Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food Read online

  “Cold out,” Miss Minnie said. “This boy was nearly frozen.”

  Tol saw that she had had no luck either in learning who their guests were. “Yes,” he said. “Pretty cold.”

  He turned to the little washstand beside the door, dipped water from the bucket into the wash pan, warmed it with water from the tea-kettle on the stove. He washed his hands, splashed his face, groped for the towel.

  As soon as Tol quit looking at his guests, they began to look at him. Only now that they saw him standing up could they have seen how big he was. He was broad and wide and tall. All his movements had about them an air of casualness or indifference as if he were not conscious of his whole strength. He wore his clothes with the same carelessness, evidently not having thought of them since he put them on. And though the little boy had not smiled, at least not where Tol or Miss Minnie could see him, he must at least have wanted to smile at the way Tol’s stiff gray hair stuck out hither and yon after Tol combed it, as indifferent to the comb as if the comb had been merely fingers or a stick. But when Tol turned away from the washstand, the man looked back to the window and the boy looked down at his knee.

  “It’s ready,” Miss Minnie said to Tol, as she took a pan of biscuits from the oven and slid another in.

  Tol went to the chair at the end of the table farthest from the stove. He gestured to the two chairs on either side of the table. “Make yourself at home, now,” he said to the man and the boy. “Sit down, sit down.”

  He sat down himself and the two guests sat down.

  “We’re mightily obliged,” the man said.

  “Don’t wait on me,” Miss Minnie said. “I’ll be there in just a minute.”

  “My boy, reach for that sausage,” Tol said. “Take two and pass ’em.

  “Have biscuits,” he said to the man. “Naw, that ain’t enough. Take two or three. There’s plenty of ’em.”

  There was plenty of everything: a platter of sausage, and more already in the skillet on the stove; biscuits brown and light, and more in the oven; a big bowl of navy beans, and more in the kettle on the stove, a big bowl of applesauce and one of mashed potatoes. There was a pitcher of milk and one of buttermilk.

  Tol heaped his plate, and saw to it that his guests heaped theirs. “Eat till it’s gone,” he said, “and don’t ask for nothing you don’t see.”

  Miss Minnie sat down presently, and they all ate. Now and again Tol and Miss Minnie glanced at each other, each wanting to be sure the other saw how their guests applied themselves to the food. For the man and the boy ate hungrily without looking up, as though to avoid acknowledging that others saw how hungry they were. And Tol thought, “No breakfast.” In his concern for the little boy, he forgot his curiosity about where the two had come from and where they were going.

  Miss Minnie helped the boy to more sausage and more beans, and she buttered two more biscuits and put them on his plate. Tol saw how her hand hovered above the boy’s shoulder, wanting to touch him. He was a nice-looking little boy, but he never smiled. Tol passed the boy the potatoes and refilled his glass with milk.

  “Why, he eats so much it makes him poor to carry it,” Tol said. “That boy can put it away!”

  The boy looked up, but he did not smile or say anything. Neither Tol nor Miss Minnie had heard one peep out of him. Tol passed everything to the man, who helped himself and did not look up.

  “We surely are obliged,” he said.

  Tol said, “Why, I wish you would look. Every time that boy’s elbow bends, his mouth flies open.”

  But the boy did not smile. He was a solemn boy, far too solemn for his age.

  “Well, we know somebody else whose mouth’s connected to his elbow, don’t we?” Miss Minnie said to the boy, who did not look up and did not smile. “Honey, don’t you want another biscuit?”

  The men appeared to be finishing up now. She rose and brought to the table a pitcher of sorghum molasses, and she brought the second pan of biscuits, hot from the oven.

  The two men buttered biscuits, and then, when the butter had melted, laid them open on their plates and covered them with molasses. And Miss Minnie did the same for the boy. She longed to see him smile, and so did Tol.

  “Now, Miss Minnie,” Tol said, “that boy will want to go easy on them biscuits from here on, for we ain’t got but three or four hundred of ’em left.”

  But the boy only ate his biscuits and molasses and did not look at anybody.

  And now the meal was ending, and what were they going to do? Tol and Miss Minnie yearned toward that nice, skinny, really pretty little boy, and the old kitchen filled with their yearning, and maybe there was to be no answer. Maybe that man and this little boy would just get up in their silence and say, “Much obliged,” and go away, and leave nothing of themselves at all.

