The Home Place Mama Told Everyone About

Eleven Doors

Hester Tungate was first, because she was Mama’s oldest friend and I could not have started with anybody else. She is eighty-six and lives in the brick house with the green awnings. She took the wax paper off the slice and smelled it before she said a word.

“Ora’s,” she said. “She never would give me that recipe.”

I asked my question. Hester laid her crochet down on her knee.

“At Homemakers, the spring of ’21,” she said. “Ora came in with that white cane she hated, and she said, ‘Hester, the house is Treva’s, she earned it, and the ground stays whole for both of them.’ She cried when she said it. Ora never cried in public.”

“Why are you asking, honey?”

I told her whose name was on the deed. Hester did not say a word. She stood up, slow, and went to the hall closet for her shoes.

“Where are you going?” I said.

“I don’t know yet,” she said. “I’m putting on my shoes.”

Lucian Atwood owns the feed store on the Greensburg road, and I found him stacking mineral blocks in the back. He heard me out and went red from the collar up.

“Right there,” he said, pointing his chin at the blocks. “In March. She said, ‘Lucian, if anything happens to me, you know who the house is for.’ I said I did.” He pulled the bill of his cap down. “I’d have said it to a judge.”

“I’m not asking you to say it to a judge.”

“Then who am I saying it to?”

“Nobody,” I said. “I just needed to know I wasn’t crazy.”

“Treva,” he said, “you are the sanest woman on this road.”

Hobart Lasley is ninety-one and was sitting on his porch in a barn coat in the afternoon sun, with a blanket across his knees. He ate his slice with a fork, in four careful bites. Then he told me the thing that settled my stomach and broke my heart in the same breath.

“Homecoming of ’22,” he said. “On the church lawn, by the pie table. Your mother said it loud enough for the Methodists to hear. ‘The house is Treva’s, and the ground stays whole.’ And your brother was standing right there holding a deviled egg.”

“Hershel heard her,” I said.

“Hershel heard her. And he said, ‘Yes, Mama.’ I heard him say it. I’m old, Treva. I’m not deaf.”

That was the part I could not set down. It was not that Mama had forgotten to tell him. She had told him in front of a hundred people, and he said yes.

Eleven doors, and the same story eleven times in eleven different kitchens. Some of them cried. Not one of them had to stop and think. By Wednesday I had quit saying whose name was on the deed. They told me before I got the wax paper off.