The Women Who Fed Us Anyway
“Sheila,” she said. “Come look at what’s taped on the bottom.”
I came over with onion on my hands. The women near us stopped what they were doing.
Along the bottom of the roaster, from one end to the other, in layers, was a row of little strips of masking tape. Some were yellow and curling. Some were new. Each one carried a name and a year, in my mother’s blocky ballpoint hand, the handwriting I had seen on a thousand birthday cards.
Otis Ingram, March 1975.
Ida May Platt, 1977.
The Landis baby, 1981.
Roy Fenner, 1985.
On and on. I turned the roaster slowly in Maureen’s hands and read them, one at a time, and the women gathered around without a word. She had written down every funeral she had cooked for. There were 58 strips. She had stuck a new one on each time she carried that roaster into this kitchen, I suppose so she would remember who had been fed, and who had been left to feed.
Down near the end, in the same hand: Jeanette Reinhardt, March 2019.
I knew the name. It was Tammy’s mother. I had not known my mother cooked for that one, and I stood there with my thumb on the tape and did not say so to anyone.
The last strip said Walt Dunning, May. Underneath it, at the very end of the row, was one more piece of tape, fresh and white and blank, torn off and pressed down early by a woman who liked to have the next one ready.
Nobody said anything for a long moment. The ham smelled sweet in the roasters. A faucet dripped.
Lavonne came over from the range. She looked at the blank strip. Then she took the black marker she carried for the sign-up sheets out of her cardigan pocket and held it out to me.
“It’s yours to write, Sheila.”
I could not make my hand close on it.
“Then I will,” she said, and she bent over that roaster in front of everyone and wrote slowly, in her careful schoolteacher print: Frances Lathrop, October.
She capped the marker and put it back in her pocket.
“There,” she said. “She’s on the list.”
Then Marcia said, “Ham’s at a hundred and forty. Do we want it hotter?” and everybody went back to work.
I had to leave them at 10:30. The family receives in the sanctuary for the half hour before the service, and my brother Randy had come in from Tulsa and was standing alone in front of the table with Mama’s picture on it. He is a big man, a long-haul dispatcher, and he had not slept. He looked like someone had let the air out of him.