by Rick Bragg
“Pity,” Ava said, though it was unclear if she meant it was a pity that two or so people fell into the well, or that it had been filled in and was no longer suitable for what she had in mind.
“Oh, they fished ’em out,” he said, earnestly, “afore they filled it in.”
Then he did not so much walk away as hastily retreat.
It is doubtful, to those of us who knew her, that she would have pushed her father-in-law down an abandoned well. But we do know she went looking for one, just to sit by it for a while and think about it.
Some Southern damsels, those of a different class, might have gone searching for a well to hurl themselves into, but my grandmother was not built that way. She was not forlorn; she was mad.
Her plan was to tell him there was a hog down it, or a calf, and when he bent over to peek, well…But people should not see her as cold-blooded. If she had pushed him in, she always said, she would have called down to him now and again, to see if he was still alive, and might even have sung him a song from the rim, so as to prevent him from becoming lonely. Eventually, she might even have thrown down a rope, or at the very least gone to find her young husband, to make a full confession of it:
“Papa Bundrum,” she would say, with sorrow, “fell down the well.”
I was too small to tell, the first time she told it, if she was kidding or not. I do know I walked around, till about third grade, afraid to make my grandma mad. There was an old well near our house, too.
* * *
• • •
Just that morning, the morning of the second day, she and the boy awakened to a lovely smell. Running around it, through it, was the scent of strong black coffee; you could almost smell the color of it. Then came the rest, that glorious blend of frying pork and baking bread. Like a spell, a good breakfast can draw you from the bed no matter how dog-tired and drowsy you are, and make going back to sleep unthinkable, because a hot breakfast only lasts for a fine minute or two, whereas a cold breakfast can disappoint you all day, over and over again. Try to walk past a good hot real breakfast without regret. Try.
The boy thought he might be dreaming. He had been a child the last time he smelled a morning like this. His momma and baby brother were alive the last time he had awakened this way.
The girl had awakened and sniffed the air, and was mad all over again.
She, truly, had never understood the power of food.
* * *
• • •
The old man had awakened long before dawn to begin, being of the opinion that no decent breakfast in the history of the world had ever begun after the sun had slipped free of the horizon. The girl might not have known how to cook a blessed thing, but she and the boy had laid in some sensible staples every payday, and he found all he needed here. There were grits, muscadine and crabapple jelly, pear and blackberry preserves, hard black-rind cheddar, and even a little leftover smoked sausage, not enough to fry up in links for all of them, but plenty for what he had in mind. He would need some more milk, but that was handy: the couple’s one great wealth was a fine milk cow, and the girl, by some miracle, had learned to churn butter. There were chickens raising hell in the yard, so he suspected there were eggs; a man could cook a fine breakfast, a breakfast anyone would envy, with no more provision than this. He set to.
He stoked the fire in the woodstove, fed it some more wood, and quietly gathered his skillet, pots, and pans. He liked the quiet in the morning, when the world was still mostly in dark and most of the chuckleheads and nitwits were still held safely captive in dreams. He would not destroy it himself by rattling iron. He had heard that the Texas bandit John Wesley Harden had once killed a man in the early morning, just for snoring; he had understood, perfectly.
After his inventory, he milked the cow, then went behind the house, hopeful, to peruse the small vegetable garden. Good. There were still some late-season tomatoes left. He could have given a whole lecture, sung a sonnet, on the importance of the tomato in the Southern breakfast, if it had not involved actually talking to people and, even worse, having them talk back to him.
He went to work on the biscuits first, using roughly the same recipe as the night before, the one countless thousands of workingmen and -women had already approved, a basic, simple recipe with a little extra twist, a recipe that would endure for generations. This was before the miracle of self-rising flour, so he had to mix his soda and salt, measuring it in his cupped hands. He did not roll them out and cut them this time, either, as many people did, but patted out each one in his hands, as he had the night before, in domes on the baking pan, not discs, but bigger than the dumpling biscuit, just big enough to rest in his palm.
