Celeste walked slowly across the boatyard in her church shoes, her eyes on the envelope in her hand as if it might spill. She held it out to me. The paper was cream colored and soft with age, and on the front, in my husband square printing, were three words. For Louise and Celeste. I knew that printing. He used it on every dock ticket for forty years. I opened it with my thumbnail while Wade sat on his bucket and Hector stood very still beside the table. Inside were two sheets of paper and a smaller envelope. I put on my reading glasses and began to read out loud.
“Louise, if you are reading this, then the Miss Louise has come out of the water, and I am sorry I kept this from you. In June of 2008, I found Wade on my boat with three bags of coins that did not belong to him. He had been hired to help clear out the Broussard house in Pascagoula after old Mr. Leonard passed. The family was spread across three states and nobody was watching. Wade took the coins from a desk drawer. He swore he was only borrowing them. He had a loan from a man in Mobile that was coming due.”
“I made him tell me everything. Then I took the coins away from him, because a boy who needs money that badly cannot be trusted to hold it. I meant to return them to the Broussard family. But the sheriff in Pascagoula had put out a notice, and I was afraid that if I walked in with the bags, Wade would go to prison and Celeste would lose her husband and our grandbabies would grow up without a father. So I did a foolish, loving thing. I welded the coins into the boat to give myself time to think. Then I never found the courage. Louise, forgive me.”
Three bags of silver, a welded compartment, and a letter that asked a widow to forgive the husband who hid it.
I stopped reading. The yard was quiet except for the gulls over the pilings. Celeste had both hands pressed to her chest. “Mama, there is another page,” she said. I looked down. The second sheet was in my husband hand too, but written more carefully, as if he had practiced the words. “Here is what I want done. Take the coins to Father Nguyen at Saint Margaret. He knows the Broussard granddaughter, a nurse in Biloxi named Denise. Give them to her. Tell her an old fisherman is sorry for the delay. If Wade will go with you, and tell her himself, he is a better man than I believed.”
Wade had not looked up. His hands hung between his knees, and I could see them trembling. “Mama Lou,” he said. “Twenty years I have woken up every morning waiting for somebody to knock on my door. I paid off my truck with the money from the first coin I sold. I have wanted to tell you since the day Claude passed. I did not know how.” “You could have started by not asking me to sign over my dock,” I said. “I wanted to get the coins back before the company found them,” he said. “I thought if the dock was mine, they would be mine, and I could give them back quietly.”
That explained everything and it did not excuse anything. I sat on a toolbox across from him and looked at a man I had known since he was twenty five years old. Claude had been right. Wade was not a bad man. He was a frightened one, and he had spent two decades building an ugly little house on a lie. “Wade Pellerin,” I said, “you will put on a clean shirt tomorrow morning. You will drive Father Nguyen and me to Biloxi. And you will stand in front of Denise Broussard and say it yourself, every word, with your hat in your hand.”
Hector cleared his throat. “Mrs. Boudreaux, the company lawyer is on his way. He is going to say the coins belong to the company, because they were found on the boat after the sale.” “Then the company lawyer can read my husband letter,” I said, “and the report the sheriff in Pascagoula filed in 2008, which says the coins are the property of the Broussard family. Any court in Alabama will tell him found property goes home to the people it was taken from.” Hector smiled for the first time that morning. “Yes, Mrs. Boudreaux. I believe it will.”
The lawyer came, a pink faced man in a navy suit. He read Claude letter standing at the folding table. He read it again. Then he took off his glasses and said, in a different voice from the one he walked in with, that the company had no claim to any property taken from a private estate, and that he personally would see the coins delivered to Father Nguyen by Friday. I thanked him. Wade did not move from his bucket. Celeste came and sat down beside him, put her arm through his and stared straight ahead at the bayou like a woman holding on for a very long ride.
We went to Biloxi on a Thursday. Denise Broussard was a tall tired nurse in blue scrubs who came out of the hospital on her lunch hour and stood in the parking lot while Father Nguyen opened the canvas bags. Silver dollars, tarnished black, hundreds of them, glinting dully in the sun. She put a hand over her mouth. Then Wade stepped forward with his hat in both hands and said what he had to say. It took six minutes. He did not leave out a word. When he finished, Denise looked at him for a long time and said, “My grandfather would have liked that you came.”
I still go down to the dock every morning at five. The company kept the name Miss Louise on the stern, and Hector has promised me they always will. This morning Celeste stood beside me. Wade was out on the water, the first time he had gone out in the pilot house in years, learning the boats under Hector patient eye. A shrimp boat slid out of the harbor with its lights burning low. I put my hand on the dock rail, cool with the dew. “You rest, Claude,” I whispered. “He told her. He finally told her.”
