Mr. Batiste arrived at my door at seven the next morning, and he was not alone. Behind him on the porch stood a thin woman of about sixty seven with a silver bob, a canvas bag, and eyes red from crying. She held out a faded blue hair ribbon. “Mrs. Pritchett, my name is Loretta Gaines. In July of 1971, I was nine years old, and your husband pulled me out of the Gulf at Dauphin Island after a riptide took me. You wrapped me in a towel in the back of his truck and sang Amazing Grace until I stopped shaking. You gave me this ribbon.” I looked at it, and I remembered all of it.
I sat her down in the kitchen and poured coffee because I did not know what else to do. “Wilbur never told me your name,” I said. “He only told me about a little girl and a fast tide.” Loretta wrapped both hands around the cup. “My daddy worked the docks with him. Daddy lost his job that fall, and Wilbur paid our rent for four months and never said a word to anyone. I have been a thief for thirty years, Mrs. Pritchett. But I never forgot the one man who was good to us for nothing.” Mr. Batiste stood by the sink, quiet.
“Then why did you bring my son into it?” I asked. She did not look away, which I respected. “I did not choose Darnell. A man named Ray Dupree did. Ray runs card games in the back of a seafood warehouse in Bayou La Batre. He holds my own debts, and he holds the debts of a lot of men like your son. Ray finds gamblers whose mothers own houses. I play the fiancée, the bond gets written, I disappear, and Ray takes the house through a crooked notary named Clyde Tolliver. Ray keeps ninety percent. I get a bus ticket.”
A widow in Mobile learned that the woman her son bailed out was a girl her late husband once saved, and together they stopped a crooked bond ring and kept her home.
“When I saw your name on the paperwork, I could not breathe,” Loretta said. “I called Mr. Batiste from a pay phone because I wanted somebody to stop it, and I was too afraid to say so plainly. Darnell is not safe either. Ray told him on Monday night that if the deed does not clear by Friday, he owes ninety thousand dollars on top of the fifty.” Mr. Batiste cleared his throat. “Mrs. Pritchett, Sheriff Maurice Landry is a friend of mine. He has wanted Dupree for six years and never had a single witness.”
Loretta stayed in my house Thursday night, and she slept in the room of Darnell because I would not hear of a motel. Before bed she asked to see the rocking chairs, and she ran her hand along the arm of the one Wilbur always used. “He fixed the squeak in my daddy screen door the same week he paid our rent,” she said, “and he would not take a nickel.” I made her a plate of cornbread and butter beans at midnight. She ate every bite and said no one had cooked for her since 1988. I told her that was about to change, wire or no wire.
I called Sheriff Landry myself. By noon he sat at my kitchen table with a deputy named Tasha Bell, and Loretta told them all of it again, dates, names, license plates, and the amounts from thirty years of folded cash. Deputy Bell wrote for two hours. Then the sheriff said, “Miss Gaines, if you wear a wire Friday night, I can put Dupree, Tolliver, and every man at that table in front of a federal judge.” Loretta looked at the ribbon in her fingers. “Wilbur gave me my life once,” she said. “I will spend it on this.”
Friday night I sat in my kitchen with the Bible of Wilbur open to Psalm 91, while twelve deputies waited in vans behind the warehouse in Bayou La Batre. Loretta walked in. Darnell stood by the card table, gray and shaking, and he saw her and did not give her away. At 9:40 Dupree counted out the cash he believed was his and said the whole scheme out loud, the seal of Tolliver, the widows in Pensacola and Gulfport, every bit of it. The voice of the sheriff came over the radio. “Now.” Eleven men were in handcuffs in four minutes.
Darnell came home Saturday morning with two deputies and a long silence. He stood in my kitchen door like the twelve year old he used to be. “Mama, I forged your name. I owed Ray everything, and I thought the house would buy me one more week.” I wanted to be angry, and I was, but I also held out my arms. “You are fifty years old, Darnell Pritchett,” I said. “Your daddy built that porch so you would always have a place to come home to. He did not build it so you could sell it.” He cried like he did at nine.
Judge Rosalind Whitfield of the Mobile County drug court gave Darnell a choice the sheriff had quietly arranged. He could spend eighteen months in a treatment program at Mercy House in Daphne and testify against Dupree, or he could go to prison. He chose Mercy House. Tolliver lost his notary commission and got seven years. Dupree got twenty. Mr. Batiste filed the papers voiding my deed himself. The court sold the assets of Dupree, and the two widows in Pensacola and Gulfport each received a check, one for sixty one thousand dollars and one for fifty four thousand.
Loretta testified for two days. Because she cooperated, the judge gave her probation and three hundred hours of service, and Mr. Batiste, who started out with nothing but suspicion, offered her a desk in his office answering phones. Last Sunday she sat on my porch in the second rocking chair, the one nobody had used since Wilbur, and we ate fig preserves off a saucer. “In eighteen months,” I told her, “Darnell is coming home to a room that is still his. I would like you at the table that day.” She tied the blue ribbon around the arm of the rocker.