He worked not so much fast as smoothly, to bring everything to doneness at roughly the same time, a skill that some cooks still have trouble with even after a lifetime, forgetting that temperature can completely change the taste—and enjoyment—of food. First he prepared his ingredients for the sausage gravy. He diced the smoked sausage with his sheath knife, since the girl’s knives were as dull as spoons. He wanted no more than a good handful. Then he went through their bin of potatoes and onions for a tiny white onion. What he needed was something not much bigger than a pearl onion, than his thumb, just enough for a teaspoonful minced fine; he wanted just a taste of it, a sprinkling that would cook to nothing but would be the thing that set his sausage gravy apart. Anything else, anything more than a taste, would make it a true onion gravy, and working people did not overpower their breakfast gravy with such exotica as that.
He set it all aside and went to work on the grits, a simple two-to-one ratio of water to grits, seasoning them with a little salt and pepper. As they began to thicken, he added a dollop of fresh milk, for taste and to thin them a bit; grits will run a little thick sometimes, but it’s better to start thick, and thin a little, he believed, than to start with a watery mess that could not be rescued in any way.
He had seen grown men brawl over a sorry breakfast, over a watery plate of grits. He did not blame the men; any fool should be able to thicken a pot of grits, even a drunken or inept fool.
The gravy, the main course, was simple, too. Into a little slick of bacon grease, melted and just beginning to spit and pop in an iron skillet, he tossed the diced smoked sausage and smidgen of onion. The smoked sausage was too lean and slow to render, so the bacon grease was essential, to help it along. We know this because he never cooked a thing, a single thing, without adding a touch more bacon fat, and cursing the sausage maker or the butcher or grocer for being too damn dumb to know that good sausage needed plenty of fat, not just for taste but for the cooking itself. The world, it seemed, was full of dull-witted butchers and inferior pork sausage, but he was too old to educate the whole dad-gum planet earth.
When the inferior fat in the inferior sausage had begun to render, he tossed in a single pat of butter, then quickly stirred in a few tablespoons of flour, working from sight and smell more than time, than arithmetic. He let it brown only a little before he added the milk, but enough to erase that raw, chalky taste, then tossed in a little salt, and a more impressive dose of black pepper. He wanted a black-speckled white milk gravy, not a brown gravy, and as it thickened he stirred it with the big spoon till it was just about right.
The grits—good, coarse-ground yellow grits that had not had the taste and the texture and the color milled and bleached out of them—were about right, and as they finished he added a big chunk of real butter, and wished he had just a little cayenne, not for the heat so much as for that nice taste. Some pepper was all heat and whang, but cayenne had flavor. He took just a few crumbles of the hard, sharp cheddar and tossed them in as the grits began to thicken. Plain grits were fine for children, but grown people needed grits with some damn taste. He despised a plate of dull grits almost as much as he did thin ones. And if you tried to put sugar in them, he would slap the spoon out of your hand. No one—no one—put sugar in grits.
If anyone had bothered to look closely, they would have
seen he stirred with both hands, in separate pots.
He pushed both the pan of grits and the skillet of gravy to the back of the stove to keep warm, and, still working quickly, went to work on the eggs. He would have preferred some good lard, but the bacon grease, which the girl had the good sense to hoard, was handy. He selected the smallest skillet she had and cracked and fried two at a time, carefully angling the pan to run the hot fat over the surface of the eggs, till he had six perfect medium-cooked eggs in about six minutes. Hard-cooked eggs had no flavor, he believed. People only insisted on a yellow cooked as hard as a dirt clod because they despised a runny white, but if you ran that hot grease over the sunny side before you flipped it, you could erase that probability and serve an egg that had a molten yellow but a done white and “still actually had some goddamn taste.”
