The Year the Suppers Never Stopped

The daylight woodpile

When the first Saturday of October came, I called Odessa. I told her to tell the women I would be stacking wood in the daylight this year. At eight o’clock in the morning, with my truck in plain sight.

I did not know what I was doing. I only knew I could not stack another cord in the dark for people who had already been watching me.

At seven-thirty, Clovis Dotson pulled up in his tractor with Caleb on the fender. Six more church men came behind him with splitting mauls.

By eight o’clock there were fourteen people in Cleo’s yard, and every widow I had ever stacked for sat in a lawn chair on her own porch with a quilt in her lap, watching.

I swung the maul with the whole church looking on, and I will tell you that it was harder than any wood I ever split. Every swing, I felt the women’s eyes. It made my hands feel clumsy as a boy’s.

By noon we had stacked all six cords.

Irene Fitzwater had a table set up in Cleo’s yard with a ham and a pan of corn pudding and a stack cake, and they made me sit down on a tailgate with a plate in my hand while fourteen people stood around and told me, one after another, thank you.

I had spent nineteen years dreading that word.

It was like being handed a whole armload of hot dishes. I did not know where to put them. I stood there with my plate and said it back. “You’re welcome. You’re welcome, Ruth Ann. You’re welcome, Mavis.”

It was harder than splitting oak. It was also the best day’s work I ever did.

Cleo sat in her lawn chair with her face turned to the sun. When I said it to her, she said, “I’ll tell you something, Lowell. A man who gives and never takes is only half a man. And a man who takes and never gives is only half a man too. You’ve been working on your second half all year.”

I said, “I guess I have.”

“Evie’d be mighty proud,” Cleo said.

The last supper in the ledger

Winter came. On the ninth of January, one year to the day, I got up before daylight and opened a cookbook for the first time in my life.

It was Evie’s, the old Betty Crocker with the cracked red cover. Verna had been coming on Tuesdays since August, teaching me, one dish at a time, standing at my elbow and never once touching the spoon.

By Christmas I could make soup beans and cornbread and stuffed cabbage that would pass.

I made soup beans. The way I’d been fed them on the first night. Ham hock, a pinch of sugar, a long slow simmer, and cornbread in Evie’s black skillet, her skillet, the one she’d had since 1971.

I invited everybody. Odessa and Clovis. Cleo, Irene, Verna, Lorena, Mavis, and Ruth Ann. Bonnie and Caleb. Tammy flew in with the grandbabies. Darlene drove Cleo.

By five-thirty, my kitchen had fourteen people in it, with chairs from the church basement set up in the hallway, and Biscuit lying across the doorway where he could watch everyone at once.

I will be honest about it. The beans were too salty. The cornbread was burnt on one side, a little, because I was watching everybody and not the skillet.

They ate every bite.

Seven rules, and I had lived under six of them for a year. When the last bowl was scraped, Odessa set down her spoon, and she looked down the table at all of them, and she said, “Rule seven. Every bite, even if it’s bad.” And they all laughed so hard that Mavis had to put down her napkin.