The name on the document recorded at the Jones County courthouse the Friday before that Sunday service, the name of the notary who had witnessed the deed on my sixty acres, was Deacon Harold Wilkins. Tamika read it to me over the telephone in her careful office voice, and I sat in the chair of Roosevelt with my hand pressed flat against my chest. I had known Harold Wilkins since we were children at Vacation Bible School.
He had carried my husband casket. And on the Friday before he signed his name, he had come to my house and eaten my sweet potato pie.
“Aunt Willa,” Tamika said, “the signature on this deed is not yours. It is signed by Alvin, as your agent under a power of attorney, and the power of attorney is dated in March. Did you sign a power of attorney in March?” I told her I had signed nothing. I had been in the hospital for two days in March with my blood pressure, and Alvin had come to visit with a folder of papers for the insurance. I had signed on a line where he pointed, half asleep. I closed my eyes and felt the whole room tilt.
Tamika did not waste a minute. By noon, she had spoken to the chancery clerk, who was her supervisor, and to a lawyer from Jackson who handled elder cases for free through the legal aid society. His name was Mr. Boykin, a large, deliberate man in suspenders, and he drove down to Laurel the same afternoon. He sat at my kitchen table with the deed and the power of attorney and read both through twice, saying nothing. Then he took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Sister Pugh,” he said, “this paper is no good.”
The land of a family is not only soil and timber, it is the unspoken promise that the people who worked it will not be driven off by those who sit in the pews.
He explained it patiently. A notary may not witness a transaction in which he has a financial interest, and Deacon Wilkins stood to benefit as a member of the building committee. The power of attorney had been obtained when I was under medication, which made it voidable. And the deed itself, signed and recorded before the church had received any authority from me, was a clear case of fraud. He said he would file a petition in chancery court on Monday, and that in the meantime, no one could sell or borrow against my land.
On Tuesday morning at ten, as the pastor had planned, my son Alvin drove up to my house in his new truck. He was carrying a folder. He found Mr. Boykin on my porch, and Tamika, and a deputy sheriff from the county, standing in a row with their arms folded like the elders of a church. Alvin stopped halfway up the walk. I stood in the doorway in my Sunday dress, and I looked at him for a long moment, and he looked at me, and I saw my little boy with a skinned knee.
“Mama,” he said, and his face crumpled. “Mama, I did not mean it. Brother Pace told me it was for the church. He said the Lord wanted it. He said you would be well cared for.” I came down the steps slowly. I took the folder out of his hand and set it on the porch rail. Then I put my arms around him, as I would have if he had fallen from a tree, and he wept on my shoulder, a grown man of fifty with a gray beard. I said, “Alvin, you have a great deal to answer for.”
The Attorney General of Mississippi opened an investigation the next month. Brother Pace was found to have done the same to two other elderly members of the congregation in towns across the county. He resigned his pulpit in November and left the state before the grand jury could meet. Brother Wilkins lost his notary license and made a public apology, on his knees, in front of the entire congregation. The church council voted to return every cent that had been pledged on false pretenses.
Alvin pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and received probation, with a requirement to repay what he had taken from my account and to work on the church grounds every Saturday for two years. I did not ask for more. On the first Saturday, I watched him from the porch, raking leaves behind the sanctuary, a stooped figure in an old coat. When he finished, I walked over with a glass of iced tea. He drank it without speaking. Then he said, “Mama, thank you for not giving up on me.”
I did give something to the church in the end. It was not a million and a half dollars, but one acre by the road, deeded in my own name, with my own signature, witnessed by my grandniece. A small brick fellowship hall now stands on it, where the elders meet on Wednesday nights. Over the door there is a plaque. It reads, Roosevelt and Willa Mae Pugh, Faithful Stewards. Every Sunday after service I stay behind to straighten the hymnals, and nobody has ever turned the microphone on again.