  “My boy,” Tol said—he had his glass half-full of buttermilk in his hand, and was holding it up. “My boy, when you drink buttermilk, always remember to drink from the near side of the glass—like this.” Tol tilted his glass and took a sip from the near side. “For drinking from the far side, as you’ll find out, don’t work anything like so well.” And then—and perhaps to his own surprise—he applied the far side of the glass to his lips, turned it up, and poured the rest of the buttermilk right down the front of his shirt. And then he looked at Miss Minnie with an expression of absolute astonishment.

  For several seconds nobody made a sound. They all were looking at Tol, and Tol, with his hair asserting itself in all directions and buttermilk on his chin and his shirt and alarm and wonder in his eyes, was looking at Miss Minnie.

  And then Miss Minnie said quietly, “Mr. Proudfoot, you are the limit.”

  And then they heard the boy. At first it sounded like he had an obstruction in his throat that he worked at with a sort of strangling. And then he laughed.

  He laughed with a free, strong laugh that seemed to open his throat as wide as a stovepipe. It was the laugh of a boy who was completely tickled. It transformed everything. Miss Minnie smiled. And then Tol laughed his big hollering laugh. And then Miss Minnie laughed. And then the boy’s father laughed. The man and the boy looked up, they all looked full into one another’s eyes, and they laughed.

  They laughed until Miss Minnie had to wipe her eyes with the hem of her apron.

  “Lord,” she said, getting up, “what’s next?” She went to get Tol a clean shirt.

  “Let’s have some more biscuits,” Tol said. And they all buttered more biscuits and passed the molasses again.

  FROM Hannah Coulter

  Christmas 1941, the Christmas after Pearl Harbor, came not long after Hannah, who is speaking here, married Virgil Feltner. Soon after that Christmas Virgil will be drafted into the Army, as they have expected. Because the war has so unsettled the future, Hannah and Virgil are living with his parents, Margaret and Mat Feltner.

  IT WAS THE Christmas season, and we made the most of it. Virgil and I cut a cedar tree that filled a corner of the parlor, reached to the ceiling, and gave its fragrance to the whole room. We hung its branches with ornaments and lights, and wrapped our presents and put them underneath. One evening Virgil called up the Catlett children, pretending to be Santa Claus, and wound them up so that Bess and Wheeler nearly never got them to bed. We cooked for a week—Nettie Banion, the Feltners’ cook, and Mrs. Feltner and I. We made cookies and candy, some for ourselves, some to give away. We made a fruit cake, a pecan cake, and a jam cake. Mr. Feltner went to the smokehouse and brought in an old ham, which we boiled and then baked. We made criss-crosses in the fat on top, finished it off with a glaze, and then put one clove exactly in the center of each square. We talked no end, of course, and joked and laughed. And I couldn’t help going often to the pantry to look at what we had done and admire it, for these Christmas doings ran far ahead of any I had known before.

  Each of us knew that the others were dealing nearly all the time with the thought of the war, but that thought we kept in the secret quiet of our own minds. Maybe we were t
hinking too of the sky opening over the shepherds who were abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flocks, and the light of Heaven falling over them, and the angel announcing peace. I was thinking of that, and also of the sufferers in the Bethlehem stable, as I never had before. There was an ache that from time to time seemed to fall entirely through me like a misting rain. The war was a bodily presence. It was in all of us, and nobody said a word.

  Virgil and I brought Grandmam over from Shagbark on Christmas Eve. She was wearing her Sunday black and her silver earrings and broach. To keep from embarrassing me, as I understood, she had bought a nice winter coat and a little suitcase. She had presents for the Feltners and for Virgil and me in a shopping bag that she refused to let Virgil carry. I had worried that she would feel out of place at the Feltners, but I need not have. Mr. and Mrs. Feltner were at the door to welcome her, and she thanked them with honest pleasure and with grace.

  On Christmas morning Nettie Banion’s mother-in-law, Aunt Fanny, came up to the house with Nettie to resume for the day her old command of the kitchen. Joe Banion soon followed them under Aunt Fanny’s orders to be on hand if needed.

