The two men in the Georgia Bureau of Investigation windbreakers walked down the aisle of the sanctuary as quietly as ushers. Curtis lowered his microphone. Forty faces turned from him to the agents and back, and I stood in the middle of that blue carpet with my pocketbook on my arm, feeling very calm. I have taught Sunday school for fifty years, and I know what a room sounds like when it has just found out the truth. It sounds like nothing at all. Curtis said, “Gentlemen, this is a private worship service,” and the older agent said, “Pastor, we have a warrant.”
They took him to a side room. The investor in the gray suit, whose name was Mr. Lyle Brantley, followed the agents out with his briefcase clutched in both arms, as pale as paper. Denise rose from the front row and came to me with her hands pressed together. “Mama, I knew,” she said. “I knew something was wrong with the land and I told myself it was nothing. I am so ashamed.” I looked at my daughter, fifty six years old, in a prayer shawl, and I thought of her at four, wearing Booker overalls in the pecan rows. I opened my arms.
The deputy director, Agent Lorraine Pitts, sat down with me on a church pew an hour later. She had a file as thick as a Bible. Curtis Fain had been running the same scheme in three churches across Georgia for six years, she said. He found a widow with land, forged a quitclaim, and told his congregation that the land was a gift. Then he sold the promise of a campus to investors, took their building fund money, and vanished into another town. Two widows had already lost their farms. “Mrs. Pope, you are the first who caught him in time,” she said.
A paper sack from a peach stand, a prayer circle with forty faces, and a widow who kept every acre.
I told Agent Pitts about the peach stand, and Mae Belle Dickey, and the paper sack. She wrote it down with a very small smile. “Mrs. Pope, we are going to need Mrs. Dickey as a witness,” she said. “She heard Curtis talking to the surveyor.” I said that Mae Belle was as honest as sunrise and would be pleased to be useful. I did not tell the agent how my hands had trembled in the car. A woman my age learns to put her hands in her lap and keep her face quiet. But in the pew that morning, I allowed myself one small, grateful tear.
The quitclaim deed was declared void by a Peach County judge within the month. The signature, an expert said, had been traced from my church directory entry, which lists only Harriet Pope, no middle initial. The notary stamp belonged to Curtis, and so did the false witness line. The county attorney charged him with forgery, fraud, theft by deception, and exploitation of an elder. The investors, led by Mr. Brantley, were paid back from the ministry bank accounts, down to the last dime, which the state froze on a Tuesday afternoon with a single telephone call.
As for the Walton Family Trust, Booker had set it up in 1981 with a lawyer in Macon, and I had nearly forgotten it. Curtis had never read the county plat. The trust held a hundred and sixty acres of the old homeplace, and it said, in plain legal English, that no part could ever be sold, mortgaged or transferred, except by the unanimous consent of the heirs. Denise had been listed as one of three. She read it in the lawyer office with her mouth open. “Mama, Daddy protected us from my own husband,” she whispered. I said that Booker always protected us from something.
Denise testified against Curtis in March. She sat in the witness box in a gray dress, her voice steady, and told the court what she had seen. It cost her a marriage, a church family, and thirty years of Sunday mornings. When she stepped down, she walked straight over to the bench where I was sitting, and she sat beside me, and she took my hand. Curtis was sentenced to twelve years in a state prison. He did not look at either of us. I prayed for him that night. It was the hardest prayer of my life, and I said it all the way through.
In April I took Denise out to the back forty. The orange survey stakes were gone, and the pink flags, and the sign on Booker tree. We walked down the rows together in our rubber boots, past four hundred pecans in bud, and Denise knelt at the foot of the first tree, the one nearest the fence, and pressed her palm flat against the bark. “Daddy planted this in 1975,” she said. “I was three. He held me up and let me pour the water.” I said I remembered. We stood there for a long time while the wind went softly through the new leaves.
That summer the Walton Trust funded a scholarship at Fort Valley State, in Booker name, for the children of farm families who want to study agriculture. The first recipient was Mae Belle Dickey granddaughter, a bright young woman named Tessa who plans to grow peaches and keep the family stand. Mae Belle cried at the ceremony. I told her that I had seen the paper sack in my own handwriting, in my dreams, for a week, and that she had saved the farm with a pencil. She said it was only what a neighbor does.
On the first Saturday of June I drove up Highway 341 with the windows down. Mae Belle was standing at her stand with her arms crossed, smiling like a girl. “Elbertas or Red Globes, Miss Hattie?” she called. I got out of the car slowly and looked at her baskets, heaped with fruit the color of sunset. Then I looked out at the pecan orchard, shimmering in the heat, and at my daughter, who had followed me in her own car and now stood beside the fence with her hat in her hand. “Whatever is sweetest,” I said. “And a basket for my girl.”
