The Home Place Mama Told Everyone About

Arithmetic

I called a lawyer on my lunch break. A nice young man in Greensburg said he would need $6,000 to start, that it could run a year or two if Hershel hired somebody, and that the whole case would come down to what my mother intended. Then he asked who could testify to that.

“Mama,” I said.

“Ma’am,” he said, very gently.

That night Neal listened to all of it with his boots still on. Then he laid his big hands flat on the table and said he would drive over to Exie and have a word with my brother. I know what Neal’s words look like. I asked him to wait.

I did the arithmetic at the kitchen table that night, with a pencil, the way Mama would have. A lawsuit meant six thousand dollars and two years, with the home place tied up in court while the hay went uncut and the pasture went to thistle. It meant Mama’s two living children on opposite sides of the room where she had paid her car tags for fifty years. And at the end of it, a judge would have to decide what Mama meant.

Mama had already answered that question. She answered it for anybody who would stand still. She said it on the church lawn, in the Homemakers’ room, and over the counter at the feed store. The will was not missing. It was spread up and down Cane Run Road in about twenty heads, and not one of them had been asked.

Mama’s Stack Cake

Mama’s recipe card for apple stack cake is taped to the inside of the cabinet door. Dried apples cooked down with cinnamon and allspice. Six thin layers of sorghum cookie, baked one at a time in the black skillet. And at the bottom, in her lasso hand: Never cut it the day you bake it. It is not a cake yet. It is a pile of cookies and a promise.

She used to say a stack cake needs three days to settle, so the apple can soak down through every layer. You cannot hurry it. “Folks who try,” she said, “end up with cookies.”

I baked the first one Thursday night and the second on Friday. By Sunday morning the first had settled the way it should. I cut it into slices, wrapped each one in wax paper, and set them in Mama’s cake carrier.

Neal said he would drive. He had no idea what I was doing, and he did not ask. That is one of the reasons I married him.

Cane Run Road runs eleven miles with farms on both sides, and I knew every family on it. I had one question, and I asked it eleven times over five days. Did Mama ever tell you what she wanted done with the home place?

I never said what Hershel had done. I did not need to. The deed room is the best-read newspaper in Green County, and by Monday noon half the road already knew.