I took the paper from the hand of Colby on the wet dock and read it by the lamp of the charter boat, with my thumb over the corner so the wind would not take it. It was a business filing from the Georgia Secretary of State, dated 1981, for a retail concern called Pelletier and Company. There were three names beneath. Boone Pelletier. Cleotha Washington. And Reverend Elias Tate, of Little Zion Baptist, the man who had buried my mother and married both of my daughters.
“Granddaddy had partners,” Colby said hoarsely. “Grandma, did you know?” I told him I did not. In forty four years of marriage, Boone had told me about every bolt and every crab trap. Then I remembered the bank book in the bread bag. I opened it on my knee. The last balance was in the pencil of Boone, $64,300. Underneath it, in his block capitals, were five words. For Winnie, when I am gone. I read them again, and again, until the lines ran together.
Under the loose tray of the tackle box were two folded letters, soft as flannel. One was from Cleotha Washington, dated June of 1985. The other was from Reverend Tate, dated the same week. Each said the same thing in a different hand. Received in full, with interest, my share of the loan and the business. I release all claim. I read them aloud to Colby while the tide sucked at the pilings below us. By the end my voice had gone to a whisper.
The rest I pieced together that night at the kitchen table, with Colby across from me and a pot of coffee between us. In 1981 the bank would not lend to a shrimp hand with no collateral. Cleotha, whose husband had drowned off a trawler the year before, had insurance money and wanted something that would not die. The Reverend had put up his own truck as security. They had made Boone their partner, and he had paid back every dime by 1985. He had simply never filed the paper to close it. It cost forty dollars, and he was always busy.
A debt of the heart is paid in full only when the one who is owed says so, and the best men keep the receipts to prove it.
“That is why the sign people would not start,” Colby said. “Madison paid the deposit, and the lawyer ran the title, and the state still showed three owners. Nobody could sign. I thought it was a mistake in the system.” He looked at his hands. “I came to tell you the truth, because I could not stand it any longer. I wanted that shop because I was in over my head, Grandma. We bought a car we could not afford.” His shoulders began to shake. I moved over on the cooler and put my arm around him.
The next day we drove to Townsend to see Cleotha. She was ninety one, with a face like a walnut and an apron over her church dress, and she cried when she saw the bank book. “That man,” she said. “He was supposed to be my partner, and he spent forty years treating me like a saint.” She signed the dissolution in a firm, clear hand. All she asked, she said, was a pound of shrimp every Saturday morning, and the occasional cast net lesson for her great grandson. I told her she could have the whole tank.
Reverend Tate was waiting for us in his study at Little Zion, a very old man in a cardigan with a Bible open on his desk. He signed the paper without reading it. “Boone paid me back in 1985,” he said, “and then he came every Sunday for thirty years and put a twenty in the plate.” He patted my hand. “Forty dollars to file a paper. The man could have built a church with the time he spent not doing it.” By Friday the lawyer in Brunswick had filed everything with the state. The shop was mine, free and clear, for the first time on paper.
Madison came by the shop on Monday, alone, in sneakers, with no clipboard and no sunglasses. She stood in the door for a long while. Then she said she had grown up in Savannah, over the laundry of her grandmother, and that she had been ashamed of it her whole life, and that she had taken it out on the first old woman she met who reminded her. “I am so sorry, Mrs. Winnie,” she said. I looked at her for a time. Then I handed her a bucket and told her the minnow tank needed scrubbing.
She scrubbed it. Then she asked if she could take a picture of the sunrise from the dock, and posted it, and a hundred and forty people drove down from Savannah the next weekend to buy shrimp. She now runs the little page of the shop on the computer, and she is surprisingly good at it. Colby comes on Saturdays at five. He learned to throw the cast net in three weeks. His first throw landed in the river, with him attached, and the whole line of trucks cheered.
I spent a little of the money from the bank book on a new walk in cooler and a roof that does not leak, and I put the rest back in the account, untouched, with a note of my own. For Colby and Madison, for the day they need it. On Sunday, Reverend Tate came by with a hat full of tomatoes and sat in the lawn chair out front. Cleotha rode with her great grandson in a golf cart. The sign on the plywood is gone, replaced by one Colby painted himself. Pelletier and Washington and Tate, Est. 1981.
The old tide chart of Boone came down from the register. I could finally do it. I put it in a frame, July of last year, and hung it on the wall beside the door, where every man who comes in can read it. Then I taped up this week, in my own hand. High tide at six forty. I unlocked the shop, turned on the light, and the first truck was already waiting.
