From the linen closet at the end of the east hall, I held my telephone up to the crack of the door and pressed record. I am Bernice Okafor, fifty six years old, night aide at the Magnolia Care Home in Macon for nineteen years, and I had never been so frightened in my life. In the room across the hall, Miss Hattie Coleman, eighty eight, sat propped on her pillows in her pink bed jacket. At the foot of her bed stood her grandson Darius, and beside him a stooped man in a white coat whom he called Dr. Haynes, holding a clipboard.
I knew Dr. Haynes. He was no doctor at all. He was Wendell Haynes, who had been a deacon and Sunday school teacher at the church of Miss Hattie for thirty years, until the church dismissed him for borrowing from the building fund. He now wore a stethoscope around his neck and carried a power of attorney form on his clipboard, ready for the signature of an old woman with one million, eight hundred thousand dollars. Darius, who was thirty four and in debt to men who played dice in a garage, smiled at his grandmother with all his teeth.
“Grandma,” he said gently, “Dr. Haynes just needs you to sign here, so I can help with the bills.” Miss Hattie looked at him for a long moment. She was small as a bird, with silver hair braided close to her head, and her eyes were as sharp as they had been when she taught third grade for forty years. “Darius,” she said, in her soft Georgia voice, “I have been waiting for you to come.” And she slid her right hand slowly beneath her pillow.
A night shift spent in a linen closet gave one aide the evening to bring the grandson of an old teacher back to her in Macon.
Miss Hattie gave her terms in a voice that carried down the hall. “Wendell Haynes, you take that coat off before I have the Lord strike you. Darius, you sit down in that chair. I have known what you two have been planning since September. Bernice has been standing in my linen closet with her telephone for three weeks, because I asked her to. Every word you have said in this room has been written down, and every word is going to the district attorney in the morning. Now sit.”
Darius sat. His mouth hung open. Wendell Haynes took a step backward, and what Miss Hattie drew out from under her pillow was not what either of them expected. It was a brass school bell, the kind teachers used to ring at recess, which she had kept in a drawer since 1991. She rang it. The sound rolled down the east hall, loud and clear, and doors began to open, and the night nurse, a stout woman named Cora, looked out with her glasses on her forehead. The tears were running down the face of Darius.
“Grandma,” he sobbed, “I did not know how else to get the money. I owe these men eleven thousand dollars. I was going to put it all back.” But Wendell Haynes was not a man to weep. He seized the clipboard and the pen, and ran for the exit door at the end of the hall in his white coat, flapping. He did not see the med cart, which Cora had rolled out into the corridor. He hit it at a trot, and it carried him straight into the arms of two security officers who had been waiting by the nurses station since I had called them at midnight.
The hall went quiet again. Darius sat in the chair with his face in his hands. Miss Hattie held out the school bell to him, handle first, the way she used to hand it to the boy chosen to ring in the class. He took it, and looked at it, and began to cry in earnest. “Darius,” she said, “you are still the baby I rocked. Whatever you have done, you will not do it again. We are going to find you help, and I will sit with you through every day of it.”
The money consequences were clear. Wendell Haynes was charged with fraud and impersonation, and pleaded guilty. Darius cooperated, and the judge sent him to a residential program in Warner Robins and placed him on probation. Miss Hattie signed a new set of papers, which Cora and I witnessed, leaving her one million, eight hundred thousand dollars in a trust, with a share for Darius at forty if he stayed well. She also left a very modest gift to the night aides of the Magnolia, which made me laugh and cry.
In the name of her husband Booker, who passed in 1998, Miss Hattie started the Booker Coleman Fund, and I sit on its board. It pays for night aide training, recovery programs and legal help for residents of care homes, in Bibb, Houston and Jones counties. In the first year we trained sixty aides and helped twenty two families recover from schemes. One was a retired mail carrier in Warner Robins who had been handed a form by a man in a white coat. His night aide had a telephone, and used it.
On a Sunday in the spring, the residents of the Magnolia held a service in the dayroom, and Darius, fourteen months well, came to read the scripture. He stood at the front in a pressed shirt and read the passage about the prodigal son, slowly, in a steady voice. Miss Hattie sat in her wheelchair in the front row with the brass bell in her lap. When he finished, she rang it once, softly. The whole room applauded, and I stood at the back in my night shift scrubs, wiping my eyes with a tissue. It was the best shift of my nineteen years at the Magnolia, and nobody had to sneak a single thing past the night nurse.