  And then the others came. Bess and Wheeler were first. Their boys flew through the front door, leaving it open, waving two new pearl-handled cap pistols apiece, followed by their little sisters with their Christmas dolls, followed by Bess and Wheeler with their arms full of wrapped presents. We all gathered around, smiling and talking and hugging and laughing. The boys were noisy as a crowd until Virgil said, “Now, Andy and Henry, you remember our rule—I get half of what you get, and you get half of what I get.” And then they got noisier, Henry offering Virgil one of his pistols, Andy backing up to keep both of his. And then all three of them went to the kitchen to smell the cooking and show their pistols to Nettie and Aunt Fanny.

  Hearing the commotion, Ernest Finley came down from his room. Ernest had been wounded in the First World War and walked on crutches. He was a woodworker and a carpenter, a thoughtful, quiet-speaking man who usually worked alone. The Catlett boys loved him because of his work and his tools and his neat shop and the long bedtime stories he told them when they came to visit.

  Miss Ora came, still alert to see that I called her “Auntie,” with Aunt Lizzie and Uncle Homer Lord, who had come down to Hargrave the day before from Indianapolis. The Lords weren’t kin to the Feltners at all, except that Aunt Lizzie and Mrs. Feltner had been best friends when they were girls—which, Aunt Lizzie said, was as close kin as you could get.

  And then Virgil and I and the boys with their pistols drove out the Bird’s Branch road to Uncle Jack Beechum’s place—where he had been “batching it,” as he said, since the death of his wife—and brought him to our house. He was the much younger brother of Mr. Feltner’s mother, Nancy Beechum Feltner. Mr. Feltner’s father, Ben, had been a father and a friend to Uncle Jack, who now was in a way the head of the family, though he never claimed such authority. Everybody looked up to him and loved him and, as sometimes was necessary, put up with him.

  Uncle Jack didn’t try to have dignity, he just had it. A man of great strength in his day, he walked now with a cane, bent a little at the hips but still straight-backed. He was a big man, work-brittle, and there was no foolishness about him.

  You would have thought Henry would not have dared to do it, but as we were going from the car to the house he ran in front of Uncle Jack and shot at him with his pistols. I didn’t think Uncle Jack would see anything funny in that, but he did. He gave a great snort of delight. He said, “That boy’ll put the cat in the churn.”

  And so we all were there.

  To get the children calmed down before dinner and so the little girls could have a nap afterwards, we opened the presents right away. The old parlor was crowded with the tree and the people and the presents and the pretty wrapping papers flying about. Nettie Banion and Joe and Aunt Fanny sat in the doorway, waiting to receive the presents everybody had brought for them. The boys sat beside Virgil, who was making a big to-do over their presents, in which he was still claiming half-interest. The boys were a little unsure about this, but they loved his carrying on, and they sat as close to him as they could get.

  There were sixteen of us around the long table in the dining room. The table was so beautiful when we came in that it seemed almost a shame not to just stand and look at it. Mrs. Feltner had put on her best tablecloth and her good dishes and silverware that she never used except for company. And on the table at last, after our long preparations, were our ham, our turkey and dressing, and our scalloped oysters under their brown crust. There was a cut glass bowl of cranberry sauce. There were mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans and butter beans, corn pudding, and hot rolls. On the sideboard were our lovely cakes on cake stands and a big pitcher of custard that would be served with whipped cream.

  It looked too good to touch, let alone eat, and yet of course we ate. Grandmam sat at Mr. Feltner’s right hand at his end of the table, and Uncle Jack sat at Mrs. Feltner’s right hand at her end. Virgil and I sat opposite Bess and Wheeler at the center. And the children in their chairs and high chairs were portioned out among the grownups, no two together.

  Every meal at the Feltners was good, for Mrs. Feltner and Nettie Banion both were fine cooks, but this one was extra good, and there were many compliments. Of all the compliments Uncle Jack’s were the best, though he only increased the compliments of other people. He ate with great hunger and relish, and it was a joy to watch him. When somebody would say, “That is a wonderful ham” or “This dressing is perfect,” Uncle Jack would solemnly shake his head and say, “Ay Lord, it is that!” And his words fell upon the table like a blessing.

  Beyond that, he said little, and Grandmam too had little to say, but whatever they said was gracious. To have the two of them there, at opposite corners of the table, with their long endurance in their faces, and their present affection and pleasure, was a blessing of another kind.

