The Job Nobody Would Give Me

What the town thought

Mamou is a small place with a long memory. We have one blinking light, three churches, a grocery, and a boudin counter at the gas station. Everyone in town knew what I had done, because I had done it to them.

I should say plainly what that was. After the oilfield took my hand and the pills took most of the rest of me, I broke into places.

A deer camp. A fire station storage room. A feed store. Then, one night in March of 2013, a lumberyard.

I sold what I stole for pill money and I was caught within a week. I pleaded guilty to three counts and a stolen truck.

In nine years I never once told myself it was somebody else’s fault, because by about the third year I could not make that lie hold.

Knowing it did not make the town forget it.

My first Saturday back I walked to the grocery for bread and bologna, with money Noella had pressed into my hand. Mrs. Aurelie Dupré, who had taught half of us Sunday school, was coming out the door with a cart.

She looked at me as if I were a snake on the pavement. Then she turned the cart around, went back inside, and waited, I was told, ten full minutes by the register.

The cashier would not look at my face. She rang me up and said, “Have a good day,” to the screen. That was the gentlest welcome I got that month.

Thirty-one applications

My probation officer, a tired, decent man named Mr. Hebert, told me at our first meeting that I had six weeks to show him steady work or I would be back in front of a judge.

“Most of these folks won’t hire you, Guillory,” he said. “I have a list of places that say they will, and half of them are lying.”

He was right. I filled out thirty-one applications in thirty-two days. A man at the farm supply laughed, not unkindly, and slid my clipboard back across the counter.

“We had a break-in out here in 2011,” he said. “Wasn’t you. But you see how it is.”

At the sawmill the man behind the desk looked at the box I had checked and said, “Son, I just can’t.” Then he said, “I hope you get right.” I did not have the words to tell him I already had.

Noella never pushed. She kept the coffee going and left a plate in the camper refrigerator every night. One evening I came back from another refusal and found a note under it in her slanting hand. It said, “Eat. Tomorrow is another door.”

By the fourth week I had stopped going into town in daylight. I walked at night, down the highway to the edge of the ponds and back, and I thought about the pills I could have found.

I knew exactly who would have sold them to me, and nobody in the world would have blamed me much.

I never took one. It was close, and there was one night I came within a few steps of it.

What turned me around was a folded paper in my pocket from a counselor inside, with a phone number and four words in a spidery hand: “You can do this.”

A stranger’s four words held up a man’s whole life for a month. I am thankful for every letter.