The little blinking light on the tablet in the corner of my living room in Opelousas, which my granddaughter had set up to stream the Sunday rosary for the homebound, had been on the whole time. I am Earl Dupree, eighty seven years old, and I learned it from Pastor Gene Thibodeaux himself, on the telephone, Wednesday evening. “Earl,” he said, “the microphone picked up every word your daughter in law and your son said in your kitchen. Forty people heard it. I was one of them. And you need to know what your son Calvin signed in my office in 2019.”
I sat in my recliner with the telephone against my ear. The pastor told me what they had planned. My son Calvin, fifty eight years old, a gambler since he was twenty, and his wife Sharon had sat in my kitchen and talked of how to split my one million, eight hundred thousand dollars, with a third to Pastor Gene for helping them move me into a facility. Sharon had laughed. Calvin had said, “Papa will not know the difference.” Forty homebound parishioners had listened to every word, through their tablets, over the rosary prayers.
“I played along,” said Pastor Gene. “I did it because of what Calvin signed in 2019. He came to me then, in tears, after he had taken eleven thousand dollars from the poor box of the church to cover a debt. He signed a sworn paper confessing it, and promising never to touch your money. I have kept it in my safe for five years. I never meant to use it. But I will, Earl, if you ask me to.” I closed my eyes. In the next room hung the photograph of my late wife Marie, smiling from the wall.
A live stream left running on a tablet gave one father the evening to bring his son back to the family in Opelousas.
I gave my terms to the pastor over the telephone, in a voice that surprised me with its steadiness. “Gene, bring the paper to my house on Saturday at noon. I want Calvin and Sharon here, and I want the deacons. I will not shout. I will give my son one more chance to be the man Marie raised. If he takes it, I will pay for his treatment, and the money will stay in the family. If he does not, I will read his own words to him, in front of his neighbors, and let the law have the rest.”
On Saturday at noon, my kitchen was full. The pastor sat at the head of the table with a manila envelope. Five deacons in their church clothes filled the chairs along the wall, and Calvin and Sharon stood at the doorway, stiff and pale, having been told only that I wished to see them. When I told them what I knew, Sharon denied everything. Calvin said nothing at all. Then the pastor drew out the paper of 2019 and began to read, in his deep voice, the words that Calvin had signed with his own hand.
I watched my son listen. When the pastor reached the sentence about the poor box, Calvin sank into a chair and wept without sound. But Sharon had other ideas. She darted to the table, snatched the paper from the hand of the pastor, crushed it in her fist, and ran for the front door with it. “That is a forgery!” she screamed. She flung the door open and nearly collided with the tallest of the deacons, Mr. Broussard, who had slipped out ahead of her and stood on the porch with his arms spread wide.
Sharon stopped on the threshold. Behind her, the deacons filed out silently onto the porch, five of them in a row, like a choir. Mr. Broussard gently plucked the crumpled paper from her fingers, smoothed it against his chest, and handed it back to the pastor, who gave it to me. I held it in both hands. The ink of my son was faded and shaky. Sharon sat down on the porch step and put her head in her hands. Nobody spoke. The mockingbirds were singing in the pecan tree.
The money consequences were gentle. Pastor Gene returned the money from the poor box on behalf of Calvin, and Calvin repaid the church over two years. He entered a gambling treatment program in Lafayette, and Sharon, after a long and bitter month, agreed to go to counseling with him. The one million, eight hundred thousand dollars stayed in my name, in a trust, with the church and the family as beneficiaries. I deleted the stream from the tablet, and my granddaughter helped me start a new one, with no secrets.
In the name of Marie, who passed in 2019, I started the Marie Dupree Fund. It pays for gambling counseling, elder legal help and tablets for homebound parishioners, in St. Landry, Evangeline and Acadia parishes. In the first year we placed twenty seven people in counseling and gave out sixty tablets. One was a ninety year old widow from Eunice who had listened to a rosary stream and heard her nephew plotting. She called the pastor, and the pastor called the sheriff, and she has never missed a prayer since.
On a Sunday in the fall, Calvin sat beside me on the sofa in front of the tablet, in a clean shirt, while the rosary was streamed to forty homebound parishioners. He was a year well. When the prayers were finished, he leaned toward the little microphone, and said softly, “This is Calvin Dupree. I want to say thank you to everyone who heard what you heard, and did not look away.” I put my hand over his on the cushion. The little red light blinked, and blinked, and went out. I thought of Marie, and I knew she was listening too, and the whole house felt warm and full, the way it used to on Sunday afternoons.
