The Home Place Mama Told Everyone About

Zelma’s Window

At eight o’clock Monday morning, Hershel was standing at Zelma’s window with a new deed he had typed himself, the recording fee in one hand and his own pen in the other. Nelda Cundiff sat on the lobby bench with her pocketbook in her lap. She did not eat a cracker.

I stood a little way back, by the doors. Neal had driven me, and he stayed in the truck, because some things a man ought to let a woman walk into by herself.

Zelma asked Hershel to sign in front of her, and he did. She asked, “Mr. Embry, is that your signature, and do you sign it of your own free will?” and Hershel said, “Yes, ma’am, I do,” loud enough for the whole lobby to hear. She stamped it, and her hand was steady this time.

The new deed gave me the house and twelve acres around it, and the other hundred acres to the two of us together, the way Mama said. Hershel will keep cutting the hay on the same shares he has always cut. When he got to the line where the price goes, he typed “love and affection” again. I looked at him. “This time it’s true,” he said, and Zelma looked at the ceiling.

It was not clean, and it was not painless. Lucian and Hobart’s nephew, who is a loan officer at the bank in Greensburg, sat down with Hershel that same week and went through the note line by line. Jarrett sold two of his three trucks. Hershel put his own house up for sale and took it back off the market in the spring, when the numbers finally worked. Nobody lost a roof.

Hershel stepped down as deacon at the November business meeting, in front of the whole church, and he still sings bass in the quartet. Brother Ellis says there is no rule against a man singing once his family has forgiven him. Pauletta came back on Wednesday. That is their business, and I will not write more than that.

The Last Slice

The Sunday after Thanksgiving, Hershel came up the porch steps holding his grandson Micah by the hand, a serious six-year-old in a puffy coat. He stood on the mat with his cap in his fingers and asked whether he could come in.

“It’s your mama’s house,” I said. “You never needed to ask.”

“Does the pantry door still have the marks?” he said.

I got a pencil. The three of us went into the pantry, and Micah stood against the frame with his heels to the baseboard and his chin up, the way children do when they know a thing is serious. Hershel laid the flat of a ruler on top of the boy’s head. His hand was not quite steady.

“Three foot ten,” he said. And then, to me, “Would you write it?”

I wrote it low on the frame, beside the old initials. M, 6, 3 foot 10. Hershel put his thumb on the mark that said H, 1971, in Mama’s slanting hand, and he kept it there a long time. Then he looked up at the ink above the top mark.

“Do not paint,” he said, and his voice broke in the middle. “She never did let Daddy.”

“No,” I said. “She never did.”

I put the kettle on. We sat at Mama’s kitchen table, the three of us, and I unwrapped the cake I had baked on Friday, so it would have its full three days. I cut Micah a slice, and then one for his granddaddy, and one for myself. It was the best one I have ever made. The apple had gone all the way down.

Mama’s rule was never to cut a stack cake the day you bake it. It took me fifty-eight years and one deed to understand she was not only talking about cake.

This story is a dramatization. Names, characters, and details are invented, and any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.