I set the last page in the middle of the table, right beside the banana pudding, and every head in the room leaned toward it. It was a stack of printed messages with a yellow note on top in the careful handwriting of Marcus Reed. Odell, my neighbor of forty years, read over my shoulder and let out a low whistle through his teeth. The top message came from Crystal, and it was dated three weeks before the court date. “Dale will be in jail by Friday,” it read, “and I will be in Monterrey by Saturday. The bond will be his problem, not mine.”
Marcus laid his palms flat on the table, a big, tired man in a tan sport coat who had been in the bail business for twenty six years. “Mrs. Broussard, I did not come for your son,” he said. “I came because the paperwork did not add up. Someone forged his signature on the travel release, and someone bought a one way bus ticket under the name of Dale Broussard, and the same someone wired the first payment on a rental in Mexico.” He tapped the page. “All of it traces to one telephone. I would like to hear the name from you.”
Dale stood in the kitchen doorway with his cap in his hands. He was thirty nine years old, as thin as a fence rail, and he could not lift his eyes from the floor. “Mama, she told me the bond was paid,” he said. “She told me the court date had moved. I believed her, because I wanted to.” Crystal, at the end of the table, had gone the color of the cream in the pudding. “Lucille, those messages are fake,” she said. Odell tapped the page with one knotted finger. “Young lady, the phone company does not make mistakes about whose phone it is,” he said.
A bowl of banana pudding left beside a pile of messages gave one mother the weekend to bring her son back to the table in Stuttgart.
I gave my terms in my own kitchen, with the pudding sweating in its dish. The farm had sold for twelve point nine million, and that money was in a trust that no bondsman and no girlfriend could reach. I would pay the seventy five thousand dollars at the courthouse in Stuttgart myself, that morning. Dale would surrender to the sheriff by noon and enter a treatment program, with a lawyer I would choose. Crystal would give a statement to Marcus and to the deputies. And not a dollar of mine would ever again travel with anyone to Mexico.
Dale slid down the doorframe until he was sitting on the linoleum. “Mama, I am so tired,” he said. “I have been running since March. I slept in the truck behind the cotton gin. I ate crackers out of a sack.” He covered his face with his cap. I knelt beside my son, at seventy four years old, and I pulled his hands down. “Dale Wayne, I fed you at this table for thirty nine years,” I said. “I can feed you through this too. But you are going to walk into that courthouse on your own two feet, and I am going to walk with you.”
Crystal ran. She grabbed her purse and shot toward the front door with her heels clicking on the boards, but Odell, who is eighty one years old and moves like a cat when he has to, got to the hallway first. He stood in the doorway with both arms spread and his cane planted like a fence post. “Young lady, you are not going to Monterrey from the house of my neighbor,” he said. Behind him, two deputies of the Arkansas County sheriff came up the porch steps, as polite as church ushers, and one of them held out a pair of handcuffs.
Marcus stayed at the table until the deputies were gone. He did not eat the pudding. He sat with his hat on his knee, looking at the yellow note. “Mrs. Broussard, in twenty six years, I have never had a family pay me before the court date,” he said. “Most of them hide.” I put a bowl in front of him anyway and slid a spoon across the cloth. “Mr. Reed, you came to my door instead of kicking it in,” I said. “That is worth a bowl of pudding.” He ate it slowly, and when he finished, he asked for the recipe.
The money consequences were plain and fair. I paid the full bond at the courthouse, and Marcus tore up the paperwork with his own hands. Dale pleaded to the failure to appear and received eighteen months of probation, with a year in a treatment program outside Little Rock. Crystal was charged with forgery and with fraud, and the lease in Mexico was cancelled. The pawn shop in Pine Bluff returned the tractor titles she had tried to sell, and the bank froze the two accounts she had opened in my name. Not one dollar of the trust was touched.
In the name of my husband, Wendell, who passed in 2020 and who drove a combine through fifty harvests, I started the Wendell Rice Sack Fund. It pays for bail help, treatment and legal counsel for farm families in Arkansas and Prairie counties whose grown children are caught in trouble they cannot get out of. In the first year, we helped twenty one families. A woman of seventy nine, in a feed store apron, sat in the office with a rosary wound around her fingers and said, “My boy has been missing since June. I did not know anyone would help.”
On a Sunday in October, I carried a bowl of banana pudding through the doors of the Stuttgart Baptist fellowship hall, where Dale had asked to be baptized. He stood at the front in a white shirt that was too big for him, thin, but clear eyed and steady. When the pastor lifted him out of the water, my whole row of church ladies cheered. Afterward, he found me by the dessert table and took the bowl from my hands. “Mama, I made a new batch,” he said. “It is not as good as yours.” He had put in the wrong cookies. I ate two helpings.
