Four Hundred Came to Watch It Boil

When she married my daddy, she brought the knowing with her. Daddy brought the mill, his granddaddy’s old iron press with three upright rollers on a post, turned by a mule walking circles on a long sweep pole.

Every fall of my childhood, the first cool Saturday in October, our yard filled up with smoke and steam and people.

Daddy fed the cane through. Mom stirred the pan. My brother Ronnie and I fought over who got to lick the skimmer.

Daddy passed eleven years ago this past spring. After that, Mom couldn’t manage the mule mill, so every fall since, we hauled her cane over to a man in the next hollow who has a little gas engine press, and she boiled it there.

But she never stopped. Every year she put up somewhere around a hundred pints, and every year she sold them at the church bazaar for ten dollars a jar, and every year they were gone by noon.

Some of the old folks paid her a year ahead. One widow over in Bethel bought six jars every year and mailed them to her children in three states.

So when my mother put those labels in a drawer, she was not putting away a hobby. She was putting away the one thing in that church that was plainly and entirely hers.

I called Curtis from the porch. My husband works at the sawmill outside of town five and a half days a week, and he answers his phone at work about as often as a fence post does, so I left a message.

Then I called my brother.

Ronnie is fifty-one. He drives a propane truck and he coaches the little league team in the summer, and he married Tiffany eight years ago, after his first wife left. Tiffany is forty-eight. She moved here from Lexington.

“She told Mom it looked like hillbilly syrup,” I said. “To her face, Ronnie. On her own porch.”

He was quiet a long while. I could hear the truck idling and the radio turned low.

“Tiff’s under a lot of pressure, Wanda,” he said finally. “That roof estimate came back at thirty-eight thousand dollars. She thinks booth fees from twenty vendors will make three times what the bazaar ever made.”

“That’s fine. Let her. There’s room for one table of molasses.”

“I know it.” He sighed. “I’ll talk to her. I mean it. I’ll talk to her tonight.”

And I believe he did. But whatever he said, the table stayed off the list, and Tiffany’s sign-up sheet went up in the fellowship hall that Sunday without Mom’s name on it.

I’ll tell you plainly why I didn’t do more right then. I could have called the committee, or stood up at church, but it was a church bazaar, not a fight I would carry into the Lord’s house, and Mom would not have it.

She told me so herself on Wednesday, when I brought it up again while I was washing her hair at the kitchen sink.

“Leave it be, Wanda,” she said with her eyes shut and the water running. “It’s the Lord’s bazaar. It isn’t mine. I will not have people taking sides in that church over syrup.”

“It isn’t over syrup, Mom.”

“It is to everybody but me,” she said. “Hand me that towel.”

So I left it be. Or I tried to.

The trouble was the cane. Mom’s sorghum patch sits out behind the garden, maybe a tenth of an acre, and that year it had come up beautiful. The stalks stood taller than Curtis, the seed heads gone dark and heavy, bowing over.