The Best Cook in the World

by Rick Bragg

  He had heard stories of them, of feral hogs the size of milk cows, living in those mountains, getting fat on hickory nuts and persimmons and whatever they could root—not common, but real.

  One night, after fried cornbread patties and a little buttermilk, he lingered long once the dishes had been put away, telling her his plans. As he talked, he packed some cold biscuit, a wool army-surplus blanket, and all his shells, even the bird shot. If he could get close, he would beat it to death with his bare hands if there was a pork chop in it.

  “I may scare up a deer, too,” he told Ava.

  “You may fall off that mountain and make me a widder,” she said.

  He tried to pat her, but she would not allow it. Ava was against it, no matter what he said. Ava’s strategy in life was to be against everything, or almost everything, proposed by the men and boys in her life. Though she was a wonderfully tough woman, she was not necessarily a brave one when it came to some things, and the hard times had touched her soul and broken her a bit inside. She was a little like one of those chickens: if you were afraid of everything, then you just couldn’t help being afraid of the right things sooner or later.

  “It won’t keep,” she said, of the pork—or any game, really—he might kill. It would take two days, longer to ride into the mountains, and two days back, if he ever came back.

  “You could snag a rich man whilst I’m gone,” he told her.

  “No one will have me with them hellions,” she said of her boy children.

  She said they would have to join the circus. The boys could bite heads off things. They would do it now if supper was running late, and if they could run something down.

  Her husband said he would only be gone a few days. As soon as he scared something up, he said, he would dress it in the woods, even smoke it there if he had to, and hurry home.

  “You’ll get et,” she said.

  “The bears is gone,” he said, “and just about all the panthers, too.”

  “Not the hogs,” she said. “The hogs is still there. You done told me.” She had a fear of hogs, for it was a known fact that a big feral hog, or a pen of domestic ones if they were hungry enough, would devour a man right down to his boot heels.

  The deep mountains scared her, naturally. City people think all the people here were the same, but they never understood the distinction. There were country people, and then there were mountain people. Ava believed the worst. There had also been stories that some of the people in the high-up were not particular as to their diet, either. The deep hills, like the bottom of the sea, pulled at the imagination, and the truth was, she was more afraid of the people he would encounter than the beasts he might find. The hard times had made the mean people meaner, more desperate, and the people in the deep-back made the country people here seem like the Junior League. The people there believed they owned everything under the moon and stars, with or without deeds and fences, and some of them had been there since the first criminals rattled ashore to found the thirteenth colony. They lived by the feud and married only within their clan, and recognized no government; they had ignored the British, the colonials, the Confederacy, the New Testament, and the state legislature.

  They had left Jimmy Jim alone, she and Charlie believed, because he was more like them than he was like the people below, and because he kept so completely to himself. He had not fled there despite these people; he had fled there because of them, because they just seemed to know when a stranger’s footfall sounded, however softly, in the leaves and weeds and uncut forest, and did not tolerate visitors.

  In the morning, before daybreak, she stood on the porch, wringing her hands inside her apron. She would do this, the same way, for all her life. She never took her apron off, except for church. Charlie waved as he rode off, but he did not expect a wave in return. She would be mad forever about this one specific thing, this day, and never forgot it. You could not pile up enough good memories around a thing, enough fine times, so that she could not find it now and then, and prick her finger on the splinter hidden there.

  Again he guided the mule into the high places, and again he avoided the smoke and the glow of the whiskey fires. This time, he did not sing out; better to move without attracting any attention, better to hope to slip by, than confront a man before he had taken so much as a ground squirrel. He rode quietly, humming low to the mule. The gray mule liked a little music, till it tried to fling you into the hereafter, or kick your brains out. Faulkner would be right about mules; they really would wait patiently for a lifetime for the opportunity to kick you once—to death, they hoped. The gray was a saddle mule in the sense that it could be ridden, if it felt like it, but only with great care, and never, ever trusted.

  The old man had shown him how to track, how to read signs, though he was not exactly the last of the Mohicans. He could find deer, and wild hogs made a clear trail, rooting and trampling. Many of them started tame, escaped, and went wild, and their very physiology changed, like a bad dream. They got leaner and meaner, and their tusks grew and curved. One day, they would trample the landscape underfoot; they were still part meat and part myth at that time, and it was hard to tell if a hog up here was feral or just loose.

  But, though he saw the world’s densest concentration of squirrel, and heard the crash of deer antlers in the distance, he did not encounter any large game, neither deer nor hog. When he finally did, it was not so much that he found it as that it just materialized, like some kind of magic, at the worst possible time.

  As he told it, it was a comedy of errors from start to finish, so bad there was no way to color it to make himself look any more than a witless victim in a string of events in which he was almost killed, first by an invisible snake, then by the mule, then by an illegal hog, and, finally, by the mountain itself. “The only thing I didn’t do,” he conceded, “was shoot myself.”