He had not timed the biscuits, and there was no glass window on the old iron stove to peek through to see how they were rising. He knew from the smell when they were done. The secret to a good biscuit, he believed, was a soft, domed top but a thin, crispy bottom. You got this with a little extra lard on the biscuit pan’s bottom—not a whole lot, just a little more—so that the flour on the bottom crisped as the rest of the biscuit baked. Some people did not like it and preferred a soft, fluffy biscuit through and through, which concerned him not at all. Those people could make their own damn biscuit, if they did not see the glory in his.
He broke a biscuit for each plate, ladled on the sausage gravy, spooned some buttered grits to the side, added two eggs, and—as a last touch—sliced one of the late-season tomatoes. He laid two thick slices beside the gravy biscuit, dusting them with just a little salt and pepper. Breakfast gravy needed a tomato, or, better yet, a slice or two of cantaloupe, the sweeter the better, for a cool balance. People here have been eating biscuit and gravy and fresh tomatoes, or cantaloupe, side by side for going on two centuries.
Finally, working fast, he buttered the leftover biscuits, spooned in some muscadine jelly that the young couple had received as a wedding present, and set them back on the stove, to keep warm and to let the jelly liquefy into the melted butter and hot biscuit, for dessert.
The whole breakfast took less than forty-five minutes to prepare, and it was cheap to make; only the pork sausage and the biscuit flour were dear in 1924. The eggs were gathered from the few scraggly hens in the yard, and the tomatoes from the red clay, and the grits ground from hominy that the boy prepared himself, mixing ash into shell corn. It was cheap food, and good food, if you only knew the way of it.
The coffee was smelling like it might be ready, too. He made it strong—too strong, the girl would complain—but not foolishly so. He knew men who liked it like mud, the same men who ate hot peppers from the jar, standing up, to prove they were somebody tough.
Philistines.
“Hit’s ready,” he hollered, in case the boy and girl were so slothful as to sleep through a breakfast such as this.
* * *
• • •
From that first night, and certainly after the glorious breakfast that followed, the old man would be the beneficiary of her crackling, sizzling moods, which the boy might have considered all along. The old man made a fine lightning rod. The boy had some mild concerns, he later said, that his beloved and his daddy might actually kill each other, if the old man’s reserve cracked and his infamous temper was unleashed, or if she could catch him from behind with a poker or a small stick of firewood. He had not even considered the abandoned well till his betrothed mentioned it, casually, sweetly, one day. But his daddy’s stoicism usually only washed away in liquor, so as long as he kept an eye on the old man’s moonshine and hard cider, he believed his bride would be secure.
The old man would quickly discover that the girl, who could not have weighed ninety pounds with her apron pockets full of lead sinkers, responded to criticism with rants, fits, fist shaking, and foot stomping. He responded to this, for a while, by simply ignoring her and—in mid-rant—just strolling onto the porch, or into the woods, or down the road, to have a peaceful smoke or chew of tobacco while she calmed down or, sometimes, just wound down from exhaustion.
People still wonder why he bothered, since the old man had never shown any outward affection for even his blood kin, and little patience, even tolerance, with anyone. My mother thinks perhaps it was because her daddy went to find Jimmy Jim when no one else wanted him, when the rest of the world seemed content to let the hot-tempered old booger rot in the trees, and pretend that he had never existed at all. It may be, though less likely, that he was lonely. And, also unlikely, it might be he was penitent for what he had wrought; either way, he was by God going to teach the brat to cook. It seemed to be what he had left.
It was not like he was trying to teach her how to be a fancy chef, but, in a way, there was more at stake; there was even more of a burden on a working-class cook. The country people, the working people, subsisted mostly on beans, greens, potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, pork, and sometimes chicken, when one could be spared or perhaps stolen; beef was a rich man’s food, mostly, and the old man could count on the fingers of both hands the times he’d had real beefsteak in his life, not just tripe and soup bones. In warm weather, his people ate richly from the green beans, green and ripe tomatoes, okra, squash, sweet corn, and more from their small gardens, which they canned to help get them through the cold, bare weather, when the diet would be plainer, poorer. They hunted then, for deer, rabbits, squirrels, raccoon, and possum, and wild turkey, quail, and doves. They gathered water and highland cress, and poke salad. They fished in warm weather, in the rivers, creeks, and backwater, for crappie, bream, catfish, jack salmon, and turtle. But you could not count on it, on almost anything in the wild, because it was a natural fact that if you did the fish would not bite for a fortnight, and the last deer would vanish in the mist.
