I turned the last page face up on the dessert table, beside the pound cake, and read it aloud to the fellowship hall in the same steady voice that leads the altos on Sunday. It was a notarized acknowledgment of paternity, filed in the Harrison County courthouse in Gulfport, in 2019. “I, Leon Eugene Culpepper, acknowledge that I am the father of Elijah Thomas Teague, born the fourteenth of March, 2018,” I read. “I agree to provide support of eighteen hundred dollars each month.” The last line was a signature I would have known anywhere, in a blue felt pen, the signature of my husband of forty eight years. “Leon,” I said, “is it yours?”
The woman in the blue dress had not moved from the door. She was thirty four or so, with a tired, honest face, and she kept one hand on the shoulder of the little boy. He was six years old, with a cowlick and a wiggling front tooth and my husbands heavy eyebrows, and he stared around the room at the hats and the covered dishes with the solemn calm of a child who has learned to be quiet. “Mrs. Culpepper, I am Rhonda,” she said. “I work in housekeeping at the Beau Rivage. I did not want to come. Mr. Leon called me last night and said it was time.” Leon sat down, very heavily, on a folding chair.
Tonya was the first to speak. She was staring at the boy, and her face was a map of shock. “Daddy, is that my brother?” she said. “Is that why you drove me to the casino bus every Friday?” Leon lifted a gray face. “Tonya, I was going to tell you,” he said. “I was going to tell your mother. I could not.” The whole congregation sat frozen in their church clothes, with paper plates in their hands. I looked at the little boy. He was the only innocent one in the room.
A tin of peanut brittle left beside a pound cake gave one wife the weekend to bring her daughter back to the choir loft in Dothan.
I gave my terms in the middle of the hall, with my pound cake behind me. The farm had been sold, and the proceeds were safe in a trust that Leon had never touched. I would file for divorce on Monday. Leon would resign as a deacon that day, and he would pay the support for Elijah out of his own pocket, and not a dollar out of mine. Tonya would enter a treatment program in Mobile the following morning. The loan against the equipment would be set aside as a fraud. And I would take a slice of my cake across the hall to a little boy who had never done anything wrong.
I cut the cake myself, a thick wedge on a paper plate, and I carried it across the linoleum to the door. Rhonda stood up straighter as I came. The child looked up at me, wary, and then he looked at the plate. “Elijah, this is pound cake,” I said. “My grandmothers recipe.” He took the plate in both hands, and he gave me the smallest nod. “Thank you, Mrs. Culpepper,” he said, and Rhonda closed her eyes. I looked at the woman whom my husband had loved behind my back for six years. “Rhonda, I am not angry at you,” I told her. “I am angry at the man. You and the boy are welcome at my table.”
Leon had not moved from his chair. He had taken off his glasses, and his big hands lay open on his knees. When I came back, he said, in a voice I hardly recognized, “Annie Mae, I got in so deep with the markers. I started gambling to cover for Tonya. Then I started gambling because I could not stop. Then Rhonda was kind to me.” He stopped. “It does not matter how it began. It matters what I did.” I looked at the man I had married at twenty three. “Leon, you are right,” I said. “It matters. You will carry it. I am not going to carry it for you.”
Otis drove me home that evening in his old Ford, in his Sunday suit, with the windows down and the smell of cut peanut hay coming in. At the end of my driveway, he stopped, and sat for a moment with the engine ticking. “Miss Annie Mae, I should have told you about the woman sooner,” he said. “I saw her at the casino in 2020. I did not know how.” I patted his arm. “Otis, you told me the truth about the bus,” I said. “That was the part I needed. The rest I had to find myself.” He nodded, and he wiped his eye with the back of his glove.
The money consequences were fair and slow. The divorce was granted in September. Leon agreed to pay the support from his pension, and he moved to a small apartment above a hardware store in Dothan, where he worked behind the counter. Tonya completed her program in Mobile, and when she returned, she took a job as an aide in the elementary school, in a classroom of six year olds. On Sundays she took Elijah to the park. The equipment loan was voided by the bank, and the casinos closed her accounts after my lawyer sent each of them a certified letter.
In the name of my grandmother, Lula Mae, who passed in 1998 and who cooked her cast iron skillet black over fifty years of peanut harvests, I started the Granny Skillet Fund. It pays for legal help, counseling and treatment for farm women in Houston and Henry counties whose husbands, sons or daughters are gambling away the land. In the first year, we helped twenty two families. A woman of seventy three, with a straw hat and dirt under her fingernails, sat in the office with her purse in her lap and said, “I have run that farm since my husband had his stroke. I thought I would have to give it up.”
On the first Sunday in June, I took my place in the alto section at Mount Pleasant. In the third row of the congregation, in a plain blue dress, sat Rhonda, with Elijah beside her in a clip on tie. He wiggled and swung his legs and counted the ceiling tiles. When the choir began “Blessed Assurance,” he looked up at me, solemn, and I smiled. At the end of the service, he walked up to the front, on his own, with a small paper bag. Inside was a piece of peanut brittle, wrapped in wax paper, broken in two. “For you,” he said. “The big half.”
