The Job Nobody Would Give Me

The doors

I started on a Saturday in March with the ledger under my arm and a shirt Noella had ironed.

The first door was Mrs. Aurelie Dupré’s. I stood on her porch a full minute before I knocked.

The rail was the one Celeste had sold her on credit in 2019 when her husband died, and I could see the paint was fresh, sanded by someone who cared.

She opened the door in her housecoat. She looked at me, and then at the ledger. “Jude Guillory.”

“Yes, ma’am. I am sorry to come on a Saturday.” My voice came out thinner than I wanted. “Celeste is going to be fine. But I am looking after the books for her, and your account has a balance of eleven hundred and forty dollars from the porch lumber. I wanted you to know, in case you had not thought of it. There is no hurry.”

She stood a long moment with her hand on the doorframe. Then she went into the kitchen. I heard a drawer. She came back with her purse and counted the money out in twenties and tens on the table where I could see.

“I crossed the street from you,” she said. “At the grocery. I have thought about it every Sunday for four years and I never said it. I am sorry.”

My throat closed. “Yes, ma’am.”

“I thought you were a thief.”

“I was, Mrs. Dupré.”

“I know. And you are not anymore. I am old and slow, and it took me a while to see.” She wrapped half a pound cake in foil and pressed it into my hands. “Tell Celeste I am praying for her. And tell her I am ashamed of how long I let that account go.”

That was the first door. I knocked on two hundred and eight more.

Some did not answer. Some were embarrassed and did not have it, and I sat at their kitchen tables and wrote out small payments, ten dollars a week, twenty. Some paid in full on the spot.

Lucien Vidrine paid his tab of twenty-two hundred and sixty dollars, and then, standing in his own driveway, he counted out another twenty-two hundred and sixty in cash. “Whose is that?” I asked.

“Cecil Broussard’s. He died in September. His daughter does not know about it, and she has enough to carry. Take it, Jude, before I change my mind.”

I took it. I did not trust my voice. In five weeks I collected nineteen thousand, eight hundred dollars, one porch and one kitchen table and one driveway at a time.

Ulysse walked half of them with me in his good Sunday cap, saying little and nodding a great deal.

It was not enough. On the twenty-fifth of March the yard’s account stood at twenty-nine thousand dollars, with nineteen thousand, five hundred still to find.

I had a savings account. Four years of eleven dollars an hour, then thirteen, then sixteen. I had lived in a camper behind my sister’s house and bought nothing but gas, a pair of boots, and a used truck.

The balance was nineteen thousand, five hundred dollars, to the dollar. I stared at that number a long time. It did not seem like an accident.

On the thirty-first of March I went to the bank. The same young woman was at the desk, four years older and no longer tight around the mouth. I told her I wanted to make a payment on Fontaine Lumber’s note.

She looked up the account and then at me. “Mr. Guillory,” she said quietly, “do you want to look over the figures first?”

“I have looked at them every night for six weeks.”

I signed the slip and walked out with my hands empty and my heart as full as it had ever been.