The Year the Suppers Never Stopped

Darlene got out and came around with the walker. It took them four minutes to get Cleo up my porch steps, with Darlene on one side and the post on the other. I stood there with my mouth open, unable to move.

“Sit down, Lowell,” Cleo said. “Darlene, bring my chair.”

Darlene had the pot already. A big black kettle of soup beans, and a skillet of cornbread wrapped in a towel, set on the rail. She lifted the towel, and I could see the cornbread was too brown on one side, almost burnt.

“I couldn’t see the stove,” Cleo said. “Darlene read me the recipe, and I did the stirring. It took us all day. It is too salty. I couldn’t see the salt.”

I could not say a word.

“I asked Odessa for the Tuesday,” Cleo said. “She said I couldn’t. I said I’d crawl up your steps if I had to. I have wanted my turn for six months.”

She felt for the arm of the chair, and Darlene steadied her down into it. Cleo folded her ruined hands in her lap and turned her face toward me, though she could not see it.

“I’m eighty-eight,” she said. “I’m going to tell you something once, and then I’m going to go home. It is about your woodpile.”

What Cleo knew

I stood there on my own porch with my hands hanging.

“Nineteen Octobers,” Cleo said. “The first Saturday, four o’clock in the morning. I heard that truck turn off the road with its lights out. You thought we were asleep.”

“Cleo,” I said.

“I slept light after Elmer died. I would lie there and listen to you split oak in the dark. I could hear every swing. And then I would get up and sit at the kitchen window with the lamp off, and I would watch your headlamp go back and forth across my yard, and I never once turned on the light.”

Her voice shook. “Nineteen years I never said a word.”

I sat down on the top step. I do not remember deciding to.

“Every one of us knew,” she said. “Irene knew. Verna knew. Every widow you ever stacked for sat in her dark kitchen and watched you do it. We never told, because your wife told us not to.”

I said, “Evie?”

“Evie came to my house the very first October. I was sixty-nine, and still had my own sight. She stood in my kitchen with a lemon pie, and she said, Cleo, my husband is going to do a kind thing and he will die before he lets anybody say so. Let him. Don’t thank him. If you thank him, he’ll quit.”

I put my face in my hands.

“She brought me a pie every October after that,” Cleo said, “from nobody. Left it on the step. Nineteen pies.”

Nobody spoke. A whippoorwill started up across the road, early. Biscuit came and laid his chin on my boot.

“Lowell.” Cleo reached out, hand shaking, until Darlene guided it to my shoulder. “Nobody has been feeding you. Do you understand me? We have been letting you be fed the only way you would stand for. Your wife worked it out in the hospital in December.”

Darlene had a folded paper out of her purse. She put it into my hand.

It was a church bulletin from Laurel Fork Free Will Baptist, one of the copies Odessa had run off on the library machine, so worn from folding and unfolding that it had gone soft as cloth.