Four Hundred Came to Watch It Boil

It held. Not one drop.

Mom stood there with her arms folded and watched the water start to steam. “Your daddy welded that corner in 1988,” she said, pointing. “Look at it. Still tight.”

That was the first time I’d heard her say his name out loud in months.

Saturday morning broke cool and clear. There was fog in the bottoms at first light, the way there always is that time of year, but you could see the sun pinking the top of the ridge, and you knew it would burn off.

Curtis had the fire going before the sun was over the hill. You want a steady fire for molasses, not a hot one. A hot fire scorches the bottom and the whole pan tastes burnt.

At ten minutes past seven, I looked up the road and saw Elmo coming.

He had walked the whole mile and a half in his overalls and his straw hat, leading Dolly on a cotton rope with her collar and hames slung over her back. She came on easy, ears up.

“You could’ve called me,” I said. “Curtis would have come got you.”

“Dolly don’t ride in a trailer,” Elmo said. “Never has.”

He stood her by the mill and let her look at it. She put her nose down to the old iron and blew on it. “She remembers,” Elmo said.

He hooked her to the sweep. Curtis stood at the rollers with an armload of cane, and Ike set the bucket under the spout with a clean feed sack tied over it to strain the juice.

Elmo clucked to her once, low. Dolly leaned into the collar, and the long hickory pole began to swing.

The rollers groaned and caught. Curtis fed in four stalks at once, butt ends first, and they went through with a crunch like stepping on ice, and down the spout came the juice.

It runs pale green, the juice, and cloudy, and it smells like a cut lawn and a watermelon both. It ran through the sack into that bucket in a steady stream, and Ike watched it come with his mouth open.

I looked over at the back porch. Mom was standing there in her faded blue cotton dress with her apron tied on over it and her white hair up in a bun, just watching.

Then she came down the steps, one at a time, holding the rail. She went over to the furnace and picked up Daddy’s long wooden paddle from where Curtis had leaned it against the stone.

She didn’t say a word to any of us. She just stood at the head of the pan and waited for the juice.

It’s a plain rule of thumb that ten gallons of juice cooks down to about one gallon of molasses. By the time Dolly finished that afternoon, we would press about a hundred and forty gallons, enough for a little over a hundred pints.

We poured the first seventy gallons in from the barrel at eight o’clock in the morning, and Mom started to stir.

The first people came a little after nine.

It was the Abner sisters, both in their eighties, in their Sunday coats. Then a couple from over toward Manchester who had heard it on the radio. Then three men off the hardware bench, who told Elmo he was doing it wrong.

“Dolly’s doing it,” Elmo said, never stopping. “Talk to her.”