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

  Once the pie was out of the way, she went ahead and made biscuit dough, flattened it with her rolling pin, cut out the biscuits, and laid them into the pans ready for the oven when the time would come.

  She had cooked breakfast, strained the morning milk, made the beds, set the house to rights, washed the breakfast dishes, and cleaned up the kitchen before I got there. Now she let me help her, and we carried the crocks of morning milk from the back porch down into the cellar, and brought the crocks of last night’s milk up from the cellar to the kitchen for skimming.

  Now it is noon of the same day. Andy has brought in the newspaper from the mailbox out at the road.

  I WENT AROUND the house and in at the kitchen door, pried off my overshoes, handed the paper to Grandma, took off my wraps, and washed my hands.

  “Try combing that hair of yours,” Grandma said. “Nobody ever saw the like. It’s a regular straw stack.”

  Knowing it would do no good, I took the comb from the shelf where the water bucket sat and passed it several times through my hair.

  Grandma watched me, and then she laughed. “You are the limit!” Her laugh was affectionate and indulgent, and yet it was a laugh with a history, conveying her perfected assurance that some things were hopeless. “Well, give up,” she finally said. “Come and eat.”

  She had made a splendid dinner, a feast, little affected by wartime stringencies, which, except for the rationing of coffee and sugar, were little felt in such households. It hadn’t been long since hog-killing, and so there was not only a platter of fresh sausage but also a bowl of souse soaking in vinegar. There was a bowl of sausage gravy, another of mashed potatoes, another of green beans, another of apple sauce. There was a pan of hot biscuits, to be buttered or gravied, and another in the oven. There was a handsome cake of freshly churned butter, the top marked in squares neatly carved with the edge of the butter paddle. There was a pitcher of buttermilk and one of sweet milk. And finally there was the pie, still warm, the top crust crisp and sugary and brown.

  Oh, I ate as one eats who has not eaten for days, as if my legs were hollow, as if I were bigger inside than outside, and Grandma urged me on as if I were her champion in a tournament of eating.

  Grandpa began the meal protesting that he was not hungry, but he ate, as Grandma said, “with a coming appetite,” and when it came it came in force. Before my time he had ridden horseback the five miles to Smallwood where his friend the atheist doctor Gib Holston had pulled all his teeth, but he “gummed it” as fast as I could chew with teeth, and he had more capacity.

  We ate and said little, for all of us were hungry. The food, as I see now but did not then, looked beautiful laid out before us on the table. And never then did I know that it was laid out in such profusion in honor of me. It was offered to me out of the loneliness of Grandma’s life, out of her disappointments, her craving for small comforts and pleasures beyond her reach, to which Grandpa was indifferent. When I had washed down the last bite of my second piece of pie with a final swallow of milk, my stomach was as tight as a tick. I am sure I said “That was good.” I may even have said “Thank you,” for I was ever conscious that I was traveling alone and therefore in need of my manners. But time has taught me greater thanks.

  And here Andy is visiting his mother’s parents, Granny and Granddaddy Feltner, in Port William.

  GRANDDADDY HAD GONE down into town after breakfast, I didn’t know what for. But I knew he was on the bank board and was trusted, and people depended on him for things. When he got back to the house, he came on to the dining room door and looked in.

  “Come on, son. Time to go to work.”

  I knew he wanted me to go with him, and I sort of wanted to, but I knew too that it was a bitter morning outside, and mostly I didn’t want to go. The weather made it lovely to imagine a whole morning snug in the house, listening to the sounds of housekeeping and cooking and the women talking.

  “Well,” I said, “I think I’d rather just stay here.”

  I have reason to believe that he would not have accepted that reply from my mother or Uncle Virgil when they were young. But I was different. I was his grandson, more my parents’ responsibility than his, and, after all, still a boy.

  He just laughed a little to himself and said, “Well. All right.” I heard him go through the house and out the back door.

  But it was not long until Granny came in. She said in her gentle way, “Andy, your granddaddy has some work that he needs you to help him with,” and I knew I had to go.