It was plain food they ate, for the most part, cooked with simple tools.
“This is what you need, to cook,” he said, and smacked an iron skillet against a biscuit pan, to make sure he had the girl’s attention. It rang so loud she held her ears.
“And a big spoon, and one deep pot,” he said.
It was the most words she had heard him say. These backwoods people seemed to live on rocks and sticks; maybe it should have been no surprise that her new husband had brought in a mulish ditchdigger to teach her how to prepare food.
“Where did you learn?” she said.
“Got hongry,” the old man said.
“Not why. When? How?” she asked.
“I’ve always knowed,” he said, which was not far from true, a thing I have heard my people say over and over again, rather than try to tell a thing that they themselves did not fully understand. In the same way that some people could hear a song and play it right then, the old man was almost a savant with simple food, which was the only food in the world he had ever tasted or cared about; everything else was mystery and theory. His mother died when he was a boy, but not before he learned biscuit, cornbread, and the essentials, and he practiced that craft in the woods, cooking for the logging crews, and on riverbanks with other rough men, cooking wild game, fish, turtle, and birds. His wife, Mattie, had been crippled after being kicked by a mule, so he cooked for his children for years; it was the only kindness from him that they could recall. Some people, the sort who hold grudges, said of course the old man knew his way around a fire, since he had apparently been born in flames and would return to them d’rectly, by and by.
The boy would never explain how the old man, who had taken such great care in feeding his children when they were small, could then leave without a backward glance when he heard the law coming for him. We always just supposed there were some men who did not give one whit about death, who even grinned in its teeth, but whose blood was iced by the idea of shackles and leg irons and confinement.
The kinfolk just watched from afar, to see who might kill whom. As it turned out, the old man was at first respectful of the volatile girl, and,
for him, patient. He was insistent that she at least pay attention, but it seemed to be coming to naught. For days, he taught, and taught, but she did not seem to be learning, or even trying all that hard. One day, after another fit, he stood quietly beside her on the porch and told her the way it would be.
It was either pay attention and learn to cook, he told her, or crawl up on the same mule she rode in on and go home to her people in Tidmore Bend. The boy had never said that, of course, and would have chased after her, running his mount to death, his heart broken, but the old man knew mulish when he saw it, and hated to waste his breath for months on end when one good made-up threat would do.
The girl was so shocked her mouth closed for the first and perhaps last time in her life, but she did not cry. She just bored a smoking hole in him with her own spooky blue eyes. The old man would later say he admired that; he would say the hardheaded girl had spine and guts. She just didn’t know which end of a spoon to hold, was all, or how to tell the difference between raw, burned, and a nice in-between.
“I ain’t got no mule,” she said, hotly.
He pointed to her feet, and walked away.
The main problem, other than attitude, was an almost total disregard for seasoning. Like a lot of people who are not eaters, or who eat mostly just to stay alive, she did not understand the importance of it; it was seasoning, the old man believed, that made the difference between living life and merely enduring it. It was not a profound notion…well, maybe a little, coming from a man in hobnailed boots. He told the girl, in as few words as possible, that she had to think about what suppertime, and all meals, really meant to working people. It did not just mean food was on the table; it meant the backbreaking labor was done, at least for a while. These meals, dinnertime and especially suppertime, were as close as most of them would come to a worldly reward. They ate supper early, because they went to bed early, to be up at four the next morning, to do it all over again; the time a workingman or -woman spent hunched over a bland, dull plate was wasted, empty, disappointing time. The cure to that malaise was salt, black pepper, ground cayenne, pork, onion, garlic, cinnamon, vanilla, and more, and a few Yankee greenbacks to buy it all with.