Cordelia and I did not speak for the whole drive to Mount Zion. She held the green tin on her lap the way you hold a sleeping child, and I kept my eyes on the red clay road. The photograph was face up on the dashboard. A girl no older than twenty, standing on the church steps with a baby on her hip, looking straight into the camera with an expression I could not name. On the back, in the careful hand of Mama, were three words. Forgive me, Lord.
The church was empty on a Tuesday. We let ourselves in with the key under the third flowerpot, which has not changed since we were girls, and we sat in the second pew where Mama used to sit. Her old autoharp was still in the glass case by the pulpit. Somebody had polished the wood. Cordelia unfolded the last letter of Mama on her knee. We had both read it a dozen times by then, and still neither of us could get through it without losing our voice.
The letter was short. Mama wrote that she was tired, and that she had been carrying something for seventy years, and that she wanted her girls to put it down for her. The pie we loved was not hers. She had learned it from a woman named Lenora Bell, who took her in the winter of 1951 when she was a frightened new bride in a strange town. Lenora taught her to bake, and taught her to play the autoharp, and taught her to hold her head up when the church ladies whispered.
Then the letter said what she never said out loud. When the church cookbook came out in 1962, Mama put her own name above that recipe. She said it was only a small thing, and everyone assumed it was hers, and by the time she thought to correct it, Lenora had moved away and it seemed too late. She wrote that she had prayed about it every night for six decades. Forgive me, Lord, she wrote, and then, underneath, Forgive me, Lenora.
A small lie told to keep the peace grows roots, and sooner or later somebody has to dig it up in the daylight.
Cordelia put her hands over her face. For a year she had been famous. A magazine had printed her picture beside a slice of that pie. People wrote to her from three states. She told me through her fingers that she had never felt right about the prize money, that every dollar of the five thousand had felt like it belonged to someone else. “Delphia, I stole it,” she said, “and I did not even know I was stealing.” I told her she had not stolen anything. She had only inherited a debt.
I called the editor of the magazine that evening. I am a retired home economics teacher, and I know how to make a phone call sound like a pot roast, firm and slow. The editor, a young woman named Paige, promised to look at the old photographs in their archive. Two days later she called me back, out of breath. She had found a print from a church supper in 1951. A girl in a plain dress, smiling, holding the autoharp of Mama, with a name written in the margin. Lenora Bell, Mount Zion, Opp, Alabama.
Finding the family took the two of us three weeks and every church directory in Covington County. Lenora had married and moved to Mobile, and she passed in 1994. Her daughter Josephine was the baby on the church step. Josephine had a daughter, Marva, a school principal who answered the phone with a cautious hello. When I told her who I was, there was a long quiet. Then she said, “My grandmother used to hum a song about a pecan pie, and I never knew where it came from.”
Marva came to Opp on a hot Saturday in July with her mother, who is seventy two now and walks with a cane. Cordelia met them at the church steps, the same steps from the photograph, holding the green tin out in both hands. Josephine looked at the name scratched into the lid. She ran her thumb across it, slowly, as if she were reading braille. “That is how my mama signed things,” she said. “She used to carve it into everything she loved.”
We did what Mama asked. Cordelia returned every cent of the five thousand dollars, and she wrote to the magazine herself, asking them to print a correction on the front page of the next issue. The recipe is now called Lenora Bell Pecan Pie. Marva asked if she could use it for a scholarship fundraiser at her school in Mobile, and I told her that was exactly what Mama would have wanted. I even offered to bake the first hundred myself.
In September, I stood in the kitchen of the fellowship hall at Mount Zion with four women from three generations and made one hundred and forty pies, just like I had for the food pantry. Josephine rolled crusts without measuring anything. Cordelia stirred the filling. Marva hummed the song her grandmother used to hum, and one by one, we all joined in. When the first pie came out of the oven, the whole room smelled like 1951.
The autoharp of Mama is out of the glass case now. The church lets a child play it after Sunday service, and the very first one to pick it up was the small nephew of Marva, who strummed it like a banjo and made everybody laugh. I am sixty nine years old, and I have taught a thousand girls to bake. The best lesson I ever learned came from a letter in a green tin. It is that credit is a recipe too, and it only works if you give it away.