  She had a promptitude of goodness that could be just fierce. She knew in an instant when I was dishonest or thoughtless or wrong. Much of my growing up, it seems to me now, was quietly required of me by her. She would correct me—“Listen to Granny. I expected something better from you”—and it would be as if in my mind a pawl had dropped into a notch; there was to be no going back.

  I went and got my outdoor things, put them on, and went out the back door. It was cold, and to make things worse a few freezing rain-drops were coming down in a slant along the raw wind. I walked through the chicken yard where a few of Granddaddy’s old hens were standing around with their tails drooped, looking miserable. They looked like I felt. I was full of reluctance and embarrassment and shrunken in my clothes from the cold. Where Granddaddy was I had no idea, for I had not asked. I went through the gate on the far end of the chicken yard and into the field behind the barn, listening all the time.

  And then I heard Joe Banion speak in the driveway of the barn: “Come up.” And he came out, standing on a hay wagon drawn by his team of mules, old Mary and old Jim. “Whoa-ho!” he said when he saw me. “I reckon you just as well get on.”

  “I reckon I just as well,” I said, and I got on.

  Joe drove up to the tobacco barn on the highest part of the ridge. When we came even with the front of the barn Joe stopped the team again. “They inside,” he told me. I jumped down and he drove on.

  I didn’t know who “they” would be, but when I went through the front door, standing wide open to let in the light, I saw that they were Granddaddy and Burley Coulter.

  The Coulters, Burley and his brother, Jarrat, had housed tobacco in that barn, but now they had emptied it. What Granddaddy and Burley were doing that morning was preparing the barn for the lambing that was due to begin in just a few days. Because they had used the barn, this was partly the Coulters’ responsibility, and Burley had come to help. I was still feeling ashamed and a little odd because of my refusal, and so when I had stepped through the door I just stopped.

  There was a large rick of baled alfalfa in one corner of the barn, put there to be handy to feed the lambing ewes. Granddaddy and Burley were building a low partition around it to keep the ewes from ruining it before they could eat it. Granddaddy was starting to nail up a board, and Burley was sorting through a stack of old lumber.

  The first to notice me was Granddaddy. He said, “Hello, son.”

  And then Burley turned to look and said, “Well! If it ain’t Andy!”

  It was a moment not possible to forget. Tom Coulter, who not long ago had been killed in the fighting in Italy, was Burley’s nephew. Part of the blood that had been shed in that bad year of 1943 had been Tom Coulter’s. I had not seen Burley since the news of Tom’s death had come. I didn’t have grown-up manners, and I didn’t know what to say. When Burley spoke to me, it was as if he was not just greeting or welcoming me, but receiving me into his tenderness for Tom. It put a lump in my throat. He came over, taking off his right glove, and shook my hand.

  He said, “How you making it, old boy?”

  I just nodded, afraid if I said “Fine” I would cry.

  Granddaddy said, “Andy, pick up the other end of this board, honey.”

  I picked it up and held it while he nailed his end. And then he came over and nailed my end. We did the same with the next board. And so I was helping. All through the morning they kept finding ways for me to help. They let me belong there at work with them. They kept me
busy. And I experienced a beautiful change that was still new to me then but is old and familiar now. I went from reluctance and dread to interest in what we were doing, and then to pleasure in it. I got warm.

  We finished the barrier around the hay rick. We picked up everything that was out of place or in the way. We made the barn neat. Joe returned with a load of straw from the straw stack. And then we bedded the barn, carrying forkloads of straw from the wagon and shaking it out level and deep over the whole floor, replacing the old fragrance of tobacco with the new fragrance of clean straw. Granddaddy had some long panels that would be used, as soon as needed, to portion the barn between the ewes with lambs and those still to lamb. We repaired the panels and propped them against the walls where they would be handy. We unstacked the mangers and lined them up in a row down the center of the driveway. Along one wall we set up the four-by-four-foot lambing pens where the ewes with new lambs would be confined and watched over until the lambs were well started and strong—“the maternity ward,” Granddaddy called it.

