The Last Vat at Pike Lick

The last wheel

Truett was sitting on the tailgate of his truck with Wren asleep across his lap. He did not say anything when I sat down beside him. After a while he moved over to make room, and that was enough for one day.

At dusk Tamsin called us back inside for the last wheel. She had the old brass stamp in her hand, the one we pressed into the rind of every wheel so the buyer would know who made it.

It carries the maker’s initials, and for forty years they were mine.

“Whose mark goes on this one?” she said.

I had thought about it all afternoon. “Cyrus Gentry’s,” I said. “He made the best cheese in the building. He taught me to read the curd.”

She looked at me a long moment. Then she turned the stamp to the other initials and pressed them into the rind herself, in front of what was left of the crew.

The wheel will age a year in the co-op’s warehouse over in Lebanon, Kentucky. Tamsin said she will cut it with her grandfather’s knife next fall and mail a wedge to Hamilton, Ohio, whether anyone writes back or not.

What came after

Everything was not mended, and I will not lie to you again.

Some people in town will not look at me. A good many others came to the door with a casserole and no words, which in that county is the highest honor there is.

Truett came over on a Sunday and sat in the porch swing and said nothing for an hour, and at the end of it he put his hand on my back.

Delwin cashed the check on Monday. The week after, he stood on my porch in his feed cap and asked if I would like to ride out and see the old milk route. We are going Sunday. Neither of us says much.

Before Billie drove off that day, she stopped at Carol’s lawn chair. Carol told me on the dock, with her blanket over her knees.

“She said to tell you one thing,” Carol said. “Her daddy ordered a block of Pike Lick Sharp by mail every Christmas of his life. That’s all she said. She did not say what she meant by it.”

I do not know what she meant. I have turned it over a hundred times. It may be that he forgave me, or it may be that he just liked cheese.

I have decided it does not matter, because I did not do it to be forgiven.

I have done a good many things in my life I am proud of.

But the thing I am proudest of, and it is a strange thing to say, is that I put down a paper plate one afternoon and said a true sentence out loud.

It cost me a plaque and a knife and thirty-one thousand dollars and a few friends, and some nights it still costs me sleep.

It gave me back my wife’s hand in mine, and my son on the tailgate beside me.

And somewhere on a shelf in Lebanon, Kentucky, a wheel of Pike Lick Sharp is turning slowly in the dark with one man’s mark pressed into the rind, and it is the right one.