The Best Cook in the World

by Rick Bragg

  But, just in case, she sat beside him on the porch, to watch the chickens peck, and began to choose.

  · 7 ·

  THE FALLING COW

  Beef Short Ribs, Potatoes, and Onions

  Aunt Edna, who my mother says “run a good race”

  1929

  THE CATTLEMAN was not accusing, it seemed, only curious.

  “I ’uz wonderin’,” he asked the old man, “if you seen a cow?”

  The old man motioned with the end of his pipe toward Charlie and Ava’s milk cow, whose name was Dobbin.

  “That ’un ain’t mine,” the cattleman said.

  The old man nodded, as if to say, Of course not, and smoked a bit, leaving the cattleman unengaged. He did not like landowners and rich men, and especially did not like them when they came riding up to him on high horses with good leather, asking him foolish or pejorative questions.

  The cattleman was not a bad man. He had lived beside the people of the foothills all his life, wading through the muck and pulling the cotton and corn and shoving against the dumb beasts right beside them, except he had papers on the dirt they walked and the beasts they dragged from the bogs, and that, that right there, was the story of the world. They all made the dirt pay, with their sweat; it was the matter of shares that set them apart. Most of the renters and hired hands he lived beside knew their place in this feudal society; then there was this kind here, propped up in his straight-backed chair like he was king of something, the old glinty-eyed son of a bitch.

  The old man smoked some more, and the cattleman sat his horse. Ava, watching from the door, asked him if he would like to get down, but the cattleman said he did not have the time. Rich men’s time was always more pressing than poor men’s time. Poor men could not even argue the fact. They could dig a ditch to California or a well to Australia, for two dollars. A rich man made a hundred lacing up his boots.

  “I could use some he’p,” he said to the old man, “findin’ her, and ketchin’ her up.”

  The old man removed his pipe, as if he might say something.

  It took a full minute to become clear that he would not.

  “I’ve heard you can track a bit,” the cattleman said.

  “Might,” the old man said.

  The old man had been born in the last century, in the bleak aftermath of the Civil War, and he could trail deer, and wild pigs, and the last predators to haunt these hills. But the woods and wild things had never seen such stress as this, as now. The wild game had become wary, what with every starving peckerwood in the Deep South trying to run every living thing to ground, to sell or butcher to feed his babies.

  “But don’t see as how you need me,” he said, and left the rest of it unsaid.

  A blind fool could find a damn cow, could just fall over it, if nothing else. A cow weighed a ton, and did not exactly move dainty across the earth. But if it had gotten mired in a slough or mud bank, or tumbled off a ridge and crippled itself, or just wedged itself in the thick brush and could not push free, it could expire quickly. The country was wilder in those days; the houses and farms were far apart.

  This one seemed to have sprouted wings and flown away.

  “I’ll pay,” the cattleman said, “you find her alive.”

  The old man looked the question at him.

  “One dollar,” the cattleman said, “most I can pay.”

  That was damn near a fortune in ’29.

  “If it’s killed and she’s not yet turned, I’ll split the meat. Give you a quarter-share. You do the butcherin’, though, on your part.”

  The old man continued to stare, waiting for the rest of it.

  “If it’s stole…”

  The old man just shook his head once, to cut him off.

  He would not turn in a poor man, not give a name.

  “If it’s stole,” the cattleman said, “just bring back as much of it as you can. You still get a whole quarter….I don’t need no name. I just want my property.”

  No one in this house had tasted beef in a long, long time. The old man got up, a little creakily, and asked just one thing:

  “Whar you seen it last?”

  It had last been spotted, the cattleman said, outside a rusting, broken-down pasture fence, about five miles from an abandoned community called Tredegar, a true ghost town north of Jacksonville, where a tumbledown train depot and abandoned derelict hotel were being slowly covered up by the weeds and creeping vines.

  “I’ll send a man with you, to help,” the cattleman said. “You might need somebody to send word, or help gettin’ her out of the woods….” But what the old man heard in his head was, to make sure you don’t kill and butcher it in the trees.

  But if he was greatly insulted, it did not show. He and Ava watched the cattleman ride off on his horse.

  The old man appeared to be smiling, though it was, of course, hard to tell.

  * * *

  • • •

  They needed a break, this family did.

  This would do.

  It had been a dry and wicked summer, dying into a dusty, uncertain fall. The heat and drought had baked the dirt to iron chunks, bleached the color from the grass, and stunted the corn and cotton in the fields, and all the world—or at least as much of it as they could see—was dull, hot, and thirsty. Some of the wells had gone dry or been reduced to mud and sludge, and the stooped old men who remembered how to witch for water shuffled through the hardpack and dust and brittle weeds, holding to both ends of a green forked stick like the handlebars on a bicycle. They fixed their eyes on the quivering tip; if it dipped, it meant there was good water there, deep underground, but sometimes it was just hope that tugged it down. They had heard that, west of here, whole counties had just blown away, untold tons of red dirt and black dirt billowing across the land. The people of Texas and Oklahoma were blown off with it, and kept drifting west, searching. But that could never happen here, the old people said. The hills could not be swept away. It was all rocks and roots here, rocks and roots, and Johnsongrass, and pines.

