Four Hundred Came to Watch It Boil

“Don’t you run at that fire,” Mom said, catching him by the back of the shirt. “That pan’ll take your hide off. Come here. Come stand by me.”

She stood him on an overturned crate at the head of the pan, so he could see. Then she took the long skimmer off its nail and put the handle in his two little hands, and she put her own hands over his.

“Now,” she said. “We go slow. See that foam there? That’s the bitter coming up. We don’t want the bitter. We just take it off, easy, and give it to the bucket.”

Quentin pushed the skimmer out across the boiling juice with Mom’s hands over his, careful as a boy carrying eggs. A long green ribbon of foam came up on the screen. They swung it together over the bucket and tapped it off.

“There,” Mom said. “That’s how you do it. That’s how my mama showed me. And her mama showed her.”

“Can I do it again?”

“You can do it all day if you want,” she said. “Your great-granddaddy’s watching you do it.”

Quentin looked up at the sky. “Where?”

“Oh, around,” Mom said, and kissed the top of his head, and they skimmed again.

I had to go stand behind the smokehouse a minute after that. Curtis found me there. He didn’t say anything.

He just stood with me until I was done, and then he handed me his handkerchief, which smelled like sawdust and woodsmoke, and we went back.

The first batch came off at a quarter past one.

You know molasses is done by how it comes off the paddle. Thin, it drips. Close, it runs in a stream. Done, it comes off in a slow wide sheet, and the color goes deep red brown, like an old saddle.

Mom lifted the paddle and watched the molasses sheet off the edge. She looked at it the way a jeweler looks at a ring. Then she nodded once. “Pull the fire,” she said.

Curtis and Ronnie pulled the fire out from under that end. Then all of us together tipped the pan and ran the hot molasses through a cloth strainer into clean milk cans.

Mom filled the pint jars on the porch table with a dipper and a funnel, hot, lids on tight so they seal on their own. On every brown paper label she’d written Pearl Seay, Laurel Fork, and the year.

Fifty-three pints out of the first batch. They were gone in forty minutes.

People paid ten dollars a jar into the coffee can, and a lot paid more. One man put in a fifty for two jars and walked off before I could make change.

A little girl brought three crumpled ones and a quarter, and Mom told her it was exactly right.

The people who didn’t get a jar put their names on a sheet of notebook paper I tacked to the porch post, and they stayed for the second batch, eating biscuits and watching Dolly go round.

By two o’clock Ike’s clicker said three hundred and ten. By four, it said four hundred and two. He showed it to his grandmother, and she looked at it a long time and handed it back to him without a word.

The second pan went on at a quarter of two, and Curtis kept pouring fresh juice in at the top as Dolly pressed it. Mom stirred all afternoon. When I tried to take the paddle, she said, “Wanda, I have been stirring molasses since Eisenhower was president. I am not quitting at the end of it.”