The old deputy straightened up from the windshield of the white F 250 and walked back across the patio, and nobody at the table said a word. He set the equipment list down beside the crawfish and tapped Line 22 with a thick finger. “Remy,” he said, “whose truck am I looking at?” I am Delphine Arceneaux, seventy five years old, and I sat at the head of the picnic table in my birthday dress with a purple sheet cake in front of me and a mosquito walking across the icing. Remy looked at his father in law, and then at me. “Tante,” he whispered, “please.”
I opened my purse and laid the white envelope beside the list. Inside was a letter from the lawyer of the buyer in Florida and a spreadsheet of the vehicles of the farm, forty two of them, and one that was missing. The truck had been bought in March with the money of the farm, titled in April to Remy at the parish tax office with a signature that looked like mine written by a nervous schoolboy. Beneath the letter was a second page, a ledger of the cash I had given him over six years, a hundred and ten thousand dollars.
Brandi had put down her beer. Her father, Deputy Landry, retired from the sheriff office of St. Martin Parish, read the ledger slowly with his glasses on the tip of his nose. “Remy,” he said, “these amounts match what Brandi told me you won at the poker machines.” The mouth of Remy worked. “Tante, I never won a dime,” he said, and the words came out in a gasp. “I lied to her too. I lost it. I lost all of it. The truck was the last thing I could sell, and I was going to sell it on Monday.”
A line on an equipment list gave one old cane farmer the evening of her birthday to bring her nephew back to his wife in Plaquemine.
I gave my terms from the head of the table with the mosquito still on the cake. “Remy, the truck goes back to the buyer tomorrow with the keys in the ignition. The one hundred and ten thousand dollars you owe me, you will repay me in labor and in cash, at my own pace, which is slow. You will go with me on Thursday to the meeting at Our Lady of Prompt Succor in Plaquemine. Brandi will hold the money of the house. And you will say sorry to every person who heard you read that bill, because they laughed, and they should not have.”
Brandi stood up, trembling. “Remy, I am so tired,” she said. “I have kept the books of this house for ten years, and every month there was a hole I could not explain. I told my father you were just unlucky.” The big laugh of Remy faded. He covered his face. “Brandi, I wanted you to think I was a man,” he cried, in the voice of a boy. Her father laid the equipment list on the table and put a rough hand on the neck of his son in law. “Son,” he said, “a man is the one who says it out loud.”
But the panic returned. Remy snatched the equipment list and the ledger off the table, vaulted the bench, and ran for the driveway and the white truck, with the keys in his fist. He had gone ten steps when two of the cousins from Pierre Part, big men in Saints jerseys, who had come for the free food, stepped up from the crawfish tub with the dripping basket between them. One of them tipped it. Forty pounds of boiled crawfish, red and steaming, slid across the concrete in front of Remy, and he went down in them like a man falling into a pot of chili.
The cousins lifted him up with enormous gentleness, pulled a crawfish out of his collar, and took the papers from his hand. The younger one wiped them on his shirt and gave them to the deputy. For a moment the whole patio held still. Then Remy, sitting in the red shells with an Old Bay mustache, began to laugh, and then to sob, and then both together, and Brandi knelt on the wet concrete and held his head against her shoulder while the guests, at last, looked away.
The consequences were as I had asked. The truck went back to the lawyer of the buyer the next morning, and the lawyer asked no questions. Remy has repaid twenty six thousand dollars in eight months, much of it in work, mending fences and driving a grain truck for a neighbor. The eight million, one hundred thousand dollars from the six thousand acres I placed in a trust for the grandchildren and the church, with a bank in Baton Rouge as trustee. I kept the old farmhouse, which Remy has painted white.
In the name of my husband Lucien, who passed in 2019, I started the Lucien Arceneaux Fund. It pays for treatment for people addicted to video poker and for scholarships for the children of sugar cane workers, in Iberville, West Baton Rouge and Pointe Coupee parishes. In the first year we placed forty one people in counseling and sent seventeen students to LSU. One was a cane hauler from Maringouin who had lost three paychecks to a machine at a truck stop and now keeps the books of a church.
On the last Sunday of October, I sat on the porch of the farmhouse with a pot of coffee, and Remy came up the steps with a cake from Rouses. It was small, white, with no writing. He set it on the rail and cut me a slice. “Tante,” he said, “the bill for keeping you alive this year.” He handed me an envelope. Inside was a single page, in his own neat hand, that said, priceless, and under it, paid in full, with all my love. I ate the cake slowly, and the sun went down.
