The Job Nobody Would Give Me

This morning at a quarter to seven I unlocked the front gate of Fontaine Lumber in Mamou, Louisiana, the way I have almost every morning for four years.

The key on my ring is the only spare. Celeste Fontaine owns the yard, and she handed it to me herself.

Thirty minutes later a man I have known since grade school pulled up in a flatbed and asked for me by name, because Jude would get his cut list right.

I wrote his order on a yellow pad and called it back to him twice.

I did not think anything of it until he was gone and I stood in the quiet with the smell of cypress and cut pine. Four years ago that same man would not have let me pump his gas.

I am forty-six years old. I spent nine years and seven months in a state prison for burglary and theft, and every day of it was earned.

I am telling you that now so you never have to wonder what I am hiding. Nothing is hidden anymore, which is the whole reason I can stand behind that counter.

I want to tell you how a town of thirty-eight hundred people decided what I was, how one woman decided something different, and what I owe her.

I have spent four years trying to pay it. I am not sure it is a debt a man ever finishes.

It starts on a bus.

The ride home

They let me out on a Tuesday in October of 2022. I had a mesh bag, a bus ticket to Opelousas, and the clothes they had arrested me in nine years earlier, which no longer fit.

I was forty-two. I had gone in with a crushed left hand from an oilfield job, a pill habit I called medicine, and a belief that the world owed me a bit of ease.

I came out with a clear head, a high school equivalency certificate, a certificate in small engine repair, and a stack of papers saying I owed fees to the state.

My sister Noella was waiting at the Opelousas station in her husband’s truck.

She had gone gray at the temples, and she held onto me so long the driver behind us honked. “You’re skinny,” she said, which is how Guillorys say a great many things.

She and her husband Marcel had cleared out the old camper behind their house on the Mamou highway. They had put in a window unit and left a box fan and a clean towel on the bed.

They had told their church what they were doing.

That first night I sat on the camper step with a cup of coffee and listened to the crawfish ponds across the road.

I could hear frogs and a distant rice dryer, and nobody was counting me.