The Women Who Fed Us Anyway

I took off her apron and hung it on the nail. I washed the onion off my hands. Lavonne looked me up and down in the kitchen doorway and straightened my collar, and I went up fourteen steps and into the church.

Mama had asked to be cremated, and her ashes sat in a plain walnut box on a table near the front, with her wedding photograph and a vase of the late zinnias from her own garden. Madison, in her good navy dress, was sitting on the front pew with her feet not touching the floor. She patted the seat beside her. I sat.

“Grandma,” she whispered. “I put out sixty-four. Is that enough?”

“That’s plenty, baby.”

She nodded and went back to studying her shoes.

Randy leaned across the pew at about ten to eleven. “Where’s the food? Grady said the caterer was bringing everything at nine, and I haven’t seen a tray.”

I thought about telling him then. I thought of it for about as long as it takes to breathe in.

“It’s handled,” I said.

“Handled how?”

“The ladies are handling it.”

He looked at me, that look he has had since we were kids and he knew I was holding something back for his own good. “Sheila.”

“Randy. Sit with Mama.”

He sat.

The service began at 11. Pastor Ward Kroeker spoke about a woman who had made him a plate on his first Sunday in Ellery, eleven years ago, when he was a thirty-year-old with a wife and a newborn and not a dollar to his name. My brother read a Psalm and made it through two verses before his voice cracked, and then he stopped and cleared his throat and made it through the rest. We sang “Come, Thou Fount” and “Blessed Assurance,” and the old people sang from memory with their eyes closed.

Somewhere around the second hymn, I smelled ham.

The church is a hundred and ten years old, with a floor furnace and iron heat registers set into the aisles, and when they run in October, whatever is cooking in the basement comes up through the grates. The smell of baked ham with brown sugar crept up the aisle. Then onions. Then something sweet and buttery that I knew before I knew I knew it.

Ernie Platt was sitting at the end of the pew by the south window, a retired wheat farmer, 89 years old, with a hearing aid he turns up for sermons and down for gossip. I watched him lift his head. He sniffed like an old bird dog.

“Cornflake potatoes,” he said, and the whole row heard him. “That’s Frances’s.”

Somebody behind him laughed, the soft kind of laugh that is mostly crying, and then a few others did, and Pastor Kroeker waited for it to pass before he went on.