  He remembered how the mule had reacted to the big hog when he came here to fetch his daddy, so in the dense brush, where the trees and weeds closed in on the trail itself, he dismounted and led the animal, wrapping the leather reins around his fist. That was probably unwise, but he had the feeling that, if they were to part company, the mule would run all the way home to Alabama and he would die of old age before he hiked out of these hills. Or, if he were to let his imagination run loose, he feared he would find the mule turning on a spit in someone’s yard as he trudged, hungry, back down the mountain in his shoe leather.

  He and the mule had stopped at a natural rock spring and were drinking from the cold, clear water when he smelled the musk of a snake; what kind he did not know, because he never saw it, but it was a warm day for early fall, and he feared the serpents might still be out. The mule, suddenly wild-eyed, must have smelled it, too, and spun a perfect 360 degrees, bucking, with the young man’s hand still wrapped in the reins, dragging him across the rocky ground. He dropped the Belgium in the water and mud, and banged his hip and head against the rocks before he could get the damn thing settled down. He would have beaten the mule, but that seemed like a damn-fool thing to do to an animal on the edge of a mountainside and a nervous breakdown. He got the beast calmed enough so it would stand and quiver, so he could at least tie it to a sapling, and tried, with murder in his heart, to locate the snake that had caused all this grief. It had apparently slithered off elsewhere, to soak up the sun on one of the last warm days of the year.

  He surveyed his wounds. He had a cut on his head and a bruise the size of a mush melon on the point of his bony hip. But, worse, the lovely Belgium was befouled with mud. His daddy had never dropped it, or even laid it flat on the ground, at least not that he could recall.

  The mule, except for its nerves, was unhurt. Charlie would wonder, after that, if there even was a snake, but Ava, who knew everything, would tell him that, though a man’s mind, imagination, and even his hearing might play tricks on him, his sense of smell was usually dead-on. So, if he smelled a snake, it was a snake. Besides, a mule is not capable of imagining anything. Mules are a
s dumb as doornails but smart like that.

  He sat on a big rock to clean the gun, and it was while he was running a rag through the barrels with a green stick that he heard it—heard not a squeal or a snort but a soft, deep, huffing noise, somewhere in the leaves close by.

  The great hog, which should have run to Chattanooga after the mêlée involving the mule, stood unconcerned some fifty feet away—it was hard to tell in the thick brush—rooting in the just-fallen leaves and mud. It was hard to tell its size, too, so far away, but it was a true hog, rusty red in color, thicker in the shoulders and leaner in the hips and belly than the domestic hogs, or so it seemed to the boy. One day, to make it sound more exotic, people would call them wild boars; it was still just a souped-up hog, just bacon, ham, and sausage, and a whole lot of it, from what he could tell.

  He quietly and quickly clicked the two pieces of the shotgun back together, pleading with the mule, under his breath, to keep quiet just once, then, after slipping a lead slug and a buckshot shell into his shotgun, he began to ease closer. Jim had taught him a trick to hunting anything in the deep woods with a shotgun, which was only worth a damn if you could get close enough. Figure your path as quick as you can, Jim had said, figure the tripping vines, stumps, dead branches, anything in your way, then snug the gun to your shoulder and take some rough aim on your beast; now close in, trying to remember your path. Raise your feet high, instead of shuffling them in the dry leaves. Your sights would wobble, of course, as you moved, but you would still be faster, and more on point than some fool who tried to watch his feet, glance up to relocate his game, throw the gun to his shoulder, and squeeze. You might stumble, might trip, even kill a tree or two by accident, but a man with a shotgun had to get close to do any good. A 12-gauge was not much count, the old man had warned, beyond the length of a bad intention.

  He did get close, close enough to see it was about two hundred pounds or more of good meat, and it was like the thing wanted to die, it ignored him so. Then, like something from a bad dream, it snorted a warning, fixed him with its beady eyes, and ran, not away, but straight at him. His legs atremble, he knocked it down with the punkin ball, which is a little like shooting your game with an express train, and finished it, he believed, with a blast from the double-ought buck. It was too close to miss, he would later say.

  He was pretty full of himself, standing there with his empty gun over this big, fierce creature. Then it shook and snorted and heaved, and he almost killed himself getting away. He caught his pants leg on a broken, dying trash tree, fell hard for the second time that day, and damn near drove a stob through his palm, but held his gun above his head. He trained his empty gun on the hog, futile, and then it elected to die.

  One leg of his overalls was ripped half away—where the hog had tried to cut him, he wanted to believe, but, shamefully, he had to admit he had only been attacked by a tree. By some small miracle, he was only scratched up a little bit, and he just had to sit and shake awhile before going to work on his prize. It took him two solid hours, maybe three, to do the rough work of it all. He was trying to decide whether to take the head home with him—not from vanity but because there was good meat in it—when he noticed the ear.

  Someone had notched it, neatly, with a sharp knife, probably when it was just a piglet or shoat. The V-shaped notch was how some of the old-timers identified their livestock, like a brand, usually after cutting them to make the meat better. Then they just turned them loose, and let the grubs, roots, and acorns feed them until it was time to harvest the meat. He had heard of it from Jim, and had believed the practice had faded. Whatever had happened, this hog had not been cut; he was somebody’s boar, or at least he had been.

