Grandma Came Home to Pine Fork

Homecoming

We pulled into the Pine Fork lot at nine thirty. There were already forty cars and trucks parked in the field below the church, and men in short sleeves directing traffic with their hands.

Somebody saw her before I even had the engine off. I heard a woman say, “That’s Zelma,” and then another one say it louder, and then they were coming across the grass.

I helped Grandma down out of the truck. By the time her feet were on the ground there were a dozen people around her, and by the time we reached the church steps there were thirty.

Men who build fence and cut timber and haul cattle for a living took their caps off and took her hands in theirs, one at a time, very gentle, like she was made of glass.

Two of them, a pair of old brothers who still farm at the mouth of the cove, walked her up the church steps between them, one on each arm. I walked behind with my hands ready and never needed them.

And then Dovie Shepherd came down the aisle.

Dovie is 89. She and my grandmother grew up two farms apart in that same cove. They started school the same fall in a one-room schoolhouse and shared a bench for eight years.

Dovie had on a lavender blouse with little pearl buttons, and her white hair was done up in fresh curls.

The two of them did not say anything at first. They just took hold of each other in the aisle of that church and stood there rocking a little, two old women, while everybody found somewhere else to look.

“Five months, Zelma,” Dovie said finally, into my grandmother’s shoulder. “Five months I’ve been calling that house and you can’t talk.”

“I know it,” Grandma said. “I’m here now.”

They sat together on the third pew from the front, left side, which is where my grandmother has sat for as long as anybody can remember. Dovie told me they had kept it empty all summer.

The Service

The preacher at Pine Fork is a young man who drives a school bus during the week. He welcomed everybody home, and then he said, “And we want to welcome home Miss Zelma Brackins, who has been gone too long.”

The whole church stood up. Nobody planned it. A hundred and fifty people stood up in that little white church, and my grandmother sat with her hands in her lap and could not look at any of them.

They sang “When We All Get to Heaven” and “Farther Along” and “I’ll Fly Away.” My grandmother sang alto on every one of them without opening the book. She has never needed the book.

I stood beside her and listened to her voice come back. It was thin at first, and then on the second hymn it got stronger, and by the third one she was holding the long notes out like she used to.

The preacher kept it short, the way a smart preacher does on Homecoming. By a quarter till twelve he said the benediction and we went out into the sun.