What Hershel Said
I drove to Exie the next morning before work. Hershel and his wife, Pauletta, live in a brick ranch on four acres with a metal shop out back. He was in the shop, sharpening mower blades on the bench grinder, sparks coming off in a fan.
My brother is sixty-two, a big man in a seed-store cap with hands like feed shovels. He is a deacon at Cane Run Baptist, and he sings bass in the Homecoming quartet. At the funeral he read Psalm 121 in a steady voice, and I cried all the way through it, because I thought I was hearing the voice of a grieving son.
He shut off the grinder when he saw my face.
“I saw the deed,” I said.
He wiped his hands on a red rag, one finger at a time. It took him longer than a man needs.
“Mama wanted it simple,” he said. “One name on it. Easier for the taxes.”
“It says love and affection.”
“That’s just the words you use.”
“Who typed the words, Hershel?”
“I got a form off the computer. It’s legal, Treva. It’s recorded.”
“Who signed Mama’s name?”
He looked at me then, straight on, the way a man looks when he has made up his mind. “She signed it. Zelma Roark stamped it. Ask anybody in that office.”
I thought about the O pinched shut like a mouth, and I did not say it. A man who is ready for one argument is not ready for the next one.
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“You and Neal can stay through the winter,” he said. “I’m not a monster.”
“I know you’re not.”
“I’ve got obligations, Treva. A man has obligations you don’t know about. Not everybody gets to sit home with Mama.”
That one landed. I stood in the door of his shop with the smell of hot metal in my nose, and I felt it go all the way down.
I did not raise my voice. A raised voice is a gift to a man like Hershel, because it lets him turn into the one who was wronged. I said, “I’ll see you at church,” and I drove to work and sat at the front desk for six hours with a copy of that deed folded in my smock pocket.