Forty Brushes for Mom’s White Fence

Mom could not stay off the fence. I tried. I brought a lawn chair down to the gate for her, and she sat in it for about ten minutes and then got up.

Corliss handed her a brush. “Just the top board, Miss Bernice,” she said. “This one by the gate. You don’t have to bend.”

So Mom stood at the gate post in her light blue denim shirt with her short silver hair shining in the sun and painted the top board in long slow strokes, the way Daddy used to, and every time somebody walked past she told them who they were.

“That’s Mozelle. She could say the whole twenty-third Psalm when she was ten. That’s Pruett. He was scared of the dark and I let him hold the flashlight on the hayride.”

I do not think she stopped smiling once that whole day. I had not seen her smile like that since the funeral.

Her face was pink from the sun and there was paint on her wrist and she did not care one bit.

The kids were the best part. They had paint on their elbows and their shoes and the mare’s nose, because the mare came up close to the fence to see what all the fuss was and one of Corliss’s boys reached through and patted her with a wet hand.

The mare did not mind. She stood there with a white spot on her nose for the rest of the afternoon, eating grass, and every child there had to come look at her.

One little girl, maybe six, painted the same twelve inches of bottom board for almost an hour. Her mother tried to move her down. She would not go. “I’m making it really, really good,” she said.

Mom heard that. She went over and bent down as far as her knees would let her and said, “That is the best part of the whole fence.” The little girl looked at her like she had been handed a ribbon at the county fair.

At lunch we ate on tailgates. People had brought sandwiches and chips and a slow cooker of barbecue somebody plugged into the barn.

Mom’s two sheet cakes were gone in fifteen minutes. Somebody’s husband said grace over the whole crowd standing in the drive.

After lunch is when Corliss came and found Mom.

She had a manila envelope. She said she had almost forgotten it in the car. She opened it and slid out a photograph, an eight by ten, curled at one corner.

It was the class of 1989. Twelve children lined up on the front steps of the church, the girls in Easter dresses and the boys with their hair wet down, and Mom on the end, forty-four years old, with her hand on the shoulder of the littlest girl.

The littlest girl was Corliss.