“Pastor, it is writing to me because it bought my pound cake,” I said, and I opened my Bible to Psalm 37 and let the envelope slide out into the light. “Two months ago, they paid me five million dollars for the recipe my mother taught me in Yazoo City. The Sunday Pound Cake of Mother Eula will be in every grocery store in the country by Easter.” The church bells across the street had stopped ringing. Reverend Collins read the letterhead, and his lips moved. Andrea gasped. Lucius, at the head of his own table, put both hands flat on the cloth, as though the room had started to tip.
Pastor Collins set the paper down. He is a gentle man of fifty with a gray beard, and I have never heard him raise his voice from the pulpit or the pew. “Lucius,” he said, “is it true that you told the pension board that your mother had a stroke?” Lucius opened his mouth and nothing came out. “And that you sent them a power of attorney with her name on it?” I looked at my son, the boy I had carried to Sunday school on my hip. He would not meet my eyes. “Mama,” he said at last, “I only wanted to keep it safe.” “From whom, son?” I asked. “From the Lord?”
Andrea pushed her chair back from the table. She is a schoolteacher, and she has a way of standing very straight when she is angry. “Lucius,” she said. “The new church van. You told me it was a love offering from the members.” She said it slowly, so that every person in the room would hear. “Fifty thousand, seven hundred and fifty dollars. From your father. From the pension of a pastor.” Her voice broke. “And we put his name on the side of the van.” Pastor Collins closed his eyes. I had not known until that moment that the van carried the name of Josiah Hargrove on its door.
A pound cake recipe card laid beside an envelope gave one son the weekend to bring his mother back to the pew in Jackson.
I told them my terms with my hand resting on the Bible. The pension would be paid to me again, in my name, beginning the first of the month, and Brother Pugh would receive a letter from my lawyer to correct the records. Lucius would repay the fifty thousand, seven hundred fifty dollars to me in monthly payments for five years. He would step down from the deacon board that very Sunday, and he would not serve communion until the church elders had met with him. And the power of attorney would be torn up in front of the pastor. Lucius nodded, and he wept.
Brother Wendell Pugh drove up from the pension board on Tuesday with a leather briefcase and a very red face. He sat in my kitchen and apologized for twenty minutes. “Mother Hargrove, I should have called you. I knew Josiah thirty years. I knew you. I trusted a signature.” I poured him tea. “Brother Pugh,” I said, “forms are for filing, not for hiding behind. Call the next widow, and ask her yourself.” He wrote that down in his notebook, and I believe he meant it. Before he left, he handed me a check for the full back pension, which the board had located in a drawer, and he kissed my hand.
Lucius came to my door that evening without Andrea. He stood on the porch with his Bible in his hands and his tie pulled loose. He told me he had started with a small amount, for the electric bill, for a tire, and had told himself it was a loan. “It grew, Mama. Every month I told myself it was the last time.” I looked at the son who had been a baby when his father preached his first sermon in that church, and I did not say anything for a long moment. “Lucius,” I said, “I forgive you. That is what I am required to do. But forgiveness is not the same as a key.” He nodded. “I know,” he said.
On Sunday, the deacon board met in the fellowship hall after service. I was not there, but Sister Tillman told me everything on the telephone. Lucius had stood in front of the twelve men, said it all plainly, and handed in his deacon badge. The chairman of the board took it with both hands, and the whole room bowed their heads. Then the oldest deacon, Brother Hollis, who is ninety, spoke softly. “Son, the Lord does not need a perfect man at the table. He needs an honest one.” The next week, Lucius sat at the back of the sanctuary in a plain suit, and Andrea sat beside him, holding his hand.
The money consequences were fair. Lucius sold the church van, which had been bought with the money, and returned the proceeds to the pension board. He took a second job on the night shift at the post office. Andrea picked up summer classes. Every month, an envelope arrived at my door with a check, a carefully folded receipt and a single line written in pencil: Mama, one more. After the sixtieth, I opened an envelope that held no check. It held only a pound cake recipe card, copied in his own hand, and I put it in my Bible at Psalm 37.
In the name of the Reverend Josiah Hargrove, who passed four years ago, and who baptized half of West Jackson in the Pearl River, I started the Josiah Fund. It pays the monthly pension, medicine and rent for the widows of pastors across Mississippi whose benefits have been lost, delayed or stolen. In the first season, we helped thirty four women. One of them, ninety years old, who had been cut off without warning, took my hand in the fellowship hall and said, “I thought the Lord had forgotten me.” I told her He had sent a pound cake.
On Easter Sunday, I carried two pound cakes into the fellowship hall, as I had done every year since 1962. The tables were crowded. Reverend Collins blessed the food. Andrea and Lucius stood at the back of the line, with their daughter, and I called them forward. “Come here, child,” I said, “and hold the plate.” Lucius took a slice from my hand, and bowed his head, and ate it standing. A woman in a green hat leaned over and whispered, “Mother Hargrove, that is the best pound cake in Mississippi.” I smiled. “It is the best pound cake in the country,” I said. “I have the contract to prove it.”
