The first of the six checks lay on the polished table of the church office, and the deacon who held it up to the window light read the signature aloud in a flat voice. “Lamar Pickens. Dated the fourth of March.” He laid down the second. “Lamar Pickens. Dated the eleventh.” I am Edna Pickens, eighty two years old, and I sat in the straight chair in my Sunday hat with my hands folded over my purse. My husband Lamar had passed in November, and every check on the table was dated four months later, in a handwriting that looked just like his, and drawn on the offering account of Bethel Missionary Baptist Church of Tuscaloosa.
The church treasurer, Sister Odessa Banks, had found them when she reconciled the statements for the audit. Six checks, each for twenty two hundred dollars, made out to cash, all cashed at the same branch on a Monday. Lamar had been chairman of the finance committee for thirty one years, and his signature was one that every teller in town knew. I knew in my heart who had practiced that signature at my kitchen table at the age of fifteen, copying his grandfather out of a birthday card. I had hoped I was wrong. I asked Sister Odessa to call the deacons for Sunday afternoon.
The door opened and my grandson Tanner came in, twenty six years old, in a pressed shirt, with his car keys in his hand and a smile that faded as he saw the table. The deacons rose, five of them, in dark suits. Deacon Willis Carter, the oldest, who had stood beside Lamar at the church door for forty years, said, “Sit down, son.” Tanner looked at the checks, then at me. “Grandma,” he said, “what is all this?” I took off my glasses, and I held the gaze of the boy I had raised since he was nine, after his mother left.
A stack of signed checks gave one church widow the length of a Sunday afternoon to bring her grandson back to the truth in Tuscaloosa.
I gave my terms in the quiet room. “Tanner, I am not calling the police this afternoon, and I want you to hear why. Your grandfather would not have wanted it. But you will repay every dollar, all thirteen thousand two hundred, to the church, from your own wages, on a schedule that Deacon Carter will set. You will stand before the congregation on Sunday and tell them what you did. And you will give back the keys to the church office. After that, you will come home to my table, and I will cook for you, because you are still mine.”
Tanner sank into a chair and put his head in his hands. “Grandma, I borrowed from a man in Northport to pay for my truck and my sneaker business,” he said, his voice cracking. “I told myself I would repay the church by April. I wrote the name of Granddaddy six times, the way he taught me, and every time I felt sick.” He looked up with wet eyes. “I sat in that pew every Sunday and watched them pass the plate, and I knew it was my money in the plate, and I knew whose it was. I only wanted to be somebody he would be proud of.”
But fear is stronger than shame. Tanner snatched the six checks off the table in one sweep, spun around, and bolted for the side door that opens on the church parking lot, with the paper crushed in his fist. He made it across the hall. At the door, the head usher, Mr. Jerome Tolliver, six foot four in his white gloves, stepped squarely into the doorway. Two more ushers closed in from the corridor. And behind them, in the hall, the whole church choir, still in their purple robes, who had come to see why the deacons had been called, stood shoulder to shoulder across the hallway.
Tanner stopped in the hall with his chest heaving and the checks crumpled against his shirt, and the choir fell utterly silent. Mr. Tolliver did not touch him. He only held out one white glove, palm up, as he does every Sunday for the offering plate. “Young man,” he said in a deep, gentle voice, “the plate comes to you. You do not run from it.” Tanner stood trembling. Then he walked back down the hall, past the purple robes, and laid the six checks in my lap, one by one, in order of date.
The consequences were measured and kind. Deacon Carter drew up a schedule, and Tanner repaid the church thirteen thousand two hundred dollars over fourteen months from his wages at the tire plant, driving there in an old car after he sold the truck to pay the man in Northport. He stood before the congregation on the third Sunday and spoke for six minutes with his voice shaking, and the church answered with a long, warm Amen. Sister Odessa made a rule that two signatures were needed for every check, and I made him collards every Sunday.
In the name of my husband Lamar, who passed in November, I started the Lamar Pickens Fund. It pays for scholarships for young people from church families and for financial literacy classes for young adults and seniors, in Tuscaloosa, Hale and Bibb counties. In the first year we sent eleven students to Stillman College and taught four hundred people to balance a checkbook. One was a seventy year old woman from Greensboro who had never had her own account, and who walked out of the bank with a passbook in her hand, holding it up to the sun for her sister to see.
On a warm Sunday in June, I sat in the third pew with my fan, with the windows open and the sound of the choir rolling out over the oaks. When the offering plate came by, Tanner was the one carrying it, in a white shirt and the badge of a junior usher. He stopped at my pew and held the plate in both hands. I opened my purse, took out a folded bill, and laid it in. He bent close and whispered, “Grandma, it is all there.” I patted his hand. “I know, baby,” I said. “I counted.”
