Mom took it in both hands. She had paint on her fingers and she held it by the very edges so she would not smudge it. She did not say anything for a long time.
Then she started at one end and named every child in that picture.
Every one. “Herschel. Orpha. Cleda. Roxie. Sherman, there’s Sherman. Zora. Lettie. Dovie. Floy. Grover. Jethro.” She put her finger just above the last face. “And this is my Corliss.”
“You got every one,” Corliss said. Her voice was not steady.
“Of course I did,” Mom said. “I prayed for every one of them by name every Sunday night for forty years. I still pray for some of them.”
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Three of the children in that picture were standing right there at the fence with paint on their arms.
One of the boys in it had died in a wreck in 1998, and Mom touched his face in the picture without saying anything.
Corliss knelt down in the grass by Mom’s chair and put her head against Mom’s knee, a grown woman near fifty herself, and Mom put her painted hand on her hair. They stayed like that a while. Nobody went near them.
I went around the side of the barn. I am not much of a crier, but I had already cried once that week in a walk-in cooler and I was not going to do it in front of forty people.
When I came back, Mom had the photo propped up on the card table against the lemonade jug, and people were coming by in ones and twos to look at it. Sherman found himself and laughed and said, “Look at those ears.”
By two o’clock the first side was done. By three, they had come back up the inside, the pasture side, and they were most of the way.
The sun was still high and hot and somebody’s radio was playing gospel low from a truck cab.
Somewhere down the line, an older woman started humming “Blessed Assurance.” Another one took it up. Then a man. Not loud, not like church, just like people who know the words and are working with their hands.
Mom stood at the gate and listened. She did not sing. She just stood there with her brush and her eyes shut.
At ten till four, the last board was done. Booker painted it. He stood back and looked at it and said, “Well, Miss Bernice, I reckon that’s my gum paid off.”
I walked out to the road and looked back. Three hundred feet of white board fence, every board, every post, both sides, so bright in the afternoon sun it hurt to look at.
The pasture behind it green as a church lawn. The old mare with a white spot on her nose.
People were cleaning brushes at the hose by the barn. Kids were lying in the grass. A couple of the men had sat down on Dean’s tailgate. It was the kind of tired you feel good about.