The Home Place Mama Told Everyone About

Dinner on the Grounds

Cane Run Baptist Church was built in 1889, white frame, with a steeple the lightning has hit twice. Every second Sunday in October it feeds about a hundred and forty people on the lawn. The long tables go up under the maples with the leaves at their peak. Fried chicken, green beans cooked all morning with a ham hock, corn pudding, deviled eggs, and a dessert table thirty feet long. Mama and Daddy are buried in the cemetery behind the church, and I could see their stone from where I sat.

I sat at the end of the third table with Neal on one side and Hester on the other. In my lap, in wax paper, was a slice of a fresh cake I had baked that Thursday.

Hershel came out of the church in his good gray suit with the deacon’s pin in his lapel. The quartet had already sung. He walked to the head of the tables the way he had for eleven years and waited for the talk to settle. Pauletta sat three seats down from him, small and pleasant in a lavender cardigan, with no idea.

“Let’s bow our heads,” Hershel said.

Every head went down but a few. Mine stayed up. I watched my brother’s lips begin to move.

“Hershel.”

The voice came from the middle of the second table, thin and clear. Hobart Lasley was standing, and it took him a while, because he had to push himself up on his cane.

“Before you ask the Lord to bless this food,” Hobart said, “I’d like you to tell these folks whose name is on Ora’s land.”

Nobody coughed. A child asked a question, and somebody hushed it.

“Hobart,” Hershel said. “This isn’t the place for it.”

“It’s the place she said it. Right over there by the pie table. You were holding a deviled egg.”

Hester stood up beside me. She is five feet tall and has never in her life interrupted a prayer. “She told me too, Hershel,” she said. “At Homemakers, with six women listening.”

“And in my store,” Lucian Atwood said from the back.

My brother’s face had gone the color of hay. “It’s all legal,” he said. “It’s recorded. Mama signed it.”

“Hershel, I was by the vending machine.”

That was Nelda Cundiff. She and Zelma were standing at the church gate with their pocketbooks over their arms, and I do not know how long they had been there. They came up the gravel slowly, and Nelda’s voice carried clear across that lawn without being raised.

She told it the way she had told me, only shorter. The lobby, the pen on his knee, the dark glasses, the nod. She did not embellish it, and she did not look at me once. When she finished, nobody spoke.

Then Zelma Roark said, “I stamped it, and I should not have.” Her pocketbook shook on her arm. “She looked at me first. I have to carry that.”

Pauletta stood up. She did it slowly, one hand on the table, like a woman getting out of a boat.

“What deed?” she said.

Hershel did not answer.

“Hershel Embry. What deed?”

He took his time. I watched the deacon’s pin catch the sun, and I watched him decide to stop being the man he had been for sixty-two years, the way you decide to put down something too heavy to carry.