The name on the last check from the building fund was Felicia Ransom Ross, in the careful hand of the church treasurer, with the amount of sixty two thousand dollars beside it. I stared at the page by the light of the nursery night lamp, and the two babies in the cribs began to stir. My daughter had cashed a check from the building of the Lord. I am Hattie Mae Ransom, eighty three years old, and I laid the paper on the changing table and picked up the little Jefferson boy, to quiet him before he woke his sister.
Deacon Lewis stood at the door, trembling, his thin hands twisting the brim of his black hat. “Hattie Mae, I did not know where else to take it,” he said. “I tried to ask Reverend Ross, and he told me the books were not my concern. I have kept those books since 1979, and I have never lost a dollar.” His voice cracked. “Twelve checks in two years, to a land company in Destin and to your daughter. A hundred and eighty thousand dollars of the widows. I could not sleep.”
Out in the sanctuary, the choir finished a hymn, and the voice of Reverend Calvin Ross came through the speaker on the wall, rich and warm, thanking the donors by name. He read my name. He read the names of the Jefferson grandmothers, and of Sister Mabry, and of the widows who had given a hundred dollars from their pensions. I set the sleeping baby gently in the crib and smoothed the blanket. I took the bank statement from the deacon, folded it in thirds, and tucked it into my pocketbook. Then I walked out of the nursery.
A folded bank statement passed in a church nursery gave one pecan farm widow the length of an anniversary dinner to bring her son in law back to the truth in Albany.
I walked the length of the center aisle with the whole congregation turning to watch, and I stopped at the foot of the pulpit. My knees ached, and the church smelled of floor wax and roses, and I looked up at my son in law. I gave my terms in a voice that carried to the back pew. “Calvin Ross, Deacon Lewis has shown me the bank statement. You will step down from that pulpit tonight and give the books to the trustees. You will repay every dollar, from the beach lots in Destin. And the fellowship hall will be built, with my own money, in the name of my husband.”
Calvin gripped the edges of the pulpit, and the color left his round, handsome face. “Mother Ransom, the Lord knows my heart,” he began, in his preaching voice. Then it broke. “I started small. I borrowed a few thousand for a land deal in Florida. It was going to double. I meant to put every cent back before the building began.” His hands shook on the polished wood. “I bought the lots at the beach, and then the land company said I needed more. I kept saying, one more month. And I gave Felicia the check to deposit so that she would not ask questions.”
But a man cornered in his own church will do anything. Calvin lurched down the pulpit steps, snatched the bank statement from my hand, and ran for the side door beside the choir loft, the white pages flapping in his fist. He got no further than the front pew. The ushers, in their white gloves, moved in from both sides. Three of the deacons rose together from the amen corner. And the choir, in their gold robes, came down from the loft in a single wave and stood shoulder to shoulder in front of the door, humming.
Calvin stopped in the center of the carpet with the pages crushed against his white shirt and two hundred members of Mount Pisgah silent behind him. My daughter Felicia stood up in the first pew. She was fifty one years old, in her pale Sunday suit, and her face was streaked with tears. “Calvin,” she said, in a clear, steady voice, “give the paper to my mother. I cashed that check. I should have asked where it came from. We will tell them everything together.” He turned and looked at her. His hand opened. The statement fell onto the red carpet.
The consequences were just. The trustees accepted the resignation of Calvin that night, with sorrow but without malice, and the district office sent an auditor. He sold the lots in Destin at a loss and repaid ninety one thousand dollars within the year, and the rest he is repaying from a job at the lumber yard. Felicia came to live in my farmhouse among the pecan trees, and she cried the first night until dawn. I wrote a check for the whole cost of the fellowship hall the next Monday, and the contractor poured the slab in April.
In the name of my husband Otis, who passed in 2021, I started the Otis Ransom Fund. It pays for repairs to small rural churches and for scholarships for the children of pecan orchard workers, in Dougherty, Lee and Worth counties. In the first year we repaired nineteen church roofs and sent twenty three students to college. One was a nineteen year old from Leesburg whose father shook pecan trees every November, and who stood in front of the church after the service and read the letter of acceptance to a crowd of her cousins.
On the Sunday that the fellowship hall opened, the sun poured through the new windows and the smell of fried chicken and candied yams filled the long room. A banner over the door read, Otis Ransom Fellowship Hall, in gold letters. Felicia stood behind the serving table in an apron, ladling gravy for the widows, and Calvin, in a plain gray shirt, carried the folding chairs from the truck. When he set the last one down, he caught my eye across the room. I nodded to him, once. He nodded back.
