The Sunday Meal the City Tried to Stop

“That makes three hundred,” said Jonah, very quietly, like the number was a bird that might fly off.

“They won’t hear it until Monday,” one of the deacons said at last. “And the park has the notice on it till then. If we serve, we are serving against it.”

“I know,” I said.

“I will tell you what I think,” I said. “I think Luther started this on a Sunday with a card table because nobody else was going to. I think those folks have the right to walk across Mill Street and find somebody glad to see them. And I would rather be written up for feeding a hundred and forty people than be left alone for starving them. We will not touch the pavilion. We will not touch the kitchen or the outlets or the key. We will put our tables on the open grass, in the sun, where everybody on Mill Street can see us. And whatever comes, comes.”

“In the open,” said Pastor Wiley.

“In the open.”

“Then I reckon we ought to pray on it.”

We held hands around my kitchen table, all nine of us, and he prayed. I do not remember a word he said. I remember that Verlie’s hand was thin and dry like paper, and that she squeezed once, hard, at the end.

Sunday morning I woke at four, and by five I was standing in the church kitchen with the lights on and my sleeves rolled to the elbow. A kitchen before a day you are afraid of is quiet. You can hear every spoon. The women came in by six and took down pans without a word about the notice. Green beans cooked slow with a ham hock. Pinto beans. Skillet cornbread. Sweet tea in the big orange coolers. Banana pudding, because Rufus would be looking for it.

At nine we went to church, and I did not hear one line of the sermon. At the end, Pastor Wiley stood up and said, “Folks, lunch will be in the park today, same as always.”

That was all. He sat down. I heard a sound I will never forget, the sound of about two hundred people breathing out at once.

We loaded the trucks in the church lot, and Jonah drove the smoker trailer slow across the three blocks to Fork Park. We pulled up at twenty after eleven. The pavilion stood empty and a little lonely in the sun, with the yellow notice flapping on its post, four staples holding.

The women unfolded tables on the grass. We set them in a long line on the lawn between the pavilion steps and the creek path, in plain sight of the street, thirty feet from the roof and not a single foot under it.

Verlie was already on her bench. She was sitting with her hands folded and her spoon in a paper napkin on her knee, and when she saw me look at her, she lifted her chin about an inch.

At twenty to twelve, a florist’s van pulled up on Mill Street.

I should have expected it. They had paid fair and square, and they had every right to be there. A man hung a banner across the front of the roof that said “She Said Yes.” Then the cars came, one after another, and out of them came thirty-some people in their Sunday best. Prentiss’s wife in a yellow dress. His daughter, a pretty girl of about twenty-five in a white sundress, holding hands with a young man who looked like he had been told to smile and was trying.