Grandma Came Home to Pine Fork

Dinner on the Grounds

The men had the picnic tables set up under the oaks before the service ever started. Jesse was among them. He gave me a nod across the yard and went back to laying boards.

When I walked Grandma out the side door, the women were already carrying out the food. They came in a line from the cars, every one of them with a dish wrapped in a dish towel, and they set them down end to end.

There was fried chicken, and country ham, and green beans cooked all morning with a piece of fatback. There were deviled eggs on a dozen different plates, potato salad, slaw, corn, and three kinds of cornbread.

There were biscuits, and sliced tomatoes off somebody’s vines, and chicken and dumplings, and a pan of blackberry cobbler that a woman named Mae had picked the berries for herself on the bank behind her barn.

By noon you could not see one inch of that eighty-foot table. It was a sunny August noon, not a cloud over the Blue Ridge, and the shade from those oaks was the coolest place in the county.

At the head of the table there was one spot on the bench with a cushion on it. That seat has always gone to the oldest member of Pine Fork at Homecoming. For the last nine years, that has been my grandmother.

Mae came over and took Grandma’s arm. Mae is about my mother’s age, and she has run the kitchen at Pine Fork for twenty years. She did not ask. She just took her arm.

“Miss Zelma,” she said, “your seat’s been sitting there all morning waiting on you.”

And she walked my grandmother the whole length of that eighty-foot table, past every family in the cove, to the head of it, and sat her down on that cushion, and stepped back.

Dovie sat down on the bench to her right. I took the place on the other side of Dovie, and Jesse went to stand with the men.

The Blessing

When everybody had found a place, the preacher asked the oldest deacon to return thanks. He is a man in his eighties who still runs a sawmill, and his voice is like gravel in a bucket.

Everybody bowed their heads. And I saw, out of the corner of my eye, Dovie reach over and take my grandmother’s hand, and my grandmother’s fingers close around hers.

They held hands through the whole blessing. The deacon thanked the Lord for the rain and the hay and the people who had come home, and then he thanked Him for bringing Zelma back, and his voice caught there.

When he said amen, they did not let go. They sat there holding hands at the head of that table like two girls on a school bench.

Later that afternoon Dovie told me why. She said that at the first Homecoming either of them could remember, they were little girls, and they got lost from their mothers in the crowd.

They found each other by the oaks, she said, and held hands until somebody came for them. And every Homecoming after that, close to eighty of them now, they had held hands through the blessing.

“Every one,” Dovie said. “Every one but this year’s, if you hadn’t brought her.”

I had to go stand behind the church for a minute after she told me that. I am an emergency room nurse. I do not cry easily. I stood back there by the propane tank until I could quit.