The key taped inside the cover of the library book fit a safe deposit box at the Bayou La Batre branch of the Gulf Coast Savings Bank, and I knew it the moment I saw the number stamped on the brass. I am Ruth Toomey, seventy six years old, of Mobile, and I sat on the edge of my kitchen chair with Treasure Island open on my knees and the letter of my husband Walter trembling in my hand. Outside, in the driveway, the young man in the black pickup waited with the engine off and his cap in his hands.
His name was Cody Landry, he told me on my front porch, and he was twenty six years old. He had worked on a shrimp boat out of Bayou La Batre since he was sixteen. His father, Daniel, had passed last spring, and in a tackle box under his bed Cody had found the library book, stamped 1994, with the letter and the key taped inside the cover and one line written on the flyleaf: Give this to Ruthie. “Mrs. Toomey,” he said, “my father always told me that Captain Walter was a good man. I think he was more than that.”
I made him a cup of coffee and listened. Cody believed Walter was his grandfather, and so did the letter. Before I ever met my husband, in 1966, he had a son in Pascagoula with a girl who moved away, and he had paid for that boy in secret his whole life, because he was ashamed, and because he feared losing me. I should have been angry. Instead, I felt a great sorrow for a man who had carried a stone alone for thirty years, and who had trusted a library book more than his wife.
A library book returned after thirty years gave one widow the length of a Saturday morning to bring her son in law back to the truth in Mobile.
I gave my terms at the dining table that evening, in front of my daughter Judy and her husband Gil, who had come over uninvited when he heard that a stranger had been to the house. “Gil, tomorrow morning at nine, all of us are driving to the bank in Bayou La Batre. We will open that box together, in front of the manager. Cody will sit beside me. And you will explain to me, and to my daughter, why you telephoned the library last month asking about a book that was checked out in 1994.”
Gil set down his fork. His face, which was usually florid, turned the color of grits. “Ruth, I knew about Daniel,” he said hoarsely. “Walter told me, before he passed. He said the dock and the forty acres on Dauphin Island Parkway would go in part to the boy. I have debts. I run a boat dealership that is failing. I thought if the letter never surfaced, the property would pass to Judy and me. I have been searching every library and used bookstore in Mobile County for that book for two years.”
The next morning, at the bank, the manager had barely slid the long steel box onto the table when Gil lunged. He snatched the deed, the will and the envelope of photographs from inside, and ran for the glass doors of the lobby, meaning to feed the papers to the shredder in his truck. He knocked over a stand of brochures. A security guard reached for him and missed. Judy cried out, “Gil, no!” And outside, in the bright morning, a black pickup swung across the entrance of the parking lot and stopped with a jolt.
Gil stopped on the sidewalk with the papers crushed against his chest, the pickup blocking his way to the street, the guard and the manager behind him, and the morning sun glaring on the glass doors. Cody stepped down from the truck and spoke without raising his voice. “Mr. Gil, I have worked on the water since I was a boy. I know when a man is out of line. Give those papers to Mrs. Toomey. They belong to my grandfather, and to her.” Gil looked at his wife, who stood weeping in the doorway. His hands opened, and the papers fluttered down.
The consequences were honest and slow. The will of Walter was upheld by the probate court in Mobile, and the dock was divided between Cody and my two daughters, in thirds. Gil was charged with attempted theft, and Judy forgave him only after he sold the failing dealership and repaid every dollar he had borrowed against the property. Cody moved into the old room above the boat shed and took over the shrimp boat of his grandfather, the Miss Ruthie, which I had never been able to sell. Walter had kept the name after all those years.
In the name of my husband Walter, who passed in 1996, I started the Walter Toomey Fund. It pays for boat repairs and insurance for small shrimpers and for school costs for the children of fishing families, in Mobile, Baldwin and Escambia counties. In the first year we repaired thirty one boats and sent forty two young people to school. One was a nineteen year old girl from Bayou La Batre who held her acceptance letter from the University of South Alabama against her chest and told us her father had never believed she could go.
On a golden Sunday in March, I stood on the dock behind the house, in a blue sweater, with a thermos of coffee in my hand, and watched the Miss Ruthie come in through the channel with her nets lifted and gulls wheeling overhead. Cody stood at the wheel, grinning, with Judy beside him in a pair of rubber boots. When they tied up at the dock, Cody jumped onto the planks and handed me a worn copy of Treasure Island. “Grandma Ruth,” he said, “I think this one belongs on your shelf.” I put it between the photographs of my girls.
