, and his voice cracked in two, “I used to sleep on that thing during Camille. Daddy carried me in his arms to the church hall, and he laid me on that cot, and he said, “Son, nobody is going to hurt you in here.” I put the church on the table. I put the church of Daddy on a paper marker.” He covered his face with both hands. “I am the worst man in Harrison County, and I do not know how to stop.” The dealer looked away.
Mr. Trahan tore the marker in half, then in half again. As the pieces fluttered down, Dale, seized by a last wild shame, shoved his chair back and bolted across the carpet toward the glass doors of the lobby, the chips scattering behind him like dropped coins. Four security guards moved to intercept him, but Brother Fairley was closer. The old trustee stepped squarely in front of the revolving door, spread his arms, and said, “Dale Ratliff, I baptized you in the Gulf of Mexico. You are not going out that door.” Dale halted as if he had hit a wall.
He stood there, shoulders heaving, in the cold air of the casino lobby. Then he turned and walked slowly back across the carpet to where I stood beside the cot. I opened my arms. My son came into them the way he had come into them in 1969, running, with his face in my dress. I held him against me. Brother Fairley bowed his head. The slot machines went on chiming, and the gamblers at the tables did not look up, but the floor manager took off his glasses and wiped his eyes.
The money consequences were light, for such a night. Mr. Trahan voided the marker, and the casino barred Dale from the premises for life. The pawn shop in Gulfport returned the church generator for the sum of the loan, which I paid on Monday morning. The five million, one hundred thousand dollars from the sale of the folding cot patent stayed in the bank, and the deed of Bethel Baptist stayed in the pocket of Brother Fairley, who had it moved to the vault at the credit union. The church still stands on Pass Road.
In the name of Vernon, who passed in 2020, I started the Vernon Ratliff Fund. It pays for cots, generators, water and supplies for church hurricane shelters in Harrison, Hancock and Jackson counties. In the first year we outfitted thirty one shelters. One was a tiny chapel in Pass Christian that had been flooded twice. When the first cots were unfolded in the hall, a woman of eighty stood and ran her hand along the canvas and said it was the first time anyone had asked what the church needed.
Dale came home from Hattiesburg after four months, and on the first Sunday in November, he stood at the door of the church hall with a toolbox. The new generator was bolted to its concrete pad outside, humming. He had come to unfold the cots for the shelter drill, and he set them up in rows, snapping each hinge into place. I sat on the front pew and watched my son work. When he came to the last one, the original, he set it up with great care, and he looked up at me and nodded.
