The Year the Suppers Never Stopped

A man who needs a column

I am a man who needs a column. If a thing is going to cost me, I want to see it written down.

So I drove to the feed store and bought a green ledger book, the kind with a red spine, and I started keeping the record.

I wrote down every evening. The date, the dish, and who I figured had made it, going by the pan or the tire marks.

I told myself it was for Christmas. I would cut every one of those women a cord of oak and call us square.

That was how a man cleared a debt. I wrote it all in my best carpenter’s pencil on the first page. Owed.

I filled five pages by the end of February.

By then I had gotten to know them without ever seeing them, the way you know a neighbor by the sound of her car.

Verna Hamric, who cooked in the school kitchen thirty-one years, sent her dumplings with a recipe card tucked under the lid, the amounts written out, in case I ever wanted to try it myself.

Lorena Cutlip always sent a jar of pickled beets on the side. “For the plate,” her note said. “Not for the table.”

Mavis Cogar is eighty-four and cannot drive anymore. Clovis carried her pepperoni rolls, thirty-six of them, lined up in a pan like soldiers on parade.

Irene Fitzwater sang under her breath on my porch. I could hear her through the door, a hymn about a harbor, always the same two lines, and she was gone before I could get my boots on.

I did not say thank you to any of them. Not once. I am telling you this plainly. I had decided that if I did not say it, I did not owe it, and I held to that like a man holding a rail.

I weighed myself in February. I was down eighteen pounds. I am telling you that so you will understand it was not pride that kept me alive. It was the beans.

Three words

The ice storm came in the last week of February. It took out the power for two days, and it sheeted the road to my place in glaze so thick that the school bus quit running.

Clovis Dotson and three other men chained up a tractor and plowed my lane before I was even up.

I stood at the window with my coffee and watched them do it. I did not go out. I did not know what I would have said.

At five-thirty that evening, there were two knocks, and they were louder than usual.

I opened the door. There was nobody on the rail, and nobody on the steps, but standing right in the doorway, looking up at me with his breath fogging, was a boy of nine.

He was bundled in a coat two sizes too big, and he held a covered dish out in both hands, as stiff as an altar boy.

“Mr. Skeens?” he said. “I’m Caleb Gum. Mama is Gran Odessa’s girl, and she had to work at the school late, so I’m doing it. Gran Odessa says to tell you something.”

I said, “Does she.”

“She says you don’t have to say nothing. She says you only got to say three words.” He frowned, getting it right. “I’ll take it.”

I held that door a long time.

That boy was nine years old and shivering, and he had walked a quarter mile of ice with a pot of beef stew to say a thing to me that I had not been able to say to a living soul in sixty-six years.

The wind came up the lane. Biscuit pushed his nose against my knee.

“I’ll take it,” I said.

I do not know how to describe what happened in my chest when I said it. It was not like a chain breaking.

It was more like a hand I had held shut so long that it forgot it was a hand, and then somebody laid a bowl in it.

“Yes sir,” said Caleb. He handed me the dish. “Gran said you’d say it in about six weeks. She owes Mama five dollars.”

He ran back down the steps before I could laugh, and I did laugh, on my porch, alone in the dusk, for the first time in forty-four days.

I stood there holding hot stew, and it was the first time since January that I had taken something from someone’s hand.

I ate that supper at the kitchen table, with a real plate and a real fork, and the porch light on.