Grandma Came Home to Pine Fork

The Plate

Jesse picked up an empty paper plate off the stack at the end of the table. He took a fork and a napkin. Then he walked down the slope to meet his father.

I watched them meet in the grass about thirty feet from the table. Jesse did not hug him. He did not say anything that I could hear. He just held out that plate.

Lowell looked at it. He looked at his son for a long moment. Then he took it.

Jesse turned and walked back up toward the table, and his daddy followed him, holding that plate in both hands like he did not know what it was for.

At the head of the table, my grandmother set down her fork.

She looked at her son walking toward her through all those people, and I could not read her face, and I have read a lot of faces in fourteen years of emergency nursing.

Then Mae stepped out from behind the table with a serving spoon. She did not say anything either. She put a piece of fried chicken on Lowell’s plate, and a spoon of beans, and a biscuit.

The next woman put on potato salad. The next one put on a deviled egg. All the way up the side of that table, the women of Pine Fork filled his plate, one spoon each, without one word.

By the time he got to the head of the table, his plate was so full he had to hold it with both hands, and his face had gone red from the neck up.

He stopped in front of his mother.

“Mama,” he said. That was all he could get out.

My grandmother looked up at him for a long time. Then she patted the empty bench beside her with her good hand.

“Sit down, son,” she said. “You missed the blessing.”