The Home Place Mama Told Everyone About

The Woman by the Vending Machine

On Thursday, Hester called me at the clinic. “You go see Nelda Cundiff,” she said. “She is in the courthouse genealogy room every Thursday with her magnifying glass. Thirty-four years she ran that deed room. If a paper moved through that building, Nelda knows who carried it.”

I went on my lunch hour. The genealogy room is in the courthouse basement, a long room that smells of paper and radiator, with the old deed books stacked on rolling shelves. A small white-haired woman in a cardigan sat at the end table with a book open in front of her. She looked up when I came in, and she did not seem surprised.

“Treva Embry,” she said. “I’ve been wondering which of you would walk in.”

“Gaddie now,” I said.

“You’re Ora’s girl. You have her chin.” She closed the book carefully, the way you close a Bible. “Sit down. I owe your mother something.”

I sat. I set a slice of stack cake on the table between us, and Nelda looked at it for a long moment before she began.

“On the nineteenth of August I was in the front lobby,” she said. “I come in Tuesdays and Thursdays, and I was at the vending machine by the doors, getting peanut butter crackers. Hershel came in pushing your mother’s wheelchair. She had those dark glasses on, from the eye doctor. He parked her by the bench and sat down beside her. Then he took a pen out of his shirt pocket and signed a paper on his knee.”

“I saw the top of it. It said Deed. I thought, well, he’s helping her with something.”

Nelda’s hand lay flat on the table. “Then he rolled her up to Zelma’s window. Zelma asked the question she is supposed to ask. ‘Mrs. Embry, is that your signature, and did you sign it of your own free will?’ And your mother turned her head toward her son, Treva, and I watched her think.”

“I have watched people sign away ground for thirty-four years. I know what it looks like when somebody understands what they are doing. Ora did not understand. She said, ‘Hershel, what is that paper?’ And he said, ‘It’s the tax paper, Mama. Just nod to Zelma so she can finish.'”

“And she nodded.”

I could not speak. I had heard it from Mama already, in her own way, on the porch swing.

“She nodded the way you nod at a preacher who has gone ten minutes over,” Nelda said. “She was being polite. She was eighty-eight years old and raised not to make a scene in a public building.”

“And you were thirty feet away,” I said. I did not say it unkindly. It was the only thing left to say.

“I was thirty feet away with a cracker in my hand.” Her eyes were wet, but her voice stayed steady. “I told myself it was family business. I told myself he was a deacon. I have said those sentences to myself every night for two months, and I will tell you, honey, they weigh about as much as that courthouse.”

She reached across the table and put her hand on mine. “I am eighty-one years old. I have not got long left to carry a thing like that. If you want me to say it, I will say it.”

“I didn’t come to make you say anything,” I told her. “I came to find out I wasn’t crazy.”

“You’re not,” she said. “And neither was your mother.”

Then Nelda broke the slice of cake in half and gave me one piece, and we ate it in the basement among the old deeds, and neither of us said anything for a while.