The Year the Suppers Never Stopped

Coming back

Summer came on slow and green. The leaves came out. I shaved every morning, which I had quit doing in January, and I replaced the bulb in the porch light that had burned out the day of the funeral.

I started to look like a man somebody lived with. Verna came on a Tuesday afternoon with a flat of tomato plants and a hoe and said, “Evie always put hers in wrong. Let me show you.” I said, “Evie’s tomatoes were the best in the county.” Verna said, “They were, Lowell. She put them in wrong and they grew anyhow.”

I stood in my own garden laughing at that, and then I was not laughing, and Verna kept hoeing, not looking at me, till I was done.

She was as kind as anybody I ever met, and she never once let on she had noticed.

In June, I picked up the telephone on a Sunday and told my daughter the truth.

I told Tammy that I had not been eating saltines.

I told her that for five months, a dozen church women had put supper on my porch every night, that I had fought it like a bear in a trap, and that I had lost, and I was glad of it.

She cried so hard that I had to hold the phone away from my ear. Then she said, “Daddy, why didn’t you tell me?” And I said, “Because I’d have had to admit it.”

She and the grandbabies came for the Fourth of July. Six-year-old Eli ate three helpings of Verna’s dumplings at my own kitchen table, the first time every chair in that room had been full since the Christmas before Evie got sick.

I watched them eat, with Biscuit under the table, and I thought, I have been given this, and I did not earn it, and I am not going to argue.

By then I had stopped writing in the green book. The Owed column was filled to the bottom of the second page. I could not make it come out.

Every evening a pot of something came up the steps, and I could not put a number on it, because a number was not what it was.

It was the week after the Fourth, the eighth of July, that the knock did not come.

The night it did not come

At five-thirty, nothing.

I was in my chair with the television off, and Biscuit lay on the rug with his chin on his paws, one ear turned toward the door. At five thirty-five I got up and stood at the screen door. The porch was empty.

At a quarter to six, I told myself the roads were out. They were not. It had not rained in a week. I told myself somebody was sick. I told myself it was a church meeting.

At six o’clock I was standing on the porch with my arms crossed, looking down the road, and I want you to hear what kind of fool I was. Six months earlier I had sworn I would never take another handout.

Now I was standing at my own screen door, hungry and worried and sorry, angry at a gravel road because a woman with a covered dish had not driven up it.

I had learned to wait for the knock. Somewhere between February and July, I had started to depend on it. It scared me worse than the hospital had.

At ten after six a Buick came up the lane, very slow.

Darlene Mullins Hatfield was driving, and beside her, small as a child in the front seat, sat her mother. Cleo Mullins is eighty-eight years old. The cataracts took most of her sight six years ago, and the arthritis took the rest of her hands.

Cleo is the widow whose woodpile I have stacked, on the north side of her house, every October for nineteen years.