Beau Fontaine set down his carving knife and picked up the paper, and the entire dining room, twenty two people in good wool and good pearls, watched his glass of wine tilt, a small red wave against the crystal, and settle. He is sixty eight, a large, silver, handsome man with a Southern drawl and a law degree and a way of laughing before the joke is finished. “Clayton,” he said slowly, “how much did these people pay you?” I told him. Eleven million, two hundred thousand dollars. A woman at the end of the table dropped her fork on her plate with a clatter that rang like a bell.
Lorraine rose from her chair. My wife is sixty four, a slender woman with the straight back of the daughter of a judge, and she walked the length of the table past the oyster dressing and the three kinds of gravy and stopped behind me, with one hand on my shoulder. “Beau, I knew,” she said. “I have known since September. Clayton wanted to see what this family would do with a man in coveralls.” The room was so quiet I could hear the football game in the next room. “I asked him to wait. I thought you would surprise me. You have, but not the way I hoped.”
Tanner stood at his place with his napkin crushed in his hand. My nephew is thirty, a tall, careful, polite man with the dark eyes of his mother and the build of a swimmer, and he looked at his father, at me, at the toast glass he was still holding. “Uncle Clay, it was just supposed to be a loan,” he said. “Dad said the company was going under. He said you would be glad if somebody got use of the truck before the insurance people took it.” He swallowed. “I did not want to steal. I wanted to be a man with a business.”
A string of Christmas lights hung from a ladder on a rooftop and gave one crane owner the afternoon of Thanksgiving to bring his brother in law back to the table.
The face of Beau changed. I will not say it turned to stone. It turned to something more like wet clay, sagging, losing its form. “Tanner,” he said. “I did not tell you to take the truck.” “Dad.” The voice of his son cracked. “You said I could start Fontaine Lift Services by Christmas. You said Uncle Clay was finished. You said, take the truck before the sharks do.” Beau closed his eyes. He had said it. We all knew he had. He gripped the back of his chair, and for the first time in thirty six years I saw him look his age.
“Clayton,” Beau said, “I called you the hook man.” “You did.” “I thought it was a joke, a nickname. It was a leash. I wanted you to know where you stood in this family. Under the roof, with the lights, never at the table.” He looked at the gravy boat, at the pie, at the long white cloth. “The father of your wife was a judge. My father was a judge. And you, who learned your trade on a shrimp boat, built a company that employed fifty eight people, and I could not forgive you for it.”
I said nothing for a time. I have learned in a hundred lifts that the load tells you when it is ready to move. Then I said, “Beau, I am not a man who needs to be above anybody. I only need to be at the table.” I pulled out the chair next to Lorraine and sat down in my work jacket, with a smear of roof grit on one sleeve and a tangle of Christmas lights wrapped around my wrist. “I would like to give the blessing,” I said. And I did, a short one, my own, with my head bowed.
When I raised my head, the cheeks of Beau were wet. The turkey went around. The sweet potato pie. For ten minutes nobody said anything, and then, at the end of the table, a very old aunt in a lavender dress lifted her fork and said in a trembling voice, “Clayton, dear, will you pass the dressing? It is the oysters I like.” And that broke it. The table began to laugh, and then to talk, and then to pass things, and the long Thanksgiving carried on, a little unsteady, like a boat in a swell.
After dinner, on the porch, under the live oaks, Beau handed me the extension ladder I had left on the lawn. “For the lights,” he said. “It is a big roof, and I never paid you properly.” He pressed a thick envelope into my hand. I looked inside. Four hundred dollars. “Forty times ten, Clayton. For every year I owed you.” “Beau,” I said, “I do not want your money.” “I know,” he said. “That is why I am handing it to you.” I held the envelope a long time, and then I tucked it into my jacket.
The truck went back to the yard that night, with LeRoy driving and Tanner riding along to apologize in person to the buyer. They had a long talk in a trailer, over coffee. The buyer, a pleasant, firm woman from Houston, did not press charges. She offered Tanner a place as a rigger, on the ground, learning the straps and the shackles, and in two years she would put him in a cab. “You have to learn what the load weighs,” I said to him. “Before you learn what it is worth.” He started on Monday.
Every year, on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, I hang the lights on the Fontaine house, and this year Beau held the ladder. He held it with both hands and did not once look at his phone. When I reached the ridge, I looked down. He was gazing up at me, squinting, and his lips were moving. I called down to ask what he was saying. “Counting,” he said. “Two stories. I never understood how high it was.” “Now you do,” I said. And I hung the last string of lights over the edge, and the whole roofline came on in white.
