Four Hundred Came to Watch It Boil

Brother Tim came up to me at the porch, a little out of breath from the hill. He looked at the mill and the steam rising off the pan in the sunlight, and shook his head slowly.

“Wanda,” he said quietly, “it’s awful quiet down at the bazaar.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I didn’t say anything.

Mom had heard him. She set the paddle across the corner of the pan and looked past him, down the drive, at all those people coming.

Then she wiped her hands on her apron, real slow, the way she does before she shakes a hand.

“Well, Brother Tim,” she said. “You’re just in time. We’re fixing to take the first batch off.”

He laughed and went over to her, and she put a cane stub in his hand and pointed him to the skimming bucket like he was nine years old, and he went.

I found out later how it went at the bazaar. My friend Reba from the clinic had a booth there selling crocheted dishcloths. She said the morning was busy with town people buying candles and wreaths.

But a little after eleven, people started asking where the molasses table was. Somebody said it was up at Pearl’s, pressed with a mule, the old way.

By lunch the old folks were folding their chairs, and the church people went right behind them.

“It was half empty by one o’clock,” Reba told me. “Those craft girls just sat there. I felt bad for Tiffany. I did. She stood at the door and watched them go.”

I want to be fair here. I didn’t plan that. I didn’t plan for anybody to leave anything. I put up two cards and told the truth on them. Everything after that, people did on their own.

Around one o’clock I heard a truck door shut down at the road, and up the drive came my brother.

Ronnie had his son Lowell with him, and Lowell had his little boy, Quentin, riding on his shoulders. Quentin is six.

He’s Ronnie’s grandson, which makes him Mom’s great-grandson, and he is the only person on this earth who can make my mother get down on the floor.

Ronnie came up slow, with his hands in his jacket pockets. He looked at the mill a long time. He looked at Dolly. Then he looked at me.

“I didn’t know you were doing this,” he said.

“It was on the radio, Ronnie.”

“I don’t listen to the swap shop.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Tiff’s down there. She’s real upset.”

“I’m sorry she’s upset,” I said, and I meant it. “We’re making molasses. Mom said every dime goes to the roof.”

Ronnie looked over at the porch, where I had a coffee can sitting on the table beside the jars with a piece of masking tape on it that said Roof in my handwriting. Then he looked at the woodpile, which was getting low.

He took off his jacket, picked up Curtis’s maul, and started splitting wood. He didn’t say anything else for an hour. Curtis nodded at him once when he came by, and that was all those two needed.

My brother is not a bad man. He’s married to a woman who wanted something good and went about it wrong, and he didn’t know how to stand between his mother and his wife, so he stood at the woodpile.

Lowell set Quentin down, and Quentin ran straight for his Mamaw Pearl at the pan.