  Here diseases with old names took people and livestock alike, and the rich men in the statehouses in Montgomery and Atlanta and Nashville just turned away. What did it have to do with them? Did these white trash even vote? Just a year before, Charlie had found wages in the ironworks, pouring steel at the blast furnaces in the city of Gadsden, but when the fires went cold in ’29, the steel barons laid him off without a blink or a fare-thee-well, took their company house, and put his family on the street.

  They would lose the baby Emma Mae to the deprivations of the time, to poor diet and disease, and the first crack appeared in Ava’s mind. She sat for days on the edge of her bed, as she always would when her heart was broken, and did not speak. The boy, a man now, did not know what to do. The old man let her grieve, then went into her room and led her outside, to sit on the porch. It would be grand if he had shown her some wisdom, but they just sat there, neither one talking, for a long time. They would never, none of them, live in town again.

  In the trees, you did not rely on anybody in a necktie. The old man was a wizard in making something from nothing. He and the boy set trotlines in the slow creeks, bank to bank, using tossed-out bread from the few cafés and stores that were still open then, and guts from the wild game they took. They ate catfish stew, even if the catfish were the size of goldfish or the big, rank mudcats that were the size of a bateau; you threw nothing back in those days. They made dumplings from squirrel and rabbit he trapped, and he even trapped birds, with intricate, delicate snares. He combed the woods for edible plants, and guarded the garden at night, sometimes all night, with the Belgium shotgun and a handful of rocks; what he used depended on whether the thief had four legs or two. Other nights, he waded the low places with a gig taped to an old hoe handle, and laid low whole legions of frogs. He would not, though, kill snakes for the pot; maybe someday it might come to that, but not yet; the devil owned the serpents, and he would not take them into his body.

  On
the good days, they had hot cornbread and buttermilk with a blade of green onion as a luxury, or just cornbread and beans, with a smidgen of pork no bigger than a thumbnail, or game, for seasoning. They grew potatoes and onions in the garden, which was their salvation, and tomatoes, squash, and okra. But there was never enough, never enough seed, enough rain, enough luck.

  Meanwhile, the boy chased work on the rails, braving the railroad bulls, crisscrossing the state lines of Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee inside empty freight cars, standing in lines for day labor, while, back home, the old man scrounged and looked after his family. The two boys, his grandsons, followed the old man around like unruly puppies, and Ava told the old man not to teach them any bad habits, like chewin’, smokin’, cussin’, and fightin’, or pretty much anything else that ended in an apostrophe. The old man told her the times did not call for gentle folk, but not to worry; the boys were buck-wild, barely house-trained, and mean as scorpions, and he did not believe it was them she should worry about. They followed him into the woods and stumbled out in the evenings with their arms loaded with whatever the old man could find or chase down or hit with a rock, including blackbirds, peppergrass, and groundhogs.

  As meager as their fare was, the table remained an oasis, because the old man seemed to know how to coax the most taste from the smallest, meanest amount, and it was the only place where they still laughed out loud, and joked, and sang. Then they pushed back their chairs and realized that everything outside that kitchen door was still unchanged, still bleached to hues of gray, and filmed in dusty red.

  But, in a way, the old man was born for this, for a time when the world seemed at its end, and the law seemed mostly absent, or uninterested, and a man took what he could to survive.

  * * *

  • • •

  As he mounted the gray mule to begin his search for the wandering cow, the two little boys came tumbling out in their nightshirts and no pants; it would be years before his grandsons saw much value in pants. The three-year-old, James, with the toddler, William, trailing behind, followed as the old man rode out of the yard, as they were wont to do. The old man did not waste his breath telling them to go back; they were as hardheaded and willful as their momma, as wild as weasels, and did just as they damned well pleased, too. He dismounted, scooped up some small rocks, and threw them at the boys till they ran for the porch.

  It took most of the hour, muleback, to get to Tredegar. With the cattleman’s man riding beside him, talking about church politics and world politics and other things he did not care about, he found the break in the pasture fence and the tracks of the animal; cows were as easy to track through the hills as a tornado or a freight train or an African elephant. Cows were not climbers; they stuck to the easy places, the trails. Some old-timers let their hogs wander and even go feral, but no one let a thing as valuable as a cow off a rope or out of a fence or lot on purpose. What was odd was that it would wander much out of sight to begin with; cows were social, and very, very rarely ever wandered much beyond the herd, unless they went mad or were led away. He had dealt with mad cows before, usually with a brickbat.

  Using a pair of pliers and a roofing hatchet, Jim and the cattleman’s man patched the barbed wire, which was rusted almost through along its entirety. The cattleman’s man was not much help, lacerating himself twice, cursing, getting in the way. He was not a tracker, either, and seemed to be about as sharp as a mush melon, a big, soft, easy, friendly man whose primary concern was that they might get lost in the woods and somehow miss supper. His wife would feed his supper to the dogs if he was late, a thing he told the old man at least a dozen times. By the heft of the man, it was clear he was religious about being on time.

