The Three Acres I Mowed for Nell

When she got to Pop’s stone, she stood there a long time. Then she put her hand flat on top of it, the way you would put your hand on a man’s shoulder when he is sitting at the supper table and you are walking behind him to get the coffee pot.

It was the first time she had been up there since the grass got tall.

I sat on my mower at the bottom of that hill and cried like a child. I’m not ashamed of it.

I sat there and cried, and I said a little prayer of thanks that my knees still worked and my mower still ran, and I let her be.

When she came back down, she didn’t say anything about it, and neither did I. She just said, “You’ll eat something before you drive that thing home,” and it was not a question.

I ate two ham biscuits and a slice of chess pie on her porch, and then I drove the six miles home.

I didn’t tell anybody. I didn’t put it on the internet and I didn’t call my sister. It didn’t feel like the kind of thing you tell.

It felt like the kind of thing you just do, and then go home and take a shower.

But you can’t drive a red mower six miles down a county road in Floyd County without people noticing.

That dump truck driver saw me. The dairy people saw me. Lonzo’s wife saw me. And by Sunday morning, it seemed like half the church had heard.

I sit in the same pew I have sat in since I married into the Hylton family. Nell sits on the end, and I sit next to her.

After the divorce, people wondered whether I would keep coming, and whether I would keep sitting there. I did. Nobody ever said a word about it.

That Sunday, after the last hymn, Lonzo came down the aisle and stopped at the end of our pew.

He had his good hat in his hands. He looked at Nell and then he looked at me.

“Don’t come next Saturday,” he said to me. “I’ve got it.”

That was all he said to me. He said “Morning, Nell” to her, and then he went on out to the parking lot to shake the preacher’s hand.

Then Retta, who has played the piano at our church for thirty years, leaned over the pew behind us and said her husband would take the Saturday after that.

And a young fellow named Opie, who works at the sawmill and mows half the cemeteries in the county, said he’d take the one after that.

Nobody made a speech. Nobody stood up and said anything about how a son ought to treat his mother.

They just said which Saturday was theirs, the way you sign up to bring a casserole to a funeral dinner.

Nell sat there through all of it with her pocketbook in her lap and didn’t say anything.

But when we got out to the car, she held onto my arm a little longer than she needed to before she let go.

I want to say something about this, because I think it matters. None of those people were trying to shame Brent.

Floyd County is not like that. Most of them have known Brent since he was a baby. Lonzo taught him how to pull a calf.