The woman Marcus named was Big Dee Hollis, who ran the pawn shop on Central Avenue, and who had lent money to half of Plaza Midwood at a rate that would make a loan shark blush. I sat on the edge of my bed with the old rotary phone in my lap and listened to my grandson tell the bank to add her as an authorized user on the account that held the money from my factory. Then I cleared my throat and spoke into the receiver. I am Herschel Banks, eighty six years old, and I said, in my deepest voice, “Marcus Banks, this is your granddaddy.”
There was a silence on the line so complete that I could hear the refrigerator humming in the kitchen. The bank lady said, with a note of confusion, “Mr. Banks? I thought I was speaking with you.” I answered her very politely. “Madam, you were speaking with my grandson, who does not have my permission to do anything on my account. I would like you to note that in the file, and I would like to speak to your manager.” I heard the kitchen chair scrape back, and a footstep, and then a long, low moan.
Marcus appeared in the doorway of my bedroom a moment later, thirty one years old, in a wrinkled t shirt, with the receiver of the kitchen phone still in his hand and the cord stretched taut behind him. His eyes were red and hollow, and his hands shook. He opened his mouth, and for a minute nothing came out. “Granddaddy,” he said at last, “how long have you been listening?” I put the phone down on the cradle with a click. “Long enough,” I said, “to know my grandson is on his way to a very deep hole.”
A second phone line picked up in a quiet bedroom gave one furniture maker the length of a hold to bring his grandson back to the truth in Charlotte.
I gave my terms from the edge of the bed, with my cane laid across my knees. “Marcus, I do not hate you. I taught you to sand a table leg when you were seven years old, and I remember the way you held the paper. Here is what will happen. You will go to a treatment house in Gastonia on Monday, and I will pay for the whole ninety days. You will have no contact with Big Dee Hollis. You will tell the bank every word. And when you come home, you will work in the shop of my friend Walter, and you will earn your own dollar.”
My grandson slid down the doorframe until he was sitting on the floor with his knees drawn up, and his voice came out ragged. “Granddaddy, I owe Big Dee eleven thousand dollars,” he said. “I lost my job at the airport, and then my apartment, and then I could not stop. She said if I got the money from you, I could pay her off and she would forget the rest. I was going to tell you everything, I swear. I was going to tell you on Friday. But Friday kept moving.” He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “I have been such a coward.”
But the old fear came up in him like water. Marcus sprang to his feet, snatched the bank folder and the checkbook from my dresser, and ran out of the bedroom and through the front hall, meaning to leave the house and not come back. He wrenched open the front door and bolted onto the porch, down the steps and onto the cracked sidewalk. He had gone four houses. On every porch, in every rocker, sat a neighbor. Miss Pettiford, who was ninety, rose with her cane. Reverend Dunbar stepped off his stoop.
Marcus stopped in the middle of the sidewalk with the folder pressed to his ribs, and the whole row of old mill house porches seemed to lean in around him in the October dusk. A dozen neighbors stood on their steps and said nothing. Reverend Dunbar walked down, slow and stately, and laid a large hand on the shoulder of my grandson. “Son, I baptized you in that creek behind the church when you were nine years old. You do not run from this street. This street raised you. Walk back.” Marcus bowed his head and went.
The consequences were hard and tender. Marcus entered the treatment house in Gastonia that Monday, and I drove him there myself in my old Buick with Miss Pettiford in the back seat, praying aloud. The bank closed the account to everyone but me and put a hold on the whole file. Big Dee Hollis was visited by two officers from the county, and she left Plaza Midwood within a month. I wrote my grandson a letter every single day, in pencil, and I signed each one the same, with the words, Your Granddaddy.
In the name of my wife Louise, who passed in 2017, I started the Louise Banks Fund. It pays for woodworking apprenticeships and treatment beds for young adults trying to rebuild their lives, in Mecklenburg, Gaston and Cabarrus counties. In the first year we placed twenty eight apprentices with furniture makers and paid for thirty three treatment stays. One was a twenty six year old from Kannapolis who had lost everything to the pipe, and who sanded his first chair leg and then ran his thumb along it as if it were silk, smiling.
On a mild afternoon in April, I sat in the shade of the porch with a glass of lemonade, watching my grandson carry a walnut table across the yard of the workshop that my friend Walter had lent him. He was one hundred and ninety days clean, with sawdust in his hair and a pencil behind his ear. He set the table down in the grass in front of me and wiped his forehead. “Granddaddy,” he said, “I made this.” I ran my hand over the grain, slow, the way I had taught him. “Son,” I said, “you sanded it right.”
