Four Hundred Came to Watch It Boil

He listened with the file still in his hand. When I said the words hillbilly syrup, he stopped filing and set the hoe down across his knees.

“She said that to Pearl,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

“Yes sir.”

Elmo looked out the barn door at Dolly a while. “Your daddy and me pressed in that yard the year you were born,” he said. “Your mama stirred that pan with you on her hip. You remember that?”

“I was a baby, Elmo.”

“Well, I remember it.” He nodded slowly. “Dolly ain’t walked a sweep in a while. Neither have I. But I’ll lead her myself. Nobody else leads her. She don’t know anybody else.”

“Elmo, you’re eighty-two.”

“I know how old I am,” he said. “Your mama’s seventy-nine. Go tell her.”

So I went and told her.

I found her in the kitchen snapping late beans. I told her Curtis had the mill turning, Elmo was bringing Dolly, and we meant to press her cane in her yard the old way, the way Daddy did.

She snapped beans for a long time. I let her.

“Not to spite anybody,” she said at last.

“No ma’am.”

“I mean it, Wanda. If this is to show Tiffany up, I won’t do it. I’ll let that cane fall down in the field first.”

“It’s to make molasses, Mom. It’s the first Saturday in October. It’s the day the cane’s ready. You’ve always said so.”

She looked at me over her glasses. She knew perfectly well the first Saturday in October was bazaar Saturday. I knew she knew. We sat there knowing it together.

“Every dime goes to the roof,” she said. “Every single dime. That church needs a roof whether Tiffany is the one fixing it or not.”

“Every dime,” I said.

Mom wiped her hands on her apron and went to the china hutch. She took the stack of brown paper labels out from under the good tablecloth and set it in front of me with her scissors.

“Then you’d better finish cutting these,” she said. “I only got through sixty.”

I didn’t advertise much. I put a card on the board at the feed store, between a lost beagle and a man selling round bales, and another at the post office.

Fresh sorghum, pressed with a mule, Pearl Seay’s yard, proceeds to the church roof.

Elmo told the men on the bench outside the hardware store, which is the same as telling the county. And somebody, I never learned who, read my card word for word on the Saturday swap shop on the radio.

Mom didn’t tell anybody. She just started getting ready, which for her is the same as praying.

On Thursday and Friday we cut the cane. You strip the leaves standing in the row, knocking them down with a flat oak paddle Daddy made. Mom showed Ike how, standing at the end of the row in her old sun hat.

“Down and away,” she told him. “Let the stalk do the work. You fight it, it’ll cut your hands.”

Then you top the seed heads and cut the stalks low with a corn knife. By Friday noon we had the whole patch down and stacked in the shade of the big maple so it wouldn’t sour.

Friday afternoon Curtis and Ike washed out Daddy’s pan, a long shallow steel evaporator pan about eight feet long, with baffles that make the juice run back and forth as it cooks.

They set it on the cinder block furnace Daddy built at the edge of the yard, filled it from the hose, and built a test fire to check for leaks.