  The old man did not need much help. He followed the sign along an overgrown farm road until the cow, oddly, decided to abandon the soft roadbed for the gravel of the railroad track, where the tracks disappeared. This made no sense.

  The old man slid off his mule and followed the track in the direction the cow seemed to be going, to the old Tredegar trestle. It was not exactly a great gorge, but it was the deepest one hereabouts, and little boys, for generations, had proved their courage by walking the tracks from one side to the other. Down below, the shallow water pooled around great slabs of rock.

  There he found the cow, deader’n Abraham Lincoln.

  The cattleman’s man rode off, kicking at his mule’s sides, to fetch the cattleman and some men to help hoist the carcass out of the gorge and onto higher ground, so it could be hauled off—that, or to butcher it in the gorge and pack it out. Jimmy Jim stayed behind, to guard the remains. You were talking good money here; a lot of reprobates, hungry ones, would not be above hacking off a decent portion and disappearing into the trees. In flush times, no one would have bothered with it, but in these days, you did not leave beef down a gorge for the turkey vultures and the possums and the other, two-legged opportunists.

  Some while later, the cattleman and men with ropes appeared. The cattleman stood with Jim on the trestle and tried to deduce how this tragedy came to be. It seemed to him the cow had tried to cross the trestle, and had been swept off the tracks by an east- or westbound train. Such collisions happened all the time; a cow wandering onto a railroad track, especially on a blind curve, was not even much of a story anymore. It was not the collision but the location that had him flummoxed.

  The cattleman had been around cows a long time, and had never known one to have such an adventurous nature that it was willing to cross the narrow trestle for no apparent reason at all.

  The old man just shook his head.

  “God’s will,” he said.

  The cattleman looked surprised. He had never seen the old man in church.

  It took the rest of the day to retrieve the cow from the ravine, the cattleman cursing with every heave, because he had planned to sell this cow, and a few others, any day now. Just damn bad luck, to have it take a header off a railroad trestle, and cost him a quarter of his profit, not to mention what he had to pay to drag it out of the ravine.

  “God’s will,” the old man said again.

  The cattleman supposed there were not many atheists left, with Hoover in the White House.

  It had been a coarse butchering, there beside the trestle, done by amateurs; the cattleman had always hired his butchering done. His men made a mess of it, with little regard to steaks, chops, or roast, and mostly just stripped the bones. In this, the old man saw an opportunity. He accepted his meat from the cattleman, then asked him if he could also have the ribs, which were still covered with some good meat and rich fat.

  The old man packed the beef home behind him on the gray mule. When he turned into the yard with it, it was like he had ridden up with a sack of silver. Beef was rich man’s food. Ava cried—Ava always cried at good fortune. The old man hung the big leg of beef in the smokehouse—he would deal with it later—and went into the house with the ribs. He told his daughter-in-law to rest; her health had been poor, for months and months. He would cook their supper that night, by his lonesome.

  * * *

  • • •

  When they walked into the little house that night for supper, the smell alone was the richest thing they had known in some time. Some of the babes had never tasted beef, even smelled it.

  The old man had braised and then stewed the short ribs in salted water, slowly, in a heavy iron pot, for two hours or more, till the meat all but slipped from the bones. Then he added quartered white potatoes and halved onions, the hot, yellow kind that went sweet as they cooked, and tossed in a generous dose of black pepper. He cooked it over low heat and with little water, until the only moisture left in the bottom of the pot was the liquefied fat from the beef, and the potatoes had puffed up and come apart, and the onions had begun to caramelize in the bottom of the pot. The aroma was so sweet, so intense, it almost had a shape to it, like a fog, and it had tortured the family for those two hours or more. I would ask you to imagine it, with a truly empty belly, but most of us have
never been so desperate for such food before.

  He had prepared some home-canned sweet green peas with just a little salt and sugar and a pat—well, a block—of homemade butter, baked a small, crisp skillet of cornbread, and prepared a massive bowl of slaw with white cabbage and carrot. He did not drown the cabbage with the dressing, putting just enough in to taste, and dusted it with black pepper, too, but no salt. Fresh food, of any kind, was a blessing; only a fool would cover such a thing in salt, and he was a man who damn near prayed to salt. Besides, he said, a meal this fine, built around meat this rich, a cook did not have to tart it up much to make it taste like something grand. Potatoes, onions, cabbage, peas, even mayonnaise, were cheap, available. But beef, now…It was the best meal the people around the table had had in years.

  They rose from the table, all of them, as if slightly drunk, wobbled, somehow, by the richness of the food, like there was a drug in it. A whole land hurtin’, and the old man fed them short ribs.

  “How…?” the boy asked him.

  “Fell out the sky,” the old man said, which was at least partly true.

  * * *

  • • •

  Some years would go by before the damnedest story began to circulate in this part of the world, but it never had much traction, and became swallowed up inside all the other lies and hogwash spread by all the chuckleheads here about the bad ol’ days, and what the people had to do to survive them. It was about a bone-thin old man in a slouch hat who was spotted leading a cow across the railroad trestle near Tredegar, when every fool in the county knew the westbound to Birmingham was due on that trestle, just about any time.