At six o clock on a Saturday morning, my daughter Vicky locked the door of my bedroom from the outside, and I heard the key turn and her footsteps retreat down the hall. I am Ida Belle Chambers, eighty six years old, and I sat up in my bed in Hattiesburg with my heart beating like a bird. The night before, she had brought me a cup of tea, and I had smelled something bitter in it, and I had poured it into the fern on the windowsill. Then I had lain still in the dark, pretending to sleep, and I had heard her telephone voice.
“Brother Dale is handling the other thing,” she had told someone, softly, in the hall. Dale Pickett, the pastor of our church for twenty years. I had known him since his first sermon. Now, in the gray light of the morning, I understood what the other thing was. The doctor who would arrive that afternoon to sign a paper saying I was unfit. The notary. The transfer of my two point one million dollar certificate of deposit, which my husband Clarence had left me, to an account in the name of my daughter and the pastor.
I got out of bed in my nightgown and went to the window. It was a first floor window, thank the Lord, and it opened onto the front porch, where the old rocking chairs stood in the dawn. I raised the sash, hands trembling, and climbed out onto the porch boards in my bare feet, a woman of eighty six, hanging on to the frame. Across the street, on his own porch, my neighbor Mr. Washington was watering his geraniums. He looked up and let the hose fall.
A locked bedroom door on a quiet Saturday gave one mother the morning to bring her daughter back to her in Hattiesburg.
I gave my terms to Mr. Washington across the street in a loud, clear whisper. “Booker, I need you to go fetch Sister Mattie and Sister Ruth, and the deacon board, and I need you to do it quickly and quietly. Then I need you to telephone the sheriff, but tell him to wait at the corner. I will not have a scene in the street. I want to see the face of my daughter and the face of that pastor. And Booker, bring me my slippers. I believe I am going to catch cold.”
Within twenty minutes, the porch was full. Mr. Washington brought Sister Mattie and Sister Ruth, in their housecoats, and four deacons in their Saturday work shirts, and the sheriff sat in his cruiser at the end of the block with the lights off. Vicky came down the stairs at half past eight to find her mother in a rocking chair on the front porch with a quilt over her knees and a cup of coffee in her hand. She stopped on the bottom step. Her face went the color of the porch rail.
“Mama,” she said, “how did you get out?” I told her about the window and the fern. I watched the truth reach her face. Then the pastor arrived, in his Sunday suit, carrying a leather folder, and stepped up on the porch with a practiced smile. “Sister Ida,” he began, “I am so glad you are up.” Then he saw the deacons, and Sister Mattie, and the cruiser at the corner. Vicky made her choice. She lunged for the leather folder in his arms, snatched the CD papers from it, and ran for the side gate. She did not know about Sister Mattie. At eighty nine years old, Mattie Bell was the oldest woman in the congregation, and she had been in the church parade for seventy years. She stood up from her rocking chair, planted herself in the open gate with her walking frame spread across it, and said, in a quiet voice, “Victoria Chambers, you will give those back to your mother.” Vicky stopped, with her chest heaving. The walking frame did not move. Neither did Sister Mattie. After a long moment, Vicky let the papers fall.
I rose slowly from my rocking chair, wrapped in the quilt, and crossed the porch to my daughter. She was fifty seven years old, thin as a rail, and she sagged against the gatepost with her hands over her face. “Mama,” she sobbed, “I am so sorry. I have been taking the pills for years. Dale said it would only be temporary. I only needed money for the treatment.” I put my arm around her and I held her, and the whole porch fell silent. The sheriff came up the walk, slowly, with his hat in his hand.
The money consequences were gentle. Dale Pickett was charged with conspiracy and exploitation, and removed from the pulpit by the denomination. Vicky, offered a choice by the judge, entered a treatment program in Jackson, and I paid. The two point one million dollar certificate stayed in my name, in a trust, with the church deacon board and my granddaughter as trustees. A new pastor arrived, a young woman, who preached her first sermon on the text of the locked door, and who has kept the windows open ever since.
In the name of Clarence, who passed in 2013, I started the Clarence Chambers Fund. It pays for treatment beds, elder safety checks and legal help against guardianship scams, in Forrest, Lamar and Perry counties. In the first year we placed thirty one people in treatment and made four hundred visits to seniors living alone. One was a widow in Petal who had been locked in her own room by a nephew. A deacon saw her wave from the window, and he was at the door in three minutes.
On a Sunday afternoon in the spring, Vicky sat beside me on the front porch in one of the old rocking chairs, a year clean, in a blue dress. The mockingbirds were singing. She had made the tea herself, a plain pot of Lipton with lemon and sugar, and she poured me a cup with a steady hand. I looked at it for a moment. Then I smiled at her and drank it all, down to the last drop, and she laughed until she had to wipe her eyes.
