The Home Place Mama Told Everyone About

Love and Affection

I found the deed on a Tuesday afternoon in the Green County clerk’s office, three days after we buried Mama, and it said the home place belonged to my brother Hershel and nobody else.

I had gone in for something small. Mama’s property tax bill for the farm always came in October, and I wanted to ask what paper I would need to put the bill in my name now that she was gone. I carried her death certificate in a sandwich bag so it would not get creased.

The girl at the counter was maybe twenty-five, with a lanyard and a sweet way of saying ma’am. She typed Mama’s name into her computer, and her face changed a little. Then she turned the screen toward me, the way you turn a phone to show somebody a baby picture.

“That property transferred in August,” she said. “Did y’all not know?”

Deed Book 388, page 214. Recorded August 19 at 2:41 in the afternoon. Grantor, Ora Mae Embry, a widow. Grantee, Hershel Lee Embry. One hundred twelve acres on Cane Run Road, more or less, with the house, the barn, two tobacco barns, and the pond Daddy dug with a rented dozer in 1974.

I asked for a copy. It was a dollar a page, three pages, and I paid with three bills from my coin purse. My hands did not start shaking until I got to my car.

I read the whole thing twice with the engine off. Down where a deed says what the buyer paid, somebody had typed the words “for and in consideration of love and affection.”

I laughed. I will be honest about that. I sat in my Buick in the courthouse lot and laughed out loud, one bark, like a dog. Then I stopped, because the line below it said “This instrument prepared by Hershel L. Embry,” with his address in Exie, and under that was my mother’s name.

I have known my mother’s signature for fifty-eight years. She learned her letters at the one-room school in Exie in 1944, and her capital O was a big loop, like a lasso. She crossed her t’s with a line that ran clean off the end of the word.

On the deed, the O was pinched small, like a mouth. The whole name leaned to the right, and it read “Ora M. Embry.” Mama never signed her middle name as an initial in her life. She used to say initials were for people hiding something.

I folded the copy and put it in my purse next to her death certificate. One paper said she was gone, and the other said her ground had gone to my brother, and I sat there in the lot trying to work out which one weighed more.