The Year the Suppers Never Stopped

Three days after we buried my wife, Odessa Dotson climbed my porch steps with a pot in both hands, and I told her what I had told everybody that week.

“I have never taken a handout in sixty-six years, Odessa, and I am not about to start.”

She did not argue. That was the first thing that unsettled me. Odessa has run the kitchen at Laurel Fork Free Will Baptist for thirty years, and she can out-talk a circuit judge.

She looked at my porch rail, the one Evie painted white the summer before last, and she set that pot down on it like she was laying a baby in a crib.

“Then don’t take it, Lowell,” she said. “Just eat it.”

She walked back down the steps and climbed into her husband Clovis’s truck. She never looked back.

I stood there holding the screen door, with the smell of soup beans coming up off that rail, and I was angrier than any man ought to be at a pot of beans.

I want to tell you how that house was that week, because nothing after it makes sense without it.

Evie died on a Friday in January, the ninth, at the hospital in Summersville, with her hand in mine and her heart finally tired out.

We buried her Monday on the hill above the church, in a wind that went straight through my good suit.

For three days the church had loaded my kitchen with food. Hams, rolls, a dozen pies. Cousins came from Beckley and Clarksburg and ate it, and then they all went home.

By Thursday it was me, a fourteen-year-old beagle named Biscuit, and a refrigerator full of other people’s kindness that I could not make myself touch.

Evie cooked every meal for forty-three years. I am not proud of that. I could fry an egg, and I could make coffee that would strip paint off a truck, and that was the whole list.

My daughter Tammy called from Charlotte every night that week. She wanted to take a month off work and come stay. I told her I was fine. I told her I was eating fine.

I was eating saltines and peanut butter standing over the sink. My belt had already gone in a notch.

So when Odessa set that pot on my rail, I did what I always did. I let it sit.

It sat there until dark, the steam going out of it and then not, while Biscuit stood at the screen door and cried at it like it owed him money.

Around nine o’clock I carried it inside. I told myself it was because of the possums.

Under the lid were soup beans cooked down thick with a ham hock, and under the beans, wrapped in a dish towel, a skillet of cornbread with the edges gone crisp and brown.

I stood at the counter and ate the whole thing with a serving spoon.

It was the best food I had put in my mouth since the ninth of January. I was ashamed of how fast I ate it.

Then I washed the pot, dried it, and set it back on the porch rail before bed so nobody could say I had kept it. By morning it was gone.