  The men were letting me help sometimes even when I could see I was slowing them down. We transformed the barn from a tobacco barn recalling last summer’s crop to a sheep barn expecting next year’s lambs. In our work we could feel the new year coming, the days lengthening, the time of birth and growth returning, and this seemed to bring a happiness to everybody, in spite of the war and people’s griefs and fears. The last thing we did was clean up the stripping room. It would be a sort of hospital, where Granddaddy, when he would be watching in the cold nights, could build a fire and help with a difficult birth, or pen a ewe with weak lambs until the lambs had sucked and were well dried, or keep orphan lambs until they got a good start.

  When we were done at last, Granddaddy looked at his watch and then at me. “Well,” he said, “could you eat a little something?”

  The whole morning had gone by already, and I had not thought of hunger, but now when I thought of it I was hungry. I said, “I could eat a lot of something.”

  We laughed, and Burley said, “His belly thinks his throat’s been cut.”

  “Burley,” Granddaddy said, “won’t you come have a bite of dinner with us?”

  And Burley said, “Naw, Mat. Thank you. I left some dinner on the stove at home. I better go see about it.”

  Joe took the team and wagon back to the feed barn then, and I went with Granddaddy to drive Burley out to his house.

  By the time we got back and washed, everybody was in the kitchen. Nettie was finishing up at the stove and Granny and Hannah were putting the food on the table. The smell of it seemed fairly to hollow me out inside. We had sausage and gravy and mashed potatoes, just like at Grandma’s. Granny’s sausage was seasoned differently but was just as good. And we had, besides, hominy and creamed butter beans and, instead of biscuits, hoecake—one already on the table, sliced, another on the griddle—a pitcher of fresh milk, coffee for the grown-ups, and again all the Christmas desserts, and again, for me, ice cream.

  “Save room,” Granny said again.

  And I said, “I’m going to have plenty of room.”

  I had more room even than I thought.

  Hannah said, “Do you think he’ll leave us anything to eat tomorrow?”

  “I don’t know,” Granddaddy said. “We may have to skip a day or two.”

  FROM “Misery”

  Here again Andy Catlett is speaking in old age, again remembering his Catlett grandparents, but this is from a short story. The time is 1945.

  THE HOUSEHOLD EMBODIED and was sustained by an agricultural order, resting upon the order of time and nature, that was at once demanding and consoling. Because this order was the order of the house, a child could be happy in it.

  But the time was coming, was already arriving, when that order would be disvalued and taken apart piece by piece. I had come along just in time to glimpse the old order when it was still somewhat intact. I had played or idled in blacksmith shops while the smiths shod horses or mules, and built from raw iron and wood many of the simple farming tools still in use. I had gone along with the crews of neighbors as they followed the binder in the grainfields, gathering the bound sheaves into shocks, stopping to catch the young rabbits that ran from the still-standing wheat or barley. I had watched as they fed load after load of sheaves into the threshing machine and sacked and hauled away the grain. And I had been on hand when the sweated crews washed on the back porch and sat down to harvest meals equal to Christmas dinners, even in wartime with no sugar for the iced tea, to eat big and tell stories and laugh.

  And then there came a day when Grandma, old and ill and without help, was not up to the task of cooking for a threshing crew, and my father could see that she was not. He had taken time off from his law office to splice out Grandpa, who also was not equal to the day.

  “It’s all right,” my father said, comforting Grandma. “I’ll take care of it.”

  And he did take care of it, for he was a man who refused to be at a loss, and he was capable. He went and bought a great pile of ground beef and sacks full of packaged buns. He fired up the kitchen stove and, overpowering Grandma’s attempts to help, fried hamburgers enough, and more than enough, to feed the crew of hungry men and their retinue of hungry boys. It was adequate. It was even admirable, in its way, I could see that. But I could see also that something old and good was turning, or had turned, profoundly wrong. An old propriety that I knew was not mine had been offended. I could not have said this at the time, but I felt it; I felt it entirely. There was my father in the kitchen, cooking, not like any cook I had ever seen, but like himself, all concentration and haste, going at a big job that had to be done, nothing lovely about it. And there was the crew sitting down, not to a proper harvest meal, but to hamburgers that I knew they associated, as I did, with town life, with hamburger joints.

