“He said he had been waiting forty six years to tell me where the badge of my husband had gone,” said Odessa Malveaux, in the church hat and the pressed navy suit, standing before the memorial wall behind the front desk of the Beaumont police station. “He said he had carried it in his pocket from the shoulder of that highway the night Henry died, and that he had never found the courage to return it. He said, Mrs.
Malveaux, I am an old man now and a coward, and I would like you to have it.” She was crying quietly. Her cane trembled in her hand.
I stood behind the desk with my hand over my mouth. For thirty years I had known Lyle as the kindest man on the force, the gentle one who bought candy for the children of the South End. I had not known that he was twenty four years old on the night of June second, 1979, riding on his first month of patrol, when a veteran officer pulled over a car on Highway 69, and a man in the car pulled out a gun. He had been first to arrive. He had held a dying man in the dust.
Colby had come around the desk to stand beside me. He said nothing, and his hand found mine, which it had not done since he was nine. Mrs. Malveaux continued. Lyle had told her over the telephone that the night haunted him. He had seen the face of the shooter, he said, in the headlights. He had told his sergeant, who had told him the matter would be handled, and to keep quiet. Within a week, the sergeant had been promoted, and the case file had quietly gone missing.
The badge of a dead man can weigh more than any living man, and sometimes it takes a grandson with a dollar and a bad idea to bring it home.
Lyle had never forgiven himself. He had lived for forty six years with a badge in his pocket that was not his, and a name he could not say. He had finally called Odessa because he was dying, and he wanted her to know the whole of it. He told her that the shooter was a man named Delbert Crain, who had died in prison in Louisiana in 1988 on another charge. The sergeant had been the cousin of Crain. There was no one left alive to prosecute. But there was a truth that had waited long enough.
I took the old plaque of Lyle down from the shelf behind the desk, the one with his own badge mounted on it, and set it before Mrs. Malveaux. Then I opened the little plastic bag that Mr. Varga had brought and took out the badge stamped 214. I held it in both hands. It was cold and heavy and worn smooth at the edges. I put it in the palm of Odessa. She closed her fingers around it, and she pressed it to her heart, and her whole body shook. The young officers at the back of the room had taken off their hats.
The chief of police, who had heard the news from the lobby, came out of his office in his shirtsleeves. He listened to the story with his jaw set, and then he said, in a firm voice, that Officer Henry Malveaux would be honored as he should have been in 1979. Within the month, a ceremony was held in front of the station. The mayor spoke. The city council passed a resolution. A new plaque was added to the memorial wall, with the badge number 214 and a line that read, Served with honor. Never forgotten.
Colby stood in the front row at the ceremony in a clean white shirt, with his hair cut and his hands folded. When it ended, he walked up to Mrs. Malveaux and said that he was sorry. He said he had sold a thing he did not understand. She looked at him a long moment with her kind, tired eyes. Then she touched his cheek and said, “Young man, I believe the Lord used you. He often uses the ones who do not know what they are doing.”
He started at the police academy in the fall. I did not push him. He told me one evening over supper that he wanted to be the sort of officer his grandfather had been, and the sort Henry Malveaux would have been proud to stand beside. He wears the same badge number now, which the department retired and then, at the request of Odessa, assigned to him. She pinned it on his uniform herself, at his graduation, with her old steady hands.
On Sundays after church, the three of us have dinner at my house, Odessa and Colby and I, with fried chicken and greens and a pie from the Methodist ladies. She has taken to calling me Irma, and I call her Odessa, and we talk a great deal about our husbands. The badge of Lyle, number 386, now sits in the velvet tray in my jewelry box, beside my wedding ring, exactly where he wished it to be. And the other badge hangs in a frame in her front room.
