He Bought My Father's Debt, So Now He Owns Me novel · Chapter 16 of 24
Chapter 16: The Forty-One
I called Cal from the porch with the paper still in my hand.
"They've signed," I said. "All forty-one."
"Who has?"
"Everybody in the ledger. The widow in Pascagoula took the envelopes to the fleet captain. He's got them in a room at the Seaman's Mission with a lawyer from the legal aid office. They want me there at ten."
He was silent for a moment.
"I'll drive down," he said.
"You don't have to."
"I know. May I?"
It was the first time he had asked me a question since the cold room that was not a command.
"Come to the Mission," I said. "Bring your checkbook."
"I intend to."
The Seaman's Mission was a cinderblock hall by the bayou with a tin roof and a pot of coffee on a folding table.
Forty or fifty people sat on metal chairs in the long room.
Some I knew by their faces.
Most I knew only by their handwriting on a hundred and fifty envelopes.
A woman in her sixties with a cane stood up when I came in, and I knew her before she spoke.
"Pascagoula," I said.
"Miss Guidry."
"Five hundred a month."
"And a sixth month, one Christmas, that you didn't have to." She put out her hand, and I took it, and she held on. "I put every one of those envelopes in a coffee can. I've still got most of them."
"You don't have to keep them."
"Honey," she said, "I wanted somebody to know it was somebody."
I did not cry.
I stood with my hand in hers while the room watched, and I could not make a sound.
Cal came in at ten with a leather folio under his arm and stood in the doorway.
Nobody looked away from him.
I watched him take it.
He walked down the center aisle between the chairs, six-foot-three in a grey suit, and stood at the front of the room beside the fleet captain.
"My name is Calloway Reese," he said. "I bought the Guidry notes in September, and I want to tell you why I'm standing here."
The room was very quiet.
"I was a deckhand on the Miss Beverly for three years," Cal said. "Fourteen to seventeen. I was number six hundred. I'm not going to tell you what happened. Some of you know."
A man in the third row nodded, slowly, and put his hand over his eyes.
"I came to Bayou La Batre to take a family's house. I found out last Saturday that I had the wrong man. I'm not going to tell you the rest of that either. What I'm going to say is that Miss Guidry's ledger and your claims are the same list. I've read hers. I'd like to read yours."
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of He Bought My Father's Debt, So Now He Owns Me are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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