Nobody in that sanctuary breathed. The young woman in the back, whose name was Nora Whitfield, came down the center aisle with the toddler on her hip and a gray accordion file under her arm. She did not look at the pastor. She looked at me, and she said, “Miss Edna, I am sorry I did not come to you sooner. I wanted to be sure.” Then she handed the file to Mr. Hargrove, who opened it on the pulpit with hands that were not quite steady, in front of four hundred of his friends and neighbors.
Inside were copies of five deeds, and mine was the fifth. The other four belonged to Mr. Alvin Mercer, Mrs. Louise Pratt, a widow named Ruth Ann Cobb, and Reverend Doyle Haskins, who had been our pastor before Tanner. Every one of them had passed away within the last two years. Every deed had been signed in a shaky hand, leaving the house to the Building the Kingdom campaign, and three of them carried the stamp of a notary who had been buried before the ink was dry.
“I went to the sheriff in July,” Nora said, and her voice was stronger now. “He told me it was a church matter and to pray about it. So I went to the district attorney in Florence, and she told me to bring her proof.” She looked at the toddler, then back at the room. “My aunt Delores would never have stamped a paper for a person who could not read it. She was too honest. That is why he had to steal her stamp.”
Trust is a gift to be given with open eyes, and the best protection for the old is a community that refuses to look away.
Pastor Tanner tried to speak. He said that this was a misunderstanding, that the church had followed every legal procedure, and that Satan sometimes used grieving relatives to divide a congregation. Mr. Hargrove, who had known me for fifty two years, took off his reading glasses and said, “Son, I have buried half the people in this book. Do not tell me about grief.” Then he asked the ushers to lock the front doors, and the head usher, a retired highway patrolman, stood in front of them with his arms folded.
Two deputies arrived within ten minutes. I had asked Nora to call them from the lobby, and I will say that she did it with great dignity. The district attorney herself came in behind them, still in her church hat, with a warrant for the folder and everything in the office of the pastor. They found the missing stamp in the bottom drawer of his desk, wrapped in a handkerchief with the initials of Delores. In the same drawer lay a list of the older members of the church, with their addresses, ages, and the value of every house.
There was a column on that list headed “Prospects.” My name was at the top, with a star beside it. I read it later at the courthouse and I thought of the fried chicken in the paper bag, and the way he had tilted his head when he asked about my legacy. It was the cleverest thing I ever saw a man do with kindness. He had used the sound of it like a key, and he had turned it in the door of every lonely old person in the county.
The judge in Lauderdale County voided all five deeds in a single afternoon. Three of the houses went back to nieces and nephews who had been told for months that their uncle had given everything away. Mine went back to me, and I will confess I cried in the hallway, not for the house but for Clyde, who had set every board of it. Pastor Tanner pleaded guilty to forgery and exploitation of the elderly, and went to prison for eleven years. The woman with the clipboard, a cousin of his, took a lesser plea.
The church nearly closed. Half the young families left in the month after the arrest, ashamed, and the offering plates were thin all winter. But the old people stayed. Mr. Hargrove called a meeting in the fellowship hall and asked every member to sign a promise that no one in our congregation would ever again sign a paper in the hospital or at home without a family member and a lawyer present. Four hundred people signed. I signed first, in my best penmanship, the way I taught it to the girls.
In the spring Nora Whitfield came to my kitchen table with her little boy, and I made biscuits. She asked if I would teach her. I did, and then I taught three other young mothers, and by June I was running a class every Thursday afternoon in the fellowship hall, with biscuits and checkbooks and a lesson on reading before you sign. Nora brought a poster that said “Read Every Word.” We hung it over the stove where it would be seen.
I am eighty one years old now and I still sit in the same pew. The house on Cypress Street is paid off, and when I am gone it will go to a scholarship fund for girls who want to teach, with the name of Clyde on the plaque. I had the papers drawn up by a lawyer, signed in the morning with a clear head, stamped by a living notary I watched with my own two eyes. The room was full of people who clapped. This time I let them.
