By half past nine the pan came to a slow rolling boil and the green foam started rising, thick as meringue. You skim it off for hours, because that foam is all the bitterness coming up out of the juice.
One of the Abner sisters stepped right up to the furnace. She broke a little stub of pressed cane off a stalk and dipped it in the skimming bucket and put it in her mouth. Then she closed her eyes.
“Lord have mercy,” she said. “I haven’t tasted that since 1952.”
Her sister did it next, then the hardware men. Soon every person over seventy in that yard was lined up at the bucket with a cane stub, tasting the foam the way they had as children.
One old man, a retired mail carrier I’d known my whole life, tasted it and then turned away and stood looking at the ridge a while. When he turned back, his eyes were wet.
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“Smoke,” he said to me.
“Yes sir,” I said. “It’s bad this morning.”
Ike stood at the end of the drive with the hand clicker he uses to count heads at ballgames for the boosters. By ten o’clock he was at sixty. By eleven, a hundred and fifty.
They came the way country people come to things, without any fuss. They set lawn chairs along the fence and brought their grandchildren. One woman set a pan of warm biscuits on Mom’s porch rail.
And all morning my mother stirred. She stirred and she skimmed and she watched that fire, and she told Curtis when to put on another stick and when to pull one out, and she did not hurry once.
Somewhere around ten thirty, Mom started humming over the creak of the mill and the crackle of the fire. “Bringing in the Sheaves,” the way she used to hum it at the sink when I was small.
A woman in a lawn chair picked up the words, then another. They sang it soft, the way you sing snapping beans. Mom never looked up, but I saw her smile into the steam.
And all morning, Elmo walked.
Round and round, at the end of that hickory pole, right beside Dolly’s head. Eighty-two years old. His overalls were dark at the knees by eleven o’clock and his shirt was soaked through at the back. He didn’t stop.
About eleven thirty, Curtis went over and put his hand on the pole. “Let me spell you a while, Elmo. Go sit down.”
Elmo didn’t break stride. “Dolly don’t know you.”
“She’ll get to know me.”
“Not today she won’t.” Elmo patted the mule’s neck as they came round. “Me and her have got a rhythm. You just keep that cane coming.”
So Curtis kept the cane coming. But between pressings, Ike ran an upturned bucket out to Elmo and made him sit and drink a glass of Mom’s sweet tea. Elmo let him, which tells you how tired he was.
Right after noon, I looked down the drive and saw Brother Tim walking up from the road.
He’s our pastor, a tall young man of forty with three little girls, and he had parked down at the mailbox because there was nowhere left to park in the yard.
Behind him, a little ways back, were more people. And behind them, more still.
They were the people who had been at the bazaar that morning, coming up Mom’s driveway in a long, slow, easy line, the way people walk up to a dinner on the grounds.