He Bought My Father's Debt, So Now He Owns Me novel · Chapter 22 of 24

Chapter 22: The Auction

Jo's POV

The banner said GUIDRY SEAFOOD, BY ORDER OF THE TRUSTEE, in red letters six feet tall, and it was snapping in the wind like a sail.

I stood at the head of the pier at five minutes to noon.

I wore my denim jacket and boots, with my braid down my back and my mother's wedding ring on a chain at my throat.

I had asked her for it that morning.

She had worked it off her swollen finger with soap and put it in my palm.

"Don't lose it, baby," she had said. "It's all I've got that's mine."

The sky behind the dock had gone the green-black of a bruise.

Gusts of warm rain came in off the Sound in long white sheets and blew away again.

The boats at the pilings were doubled on their lines, groaning.

Every shrimper in Bayou La Batre had come.

I counted them from the pier, the way Cal counted.

There were two hundred, and more at the back.

They stood on the shell in the wind in oilskins and caps and bare heads, with their hands in their pockets.

I knew the faces.

I knew the fleet captain in his old green slicker, and the widow from Pascagoula with her cane, and the man from Biloxi with one hand.

The forty-one stood in a row at the front.

Beside them were their sons and daughters and a few small children in rain jackets.

A dais had been set up on the loading ramp, with a long table and a microphone under a plastic tarp.

Five men sat behind it.

In the center chair, with his white crest ruffling in the wind and his anchor pin gleaming, sat the commissioner.

He looked at the crowd the way a man looks at a field he owns.

His eyes found me.

He smiled, and lifted two fingers from the table.

I did not smile back.

Beside the dais, in a folding chair with a deputy on either side, sat my father.

He wore a clean shirt that someone had lent him.

His hands were cuffed in front of him, and his face was the color of paper.

The sheriff had brought him from the county jail that morning at his own request.

"He said he wants to be here," the sheriff had told me, with the wet cigar in the corner of his mouth.

"He says he's got something to say. I told him it'd better be the truth."

Cal came to stand beside me.

He had not worn the grey suit.

He wore a dark work jacket and a plain shirt, and his hands hung open at his sides.

"Ready?" he said.

"No," I said.

"Neither am I," he said.

"You're not going to bid," I said.

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