The Home Place Mama Told Everyone About

Zelma

Zelma Roark came to the house on Saturday evening, and she came alone, carrying a pound cake wrapped in foil, the way women in this county carry apologies.

She stood on my back porch with the light drawing moths around her head. She is sixty-four, with reading glasses on a beaded chain, and she has used the same notary stamp for thirty-one years. She would not come in. She held that cake the whole time.

“Nelda called me,” she said. “She told me you’d been. I want you to know I have wanted to come since the funeral notice ran in the paper.”

“Zelma, you don’t owe me anything.”

“I do.” She took a breath. “A notary takes an acknowledgment. That is the whole job. The person says, that is my signature, I signed it. Your mother did not say it. She nodded. I had been told she signed it. And Hershel Embry has brought me deviled eggs at the church supper every year since 1991, so I took his word and her nod, and I put my stamp on it.”

“She looked at me, Treva. Before she nodded. She turned her face to me in those dark glasses, and I couldn’t see her eyes, and I knew she was asking me something. I have turned it over every night since. I stamped it anyway. In thirty-one years it is the only stamp I would take back.”

She held out the pound cake. I took it, and she put her hand over her mouth.

“I can’t unstamp it,” she said. “But I can say it. To anybody. Where do you want me to say it? A courtroom?”

I told her the truth, that I had not decided. “I’m not going to court, Zelma. Mama spent her whole life keeping that ground out of courthouses.”

“Then where?”

“I don’t know yet.”

She stood a minute under the porch light. “Homecoming is Sunday week,” she said. “Nelda hasn’t missed one since 1963. I’ll drive her.”

I opened my mouth, and she shook her head. “You didn’t ask me to,” she said. “I know you didn’t.”

One Chance

I went to Hershel’s the next Sunday after church. I took no cake. I took nothing but what I had to say.

Pauletta’s car was gone. He was sitting on the back step with a glass of tea, in his church trousers with his tie pulled loose, and he looked ten years older than he had at the funeral.

“Pauletta says people are talking,” he said. “She says you’ve been door to door.”

“I answered a question,” I said. “Eleven times.”

“What’s the question?”

“I don’t have one. I have an offer. Take that deed to Zelma’s window yourself. Sign it back the way Mama said, the house to me and the ground to the both of us, and nobody will hear another word about it from me. Not the church, not Pauletta, not Neal.”

He looked out at the pasture. Something was moving behind his face, and for a moment I thought he was going to say yes.

“It’s recorded, Treva,” he said. “It’s mine. She signed it.”

“Hershel.”

“You don’t know what I’m carrying.”

“Then tell me.”

“I can’t.”

I stood up off the step. “Homecoming is next Sunday,” I said. “You’ll stand up and bless the food, like you do every year. I’d like to see you do it with a clear conscience.”

“I’ll do it,” he said, “with the one I’ve got.”