Grandma Came Home to Pine Fork

What He Said

Lowell sat. He set the plate down. He did not eat any of it for a while. He sat with his big scarred hands on the table and looked at the oaks and the church and the hill with the cedars where his daddy is buried.

Dovie was the first one to speak to him. She reached across the table and patted his wrist, the way you would pat a boy.

“We’ve missed her, Lowell,” she said. “Five months. Five months of Sundays that seat sat empty.”

“I know it, Miss Dovie,” he said.

“I don’t believe you did,” she said, not unkindly. “I believe you do now.”

He nodded. He did not argue with her. You do not argue with Dovie Shepherd at Pine Fork, not at 64 and not at any age.

Then he looked at me. I was standing behind Grandma’s chair. I had not sat down since he came up the hill.

“She didn’t fall,” he said.

“No, sir. Not once. I had her by the arm the whole way.”

He looked at his mother, at her earrings, at her navy dress, at the way she was sitting up straight in that chair. I think he was seeing what I had been seeing all summer, except in reverse.

“I didn’t know she was like this,” he said quietly. “Down there. I didn’t know she’d gotten so quiet. I thought she was just tired.”

“She was homesick, Uncle Lowell.”

“I was trying to keep her,” he said, and then he stopped, and I watched him hear the word he had used. “Keep her safe,” he said. “I meant keep her safe.”

“I know you did,” Grandma said. “I know exactly what you meant, son. I was there too, the day your daddy fell. I was the one who found him.”

What She Said

I had never heard my grandmother talk about that day. I don’t think Lowell had either. He turned and looked at her.

“I came home from the quilting and he was laying by the tractor,” she said. “I sat down on that frozen ground and held his head in my lap till the ambulance came. I know what it is to be scared, Lowell.”

The people around us had gone quiet again, but it was a different kind of quiet now. Nobody was looking at Lowell anymore. They were looking at their plates.

“But your daddy would have rather fell in that barn lot than lived thirty years in a room,” she said. “And so would I. You can’t keep me from dying, son. Nobody can. You can only keep me from living till I do.”

Lowell put his hand over his eyes. He sat that way for a long time. My grandmother reached over with her good hand and laid it on the back of his neck, the way she must have done when he was small.

Jesse stood behind his father’s chair with one hand on his shoulder. He did not say a thing. He did not need to.

After a while Lowell took his hand down and wiped his face with a dish towel Mae had set by his plate without anybody seeing her do it.

“I’m sorry, Mama,” he said.

“I know it,” she said. “Eat your dinner. Mae’s chicken is getting cold.”

And he ate. He ate every bite of that plate, chicken and beans and egg and biscuit, while his mother and Dovie Shepherd went back to talking about people who had been dead fifty years.

The Old Men

Before we left, the two old brothers who had walked Grandma up the church steps that morning came over to the head of the table. They stood with their caps in their hands.

“Lowell,” the older one said, “your daddy helped us put the roof on our barn in 1964. Took him a week and he wouldn’t take a dime.”

“I remember,” Lowell said. “I carried shingles.”

“Well,” the old man said. He turned his cap around once in his hands. “We’ll be glad to see your mama any Sunday. And you. You know where we are.”

That was all. They shook his hand, one and then the other, and went back to their truck. That is how men up here tell you they have forgiven you. They tell you they will see you on Sunday.