  FROM Andy Catlett

  Now Andy Catlett is speaking as an aging man looking back to the Christmastime of 1943 when he first traveled away from his parents alone. He went by bus ten miles to visit, first, his grandma and grandpa Catlett who lived on the Bird’s Branch road near Port William, and then his granny and granddaddy Feltner who lived on one of the outer edges of Port William itself.This passage and the two that follow are from Andy Catlett: Early Travels. Here he has just arrived and is visiting with Grandma Catlett in her kitchen.

  RURAL ELECTRIFICATION WAS on its way, I suppose, for it would soon arrive, but it had not arrived yet. On the back porch there was a large icebox that, when ice was available, preserved leftovers and cooled the milk in the summer. That and the battery-powered radio and the telephone were the only modern devices in the house. Its old economy of the farm household was still intact. The supply lines ran to the kitchen from the henhouse and garden, cellar and smokehouse, cropland and pasture. On the kitchen table were two quart jars of green beans, a quart jar of applesauce, and a pint jar of what I knew to be the wild black raspberries that abounded in the thickets and woods edges of that time. I thought, “Pie!”

  “Are you going to make a pie?” I asked.

  “Hmh!” she said. “Maybe. Would you like to have a pie?”

  And I said, with my best manners, “Yes, mam.”

  She was soon done with the potatoes. She shut the draft on the stove, taming the fire, changed the water on the potatoes, clapped a lid onto the pot, and set it on the stove to boil. She got out another pot, emptied the beans into it, added salt, some pepper, and a fine piece of fat pork. She was talking at large, commenting on her work, telling what she had learned from relatives’ letters and Christmas cards and from listening in on the party line. I was up and following her around by then, to make sure I got the benefit of everything.

  She washed her hands at the washstand by the back door and dried them. I followed her into the cool pantry and watched as she measured out flour and lard and the other ingredients and began m
aking the dough for a pie crust. She rolled out the dough to the right thickness, pressed it into a pie pan, and, holding the pan on the fingertips of her left hand, passed a knife around its edge to carve off the surplus dough.

  As she went about her preparations for dinner, she was commenting to herself, with grunts of determination or approval, on her progress. I knew even then that it was a wonder to see her at her work, and I know it more completely now. Her kitchen would be counted a poor thing by modern standards. There was of course no electrical equipment at all. The cooking utensils, excepting the invincible iron skillet and griddle, were chipped or dented or patched. The kitchen knives were worn lean with sharpening. Everything was signed with the wear of a lifetime or more. She was a fine cook. She did not do much in the way of exact measurement. She seasoned to taste. She mixed by experience and to the right consistency. The dough for a pie crust or biscuits, for instance, had to be neither too flabby nor too stiff; it was right when it felt right. She did not own a cookbook or a written recipe.

  Meanwhile, she had prepared the raspberries, adding flour and sugar to the juice and heating it in a saucepan. Now she poured berries and juice into the dough-lined pan. She balled up the surplus dough, worked it briskly with her hands on the broken marble dresser top that she used for such work, sprinkled flour over it, rolled it flat, and then she sliced it rapidly into strips, which she laid in a beautiful lattice over the filling. As a final touch she sprinkled over the top a thin layer of sugar that in the heat of the oven would turn crisp and brown. And then she slid the pie into the oven.

  She was being extravagant with the sugar for my sake, as I was more or less aware, and as I took for granted. But knowledge grows with age, and gratitude grows with knowledge. Now I am as grateful to her as I should have been then, and I am troubled with love for her, knowing how she was wrung all her life between her cherished resentments and her fierce affections. A peculiar sorrow hovered about her, and not only for the inevitable losses and griefs of her years; it came also from her settled conviction of the tendency of things to be unsatisfactory, to fail to live up to expectation, to fall short. She was haunted, I think, by the suspicion of a comedown always lurking behind the best appearances. I wonder now if she had ever read Paradise Lost. That poem, with its cosmos of Heaven and Hell and Paradise and the Fallen World, was a presence felt by most of her generation, if only by way of preachers who had read it. Whether or not she had read it for herself, the lostness of Paradise was the prime fact of her world, and she felt it keenly.