“Because they bought my nativity figures, baby,” I said, and I set the little cypress lamb down beside the envelope. “Nine weeks ago, they paid me three million, six hundred thousand dollars for the designs that I have carved every Christmas since 1970.” Outside, the bells of St. Paul rang the noon Angelus, one slow note after another. Danielle looked at the lamb, and then at the white envelope, and then at the ornaments on the little tree in the corner of her kitchen. “Josephine Bayou Nativity,” she said slowly, in a voice that cracked at the last word.
Marcel stood so fast that the coffee jumped in the cups. “Mama, that is wonderful,” he said, in the loud way of a man who wants to be on the winning side of a conversation. “But you must let me handle the contract. You are seventy six years old.” “I have signed it, son,” I said. “I read all forty pages with my glasses and a dictionary. I also read the royalty statements from Nashville, every line of them, thirty one thousand dollars last year. Brother Thibodeaux was kind enough to tell me about the licensing fee, though you had not.” Marcel sat down again, as if his legs had been taken from under him.
Danielle took the white envelope in both hands. She is a hospital administrator, a precise, graceful woman who keeps her kitchen like a laboratory. She read the first page of the contract, and then the second. “Marcel,” she said quietly, “the cruise. The kitchen remodel. The deposit on the lake house. You told me it was a bonus from work.” Marcel did not look at her. “Forty nine thousand dollars,” she said. “From the song of your father.” She looked at me with enormous, wet eyes. “Josephine, I did not know. I would never have handed you a brochure. I swear it on the Mass.” I believed her. I patted her hand.
A cypress lamb set beside an envelope gave one son the weekend to bring his mother back to the choir loft in Baton Rouge.
I told them my terms in the voice I use with the children at Sunday school. The royalties would be paid to me, directly, beginning with the next quarter, and the licensing company in Nashville would receive a letter from my lawyer by Friday. Marcel would repay the forty nine thousand dollars, in monthly payments over four years, starting with the sale of the cruise tickets he had not yet used. I would move out of the attic that very week, to a sunny cottage on Government Street that I had already rented, and I would carve in the sunroom with the windows open.
On the Tuesday before Christmas, Brother Thibodeaux came to my cottage with a poinsettia and his hat in his hand. He is a thin, silver haired man who has directed the choir for twenty years, and he sat on my little sofa as if it were a pew. “Mrs. Delacroix, I carry a terrible guilt,” he said. “I should have told you in 2023. I saw the name on the account and I thought, it is not my place.” I took his hand. “Brother Thibodeaux, you told me on Christmas Eve,” I said. “That is when I needed to know.” He wept into his handkerchief, and we sang the first verse together.
Marcel climbed the steps of my cottage the following Sunday with a bag of oranges and an old photograph. It showed his father at the piano, in a white shirt with rolled sleeves, with a small boy on the bench beside him. “I was six,” Marcel said. “He taught me the first line of Bright Star. I forgot how it felt.” He was crying openly. “I started small, Mama. I told myself I was only holding it for you.” I studied the photograph. “Your father would not have raised his voice,” I said. “He would have asked you to play it again. So play it.” I pointed at the little upright piano in the corner. He played.
On Christmas Eve, the church was full. The candlelight service had been moved to the larger sanctuary, because word had spread. When the choir stood to sing “Bright Star Over Bethlehem,” Brother Thibodeaux turned to the congregation, lifted his baton and said, “This year, we are going to sing it for the woman who is sitting in the second pew, in the red dress.” Two hundred heads turned. I held my candle in both hands. The first verse began, soft and pure, and by the third, the whole church was singing, and Marcel, in the pew behind me, laid his hand on my shoulder, and did not take it away.
The money consequences were fair. Marcel sold the cruise, the jet skis and the second car, and he took on weekend work at a music store on Perkins Road. Danielle, who held the household budget in her hand like a surgeon, cut every extra. The first payment arrived in a plain envelope in January, with a card that said only, I am trying. In April, Marcel brought me the royalty statement for the first quarter and read it aloud like a man reading scripture. Then he laid it in my lap, signed it over, and went to wash my car.
In the name of Ambrose, who passed eight years ago and who taught a thousand children to sing in four parts, I started the Bright Star Fund. It buys instruments, choir robes and music lessons for children in East Baton Rouge Parish whose schools have cut their music programs. In the first season, we outfitted eleven choirs. At St. Paul, a little girl of nine, in a robe too long for her, stepped to the front and sang the first line of the song in a clear, wavering voice, and I felt Ambrose beside me in the pew, listening with his eyes closed.
The next Christmas, in the center of the sanctuary, on a table with a white cloth, stood the nativity set I had carved that autumn. Cypress wood, hand painted, with a little donkey and a lamb. Beside it, a card read, A gift of Mrs. Josephine Delacroix. Marcel stood next to me in the aisle, holding his candle. When the choir reached the last verse, he sang along in a deep, steady baritone I had not heard since he was a boy, and Danielle reached for his hand. I closed my eyes, and for the first time in three years, the star above Bethlehem seemed to shine on all of us.
