Grandma Came Home to Pine Fork

The first time I heard my uncle tell my grandmother no, she was whispering into the phone so he would not hear her asking me.

“Ivy, honey, is Homecoming still the second Sunday in August?” Her voice was thin and careful, the way you talk in somebody else’s house when you are not sure which walls are listening.

Before I could answer, I heard him in the background. Uncle Lowell has a voice that carries, a big flat voice that he got from his daddy and never learned to turn down.

“Mama, who are you talking to? If that’s about church again, I already told you. It’s too far. You’ll go to church down here or you won’t go.”

There was a long pause on the line. I could hear a television, and an air conditioner running hard against a Charlotte June, and my grandmother breathing.

“It’s just Ivy,” she said to him. Then, to me, so quiet I had to press the phone to my ear: “I’d better go, honey. You tell everybody I said hey.”

She hung up before I could tell her anything at all. I sat on the edge of my bed in my scrubs, still smelling like the emergency room, and looked at the phone for a long time.

My grandmother’s name is Zelma Brackins. She was 91 that summer. She had gone to Pine Fork church every Sunday for 80 years, from the summer she was baptized at eleven.

She was baptized in the creek below that church in a white dress her mother sewed. She married my granddaddy in the front of it. She buried him on the hill above it, under the cedars, where she meant to lie down beside him someday.

Pine Fork is a white frame church at the head of a cove in Alleghany County, up in the far northwest corner of North Carolina, where the Blue Ridge folds over itself and the roads give up on being straight.

Every second Sunday in August, Pine Fork has Homecoming. People who moved off to Winston-Salem and Greensboro and Ohio come home. There is preaching, singing, and then dinner on the grounds.

The men set up plank picnic tables end to end under the oaks, and the women cover them with burlap cloths and then with dishes until you cannot see the wood. The table runs eighty feet. I know because Granddaddy measured it once with a tape.

My grandmother had not missed a Homecoming in 80 years. She had not missed one when she was carrying my daddy or the August after Granddaddy died.

Now she was in a spare bedroom outside Charlotte, 200 miles from that table, whispering into a phone so her own son would not hear her ask about it.