The padlock on the basement door of my house in Fort Smith opened at three in the morning, and the sound of the key in it was a sound I had known for fifty one years. I am Norma Jean Biggs, seventy nine years old, and I stood at the top of the cellar steps in my yellow bathrobe, with the old flashlight of my husband in one hand and a cast iron skillet in the other, looking down into a yellow glow I had not seen since Harold built the room. The air that rose up smelled sharp, like a hardware store on fire.
I went down one step at a time. There were four long tables under the beams where Harold had kept his tools, and on them stood printers, laminating machines, and trays of blank plastic cards. Boxes of paper lay stacked along the wall. Three young people in dark hoodies were bent over a machine, and they froze when they saw me. They were making false driver licenses and checks, I would learn, and the bill of three hundred and forty dollars that had arrived in my mailbox that week was the cost of keeping them running.
In the shadows by the furnace stood a tall figure with his back to me, and when he turned, I let the skillet sag in my hand. It was my grandson Tyler, twenty seven years old, a sweet, soft boy who had lived in my back bedroom since the spring, whom I had fed and mended and loved. He wiped his hands on his jeans and tried to smile. “Grandma,” he said, “go back upstairs. It is not what it looks like.” And behind him, a man I did not know said very quietly, “Grandma is deaf, and once she signs the house over on Friday, none of this matters.”
An electric bill of three hundred forty dollars gave one widow the length of a week to bring her grandson back to the truth in Fort Smith.
I gave my terms from the third step, in my loudest schoolroom voice, which I had not used since I retired from the cafeteria of Southside Elementary. “Tyler, I am deaf in one ear, and not the other. You will send those people up the steps and out of my house tonight, with their machines. Then you will sit with me at the kitchen table and tell me what Friday means, because I do not recall inviting anyone to my house to sign a paper.” The young people looked at one another and began to unplug the cords.
Tyler sat at my kitchen table at dawn with his hands wrapped around a mug of coffee, and the sunshine crept across the floor. “Grandma, I owe the man who is the leader of the group sixty thousand dollars for a loan I took out for a food truck that failed,” he said, in a hoarse whisper. “He said if I gave him the basement for a few months, he would forgive it. Then he said I should get you to sign the house to a company he controls. I told myself I was only protecting you. I was not. I was selling you.” He wept openly.
But the man from the basement had not gone far. He had waited in the dark on the back porch, and at that moment he came through the kitchen door in a black leather jacket, snatched the folder of papers from the table, the deed transfer and the false notary stamp, and ran through the living room toward the front door, meaning to disappear into the morning traffic on Garrison Avenue. A chair fell. Tyler shouted. And on the front porch, with a garden rake in hand and her pink curlers still in her hair, stood my neighbor Opal.
The man stopped on the porch with the folder crushed in his hand, Opal planted on the welcome mat with the rake raised, two sheriff deputies coming up the walk behind her with their flashlights still on in the pale morning, and Tyler running out of the house behind him. Opal spoke in a voice that carried across the block. “I called them an hour ago, mister, when the lights went on in that cellar. Norma Jean has been my neighbor for forty years, and I do not hold with strangers.” The man looked at the rake. He put the folder on the porch rail and raised his hands.
The consequences were rough and fair. The man and his crew were arrested by federal agents for counterfeiting, and the machines in my basement were carried out by men in white gloves. Tyler turned himself in and testified, and because of his cooperation and his youth, he received probation and a requirement to repay his debt by working. I had the electric company check the wiring and had a new lock put on the cellar door. Tyler painted the basement walls himself, white, from floor to ceiling, and he refused to take a dime.
In the name of my husband Harold, who passed in 2017, I started the Harold Biggs Fund. It pays for electric bills and safety checks for widows and older people living alone and for legal help for those pressured to sign over their homes, in Sebastian, Crawford and Franklin counties. In the first year we paid utility bills for two hundred and six households and stopped eleven false transfers of deeds. One was an eighty four year old widow from Van Buren who held her cancelled shutoff notice up to the light and said she had thought she would be sitting in the dark.
On a golden Sunday in October, I stood at the stove in the kitchen of my house in Fort Smith, stirring a pot of chicken and dumplings, while Tyler set the table and Opal poured tea. The light from the window fell on the white walls of the basement stairs, and the cellar door stood open, and a smell of fresh paint rose gently up the steps. Tyler came over and kissed me on the cheek. “Grandma,” he said, “I will never let anyone in that cellar again.” I tapped the wooden spoon on his wrist, and I told him he could use it for a workshop.
