The Farm They Nearly Signed Away

The buttermilk pie

I want to stop the machinery of this story for one page, because if I only tell you about the papers and the acres I will have told you a lawsuit, and this was never a lawsuit to me. It was Earl.

His birthday was the second week of November. I found this out from the ledger, because I asked him, and he told me, and then he told me that Nadine had made him a buttermilk pie every single birthday for forty-four years, that she never once bought a cake, that a bought cake to Nadine was an admission of defeat. He told me that the year after she died, Sharon had brought him a grocery store sheet cake, chocolate, with a rose on it, and Earl had thanked her and eaten a polite square of it and gone out to the barn and cried where nobody could see, not because the cake was bad but because it was proof that the person who knew him best was gone and the people who were left did not know that he did not eat chocolate, had never eaten chocolate, that Nadine used to say a chocolate cake was for people who had not yet found out about buttermilk pie.

So on the second week of November I made a buttermilk pie. My mother’s recipe, close enough. I carried it into Prairie Rose in a glass dish with a tea towel over it and I set it on the little table in the sunroom and I cut Earl Merrick a slice of buttermilk pie on his eighty-first birthday.

He looked at it for a long time. Then he looked at me.

“You remembered a thing about me that my own children forgot,” he said. “How did you know.”

“You told me,” I said. “Two visits ago. It’s in the ledger. Everything true is in the ledger.”

He ate the whole slice. Then he ate a second one. And an aide came by and saw us and went and got two more residents who did not have anyone visiting that day, and I cut them pie too, and for about forty minutes the sunroom on Route 9 was not a waiting room for the end of things. It was a birthday. Earl kept a peppermint tucked beside his plate the whole time, and when a resident named Wilbur admired the pie, Earl slid him the peppermint across the table like a man passing a note in church, and I had to go stand by the window for a minute so nobody would see my face.

That is the thing they were selling. Not two hundred and ten acres. A man who still kept candy in his pocket for strangers. They had priced him at a quick-sale number and I was not going to let it stand.