The Pictures in the Church Kitchen
So I drove out to the co-op alone at eight o’clock at night. The trucks were lined up from the scale clear back to the tracks, semis and old tandem farm trucks both, engines idling, and the air was gold with dust and bees wing under the floodlights. You could taste the corn.
I parked by the scale house and walked around to where I could see the pit. Dad was there in his canvas coat with the mask on, one hand up, walking a semi forward a foot at a time.
He saw me, got the hopper gates open, and came over, pulling the mask down. There was a clean patch around his mouth and the rest of him was the color of a feed sack.
“Sis. Twice in one day. What’s wrong?”
“Dad, there’s more to it about the pictures. I need to tell you the rest.”
“Is it something that’ll keep till Sunday? We’ve got forty trucks and rain coming Monday.” He put his hand on my shoulder, and it left a print. “I’m asleep on my feet when I get home, sis. I wouldn’t hear you right. Sunday. I’ll take you and Connie both to dinner after church, and you can tell me whatever it is.”
I had the words in my mouth. Your wife set Mom out for the garbage.
And I looked at his face, which had fifteen hours of dust in every line of it, and at the men in the truck cabs watching the old man talk to his daughter, and I could not hand it to him there. Thirty seconds, standing up, in front of half the county.
“It’ll keep till Sunday,” I said.
“That’s my girl.” He pulled the mask up and went back to work.
Mrs. Tuttle called at nine to see how he had taken it.
“He knows I have them,” I said. “I couldn’t tell him the rest. Not out there.”
She was quiet. Then she said, “No. A thing like that, a man ought to hear sitting down.” And then, in a different voice: “Amy, are you doing anything Saturday? We are burying Vernon Koch at ten thirty and I am short a pair of hands in the kitchen. Your mother always brought two pans of the pumpkin bars. I do not suppose you have her card.”
“I have her card.”
“Then bring the bars. And honey. Bring that picture of her at the stove. The one with the big roaster. You know the one. I would dearly love to see it again.”
I should say what that kitchen is.
First Lutheran sits two blocks off the square in Seward, red brick, with the fellowship hall in the basement the way God and the building committee of 1954 intended. The kitchen is at the east end of the hall behind a long pass-through window with a steel counter. There are two big ranges, a dishwasher that sounds like a freight train, and two hundred-cup coffee urns that take an hour to perk.
My mother ran that kitchen from 1990 until the winter of 2020.
Ran it is the right word. She kept the funeral list by the phone at home, forty women in her own handwriting, and when somebody in the congregation died she would start at the top and call down it. Ham sandwiches on buttered buns. Cheesy potatoes. Three Jell-O salads and a relish tray. Bars, never store cake. She fed the mourners at better than four hundred funerals by Lois Tuttle’s count, and Lois kept the book.