The Plain Pine Box Mama Asked For
Noreen closed her eyes. A tear ran off her chin and onto the front of her good wool coat.
“I saw your face,” Orville said. “I was standing by the stairs. I saw you hear it. You set that coffeepot down and you went out the back kitchen door and you drove to Ames without telling anybody. Your mama went looking for you in the parking lot, and your car was gone.”
“I was twenty-one,” Noreen said. Her voice was a thread. “I was so ashamed. I thought the whole town was pitying us. I thought it was my fault. I thought if we had done it right, if I had had one dollar to give.”
“I know it.”
“I made myself a promise standing in that kitchen. I promised I would never let anybody look at Mama like that again. Not ever. I have never told anyone. Not Gary. Not Glenda.”
“I know that too,” Orville said.
I stood on the other side of the grave with Bernie’s arm around me, and I thought, thirty-eight years. She has carried that for thirty-eight years.
“Here’s what you never heard, Noreen,” Orville said. “Hap’s wife Dolores heard Alma say it, too. She crossed that room and told Alma Pettibone she would not say another word about Irene Hadley’s box, and Alma would be on Irene’s porch that week with an apology. Alma went, with an apple pie. And your mother forgave her at the door.”
He looked at the lid again.
“The whole county remembers that box,” he said. “It was the one time everybody forgot how much they owed the bank and remembered what they were for.”
Lester Voss, the oldest of the three, finally spoke, his voice like a gate hinge. “Your mother came to see us last spring. She sat on Orville’s porch an hour. She only said, Boys, I’d like you to do something for me when I go. Just come.”
“And we came,” Orville said.
I looked at my sister standing among those three old men with her hands over her face, and I understood what Mama had meant. Plain pine was never about the money. In her last year she had wanted one thing, which was for her youngest daughter to stand at that grave and know that plain was the day the whole county came to your door with its hands.
Noreen took her hands down. Her face was wet and open. She looked, for the first time all week, like my little sister.
She took a step forward, and she put her gloved hand on the pine lid, right next to Orville’s, and she laid her cheek against the wood.
“I’m sorry, Mama,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t understand.”
Orville did not say anything. He only moved his hand a little so that hers could rest beside it.
Then Hap Dressler put his hand on Noreen’s shoulder, and Lester put his on Orville’s, and for a long moment the four of them stood there with the pine under their palms.
Pastor Marv waited a long time before he said the committal. When he did, he said it softly, and the wind came back up the hill, and all around us the dry corn rattled in the fields.
The Methodist women served lunch in the church basement, the ham and the scalloped potatoes and about eleven kinds of pie, to four hundred and some people.
Noreen did not eat. She tied on an apron from the kitchen drawer and went to the sink, and she began to wash roasting pans.