  Grandma and Grandpa had achieved their threescore years and ten and more; their strength had become labor and sorrow. The life they had lived, the old season-governed life of the country, was passing away as they watched. No threshing machine or threshing crew would come to their place again, and there would be no more big straw stacks for a boy to climb up and slide down. The combines had arrived, their service to be purchased by mere money.

  FROM The Memory of Old Jack

  It is September 1952, during the tobacco cutting on the Feltner place. The tradition of work-swapping has continued until now, as it will continue, slowly raveling out, for another thirty or so years. The men have gathered to harvest the crop and the women to feed them dinner. Margaret Feltner is getting on in years and Hannah—who, after Virgil Feltner’s death in World War II, married Nathan Coulter—is pregnant. But Mary Penn, as soon as dinner is over and the dishes done, will go out to work the rest of the day with the men. At the start of this passage Hannah has found Old Jack Beechum in the barbershop, where he has been sleeping and dreaming, and she is bringing him to the Feltner house for dinner.

  THEY WALK SLOWLY up the street toward Mat’s, Hannah holding to the old man’s arm as if to be helped, but in reality helping him. And yet she knows that, by taking that arm so graciously bent at her service, she is being helped. She is sturdily accompanied by his knowledge, in which she knows that she is whole. In his gaze she feels herself to be not just physically but historically a woman, one among generations, bearing into mystery the dark seed. She feels herself completed by that as she could not be completed by the desire of a younger man. As they walk, she tells him such news as there is: how they all are, where they are working, what they have got done, what they have left to do. From time to time she stops, as if to give all her attention to her story, to allow him a moment of rest. But she is glad to prolong the walk. She is moved by him, pleased to stand in his sight, whose final knowledge is womanly, who knows that all human labor passes into mystery, who has been faithful unto death to the life of his fields to no end that he will know in this world. As for Old Jack, he listens to the sound of her voice, strong and full of hope, knowing
and near to joy, that pleases him and tells him what he wants to know. He nods and smiles, encouraging her to go on. Occasionally he praises her, in that tone of final judgment old age has given him. “You’re a fine woman. You’re all right,” he says. And his tone implies: Believe it of yourself forever.

  They are crossing Mat’s yard now, and suddenly Old Jack can smell dinner. It is strong, and it stirs him. It changes his mind. He steps faster. He is leaving the world of his old age and entering a stronger, younger world. He is going into the very heart of that world where labor’s hunger is fed with its increase. That is the order that he knows, and knows only and finally: that complexity of returns between work and hunger.

  They turn the corner of the house into sight of the back porch, and there are all the men just come in. Two washpans and two kettles of hot water have been brought out and set down. Little Margaret stands nearby, holding a towel. Lightning and Mat’s grandson, Andy Catlett, are washing at the edge of the porch, leaning over the pans. Mat is sitting in a willow rocking chair on the porch with Mattie on his lap. The others—Burley, Jarrat, Nathan, Elton—stand or squat in the yard beyond the porch, smoking, waiting their turns. Their shirts are wet with sweat. Their hands and the fronts of their clothes are dark with tobacco gum. They smell of sweat and tobacco and the earth of the field. In the stance of all of them there is relish of the stillness that comes after heavy labor. They have come to rest, and their stillness now, because of the long afternoon’s work yet ahead of them, is more intense, more deeply felt, more carefully enjoyed, than that which will come at the day’s end. Even Mat, who ordinarily would be carrying on some sort of play with Mattie, is sitting still, his hands at rest on the chair arms. Mattie is leaning against his shoulder, nearly asleep. Only Burley is talking, though he keeps otherwise as carefully still as the others. He is directing a mixture of banter and praise at Lightning’s back. It is a bill of goods designed, as the rest of them well know, to keep Lightning on hand. Under the burden of such a stretch of hard work his customary bragging has given way to periods of sulkiness.