The paper was a power of attorney, and it gave Gregory the right to sign for me on everything I owned. My house in Cooper Young, my pension, my account at the First Tennessee branch on Union Avenue. Dated that very afternoon, with a signature that looked a little like mine, the way a forgery looks like a cousin. Calvin held it out in both hands. “Captain, I did not sign as witness,” he said. “I told him I would only witness a man I had seen with my own eyes. He said he would find another captain.” His hands shook a little as he said it, and so did mine.
“Why would Gregory need all that?” I asked, although I already guessed. Calvin lowered his voice. “Sir, I have worked this river a long time. Word travels. His supply company on Summer Avenue owes a lot of money to a lot of people. Your name on that paper was his last door.” Behind us, Gregory was laughing at something with the band leader, holding his champagne glass high like a man on a postcard. Annette stood at the foot of the gangplank, looking around for me. He had never looked me in the eye all evening, and I understood why now.
Calvin made one decision I will always honor him for. He did not make a scene. He said, “Captain, will you come aboard with me? Just you.” He offered me his arm, and I took it, and my cane clicked on every step of that gangplank. The deckhand with the ponytail, whose name turned out to be Marcus, stood at attention at the rail. “Welcome aboard, sir,” he said, and snapped a salute. I almost cried again, but a captain does not cry on a deck. Under the white lights of the boat, with the band quiet for once, the Mississippi looked like it was holding its breath.
A riverboat captain whom a towboat pilot once pulled from the Mississippi refused to witness a false signature, and brought an old man to the wheel of the boat.
In the wheelhouse the lights glowed green and amber. Calvin opened the ship log and wrote the time, the date and a short plain sentence: Forged document presented, witness refused. Then he handed the pen to Marcus, and then to the first mate, and they signed under it as witnesses of what had happened. “Now it is the law, not my word,” Calvin said. Then he picked up the radio and called the Memphis river patrol, calm as a man ordering coffee.
Gregory stepped into the wheelhouse a few minutes later, red faced, asking why the boat was not unloading. Annette came behind him in her sparkly dress, and the moment she saw me standing there with a patrol officer on the other side of the glass, she understood something was wrong. Gregory said, “Pop, there has been a mix up.” The officer said, “Sir, the captain has a document I would like to discuss.” I watched my son in law reach for words, and there were none within reach. Out on the water a barge horn sounded, as if the river itself had something to say about it.
Annette read the paper twice and then turned it over, as though the back might say something kinder. She looked at the date. She looked at me. “Daddy, you were on the dock all day,” she whispered. “He told me you were too tired to come, that you were resting on the bench.” She was not crying yet. She had gone very still, as the river gets still before it turns. She said, “You paid for all of this, Daddy. Didn’t you?” I said yes. She nodded slowly. He did not meet my gaze. He looked at the floor, where a wet footprint was drying.
Gregory was taken off the boat in the quiet way, without handcuffs or music, and the party went on without the host. Mr. Haskins, my old lawyer, came to the house the next morning and put every account of mine under a new arrangement. Annette sat at my kitchen table for three hours going over the books of her own husband business, and found it was worse than any of us knew. She did not forgive him. She did, however, ask me to forgive her. I told her there was nothing to forgive, only a river to cross.
Slowly, over the autumn, she moved back into the habit of Sunday supper. She brought a thermos of coffee and a sandwich in wax paper, just as her mother used to. The first time, I could not speak. She said, “Mama told me once you can tell a man by who waits for him at the landing.” She had waited too late, she said, but she was waiting now. I put the locket on the table between us.
Marcus came to my house two weeks later on his day off, in a pressed shirt and with his mother in the car. He wanted to apologize for not stepping in on the dock. I told him he had done the best thing a deckhand can do. He had gone to his captain. We sat on the leaning porch with lemonade, and I showed him the picture of Lorene on the landing with her thermos. He asked if he could learn the river bends from me. I said I would be honored. He comes every Thursday now with a notebook, and he is a quick study. I could almost smell the magnolia on my porch back home, and the sky over Memphis went from gold to violet.
In October, Captain Calvin Ledbetter called. The same boat was sailing at sunset with no guests, only crew, and he wanted me aboard. This time I walked up the gangplank with Annette on one arm and my cane on the other. In the wheelhouse Calvin stepped back from the big oak wheel and said, “Captain Thaddeus Whitlow, she is yours.” I took her out past the bridge lights, bend by bend, the way I always knew. The whistle sounded across the water, long and low, and on the landing, for once, somebody was waving.