  He had shot some man’s property; there was no way around it, he was a thief. He could have let it rot in the woods and fled down the mountain, but decided that would be twice a crime. He decided he would pack it out on the mule, and if anyone confronted him, he would tell them what had happened, and tell the truth, and try to make it right if he could. Larceny, of any kind, was not in him; somehow, that tendency passed him by.

  He would have felt better about it if it had happened down below. But these people lived up here for a reason. He had about a hundred pounds of fresh pork behind his saddle, their pork; if he made it down the mountain, it would be a miracle, and he had never been a praying man.

  Still, he almost made it. He was half a day from the state line, maybe a little more, when he rode through a bottleneck cut and saw two singular men lounging in the path, as if they had been waiting for him, and maybe they had. They were not what Hollywood would have cast as hillbillies. They were not passing a ceramic jug around, or scratching themselves; not shirtless and barefoot, or garbed in rags with one gallus dangling. They were lean, hard-looking men, clean-shaven, in fresh-washed overalls, their shirts buttoned to the neck. One had a lever-action rifle swinging easily in one hand. They were hatless and beardless, or he might have guessed Mennonites. Whoever they were, this was their mountain.

  The old man had raised him to be a fighter, but, as bad as things were in his house, he hated to kill, or die, for a hog. He raised the Belgium just a bit, but as the men approached him, he saw the man with the rifle step away from the other, to put some space between the two, as the other man, calm as you please, conjured a short-barreled shotgun, a rabbit gun, from behind what seemed thin air. They did not threaten him in any way, unless you count looking hard.

  “Fellers,” young Charlie said, “I reckon this is your hog.”

  The men had the look of his daddy about them, unsmiling, curt.

  “Thangs be bad down yonder?” one of them asked.

  He just nodded.

  They left him some of the pork, which was more than he expected, a shank and one small piece of side meat, all the feet, and—he reckoned as a joke—the notched ear. They told him not to come back and shoot no more wandering livestock, and it might be best if he never came back at all. He tipped his hat and rode off with cold sweat running down his back, rode all the rest of the way home slouched in the saddle, miserable, beaten, weary, and sore, but not mad, for, as he would later admit, he was in the wrong. He lacked the outright cussedness his daddy had to be wrong and righteous at the same time.

  As he rode into the yard, Ava was sitting on the porch, her face bleak. Some days, bad luck is all there is.

  She did not wait to hear his story; such foolishness could wait. She told him the sheriff had been by the day before to take him to jail. He had papers on him, not for making liquor, but for packing it out of the woods for another man, for wages. The sheriff told her to tell him to come into town, d’rectly, and turn himself in. He said it would only be four months or so, maybe six months on the outside, if the judge was not a hard-hearted son of a bitch. But it would be more, much more, if they had to chase him down.

  It looked like civilization had decided to include them, after all.

  “We’ll starve,” Ava had told the sheriff, and the man did not meet her gaze. And for some reason, that scared her to death, maybe because his offering no argument meant that it might actually be true.

  She took the bloody burlap bag from him, and said nothing about its being so light.

  “You should eat,” she said, “afore you go.”

  He had no stomach for it, and just stepped inside to change. He had two pairs of overalls and two ragged shirts to his name. He put on the worst of them—he might be living in it for months if they kept him in the county prison, and there was no point in wasting good clothes. If they kept him in county, he would be shoveling sand or gravel across hot tar, or cutting brush, or loaned out as contract labor to a rich man.

  He had not unsaddled the tired mule. He climbed up, and pulled the oldest boy up behind him. It was too far to walk to the county seat, and James could ride the mule home when they locked him away. There was no money for a fine, even if that had been an option, and no need for a lawyer. He was twice guilty: of hauling liquor, and of being too poor to get
out of it. He would have to do whatever time the judge handed down.

  As they rode to town, he told James he and William could take the Belgium out every day to hunt, but he shouldn’t shoot unless he was sure, sure of a deer, a possum, or a coon. There were only a few shells left, and Charlie warned him not to waste them on birds, except maybe a turkey—not enough return on the price of the shell, he told the boy, for a mere bird. Best to use the .22, he said, when he could. He had a tobacco tin full of .22s at the house.

  They would have to hire themselves out, him and his brother William, to any farmer who would have them. They might get fed, at least, but he told James to take any wages they might earn home to their momma, and not be tempted to buy hard candy or bubble gum or cigarettes; he knew his boys. They would have to see to the garden. With Edna, who could outwork either one of them, they would need to plant, hoe, and harvest—potatoes and corn especially, but also tomatoes, squash, onions, okra, and watermelons, to sell if they could. Feed any scrap to the hog. And walk the neighbors’ fields, after their harvest, for any corn or anything else they had missed, like some late-season melons. “They won’t care,” he said.

  “Do what you can, and don’t worry about school,” he said, as if either of the boys had worried about it much to start with.

  Then, almost as an afterthought:

  “Try not to steal nothin’, if you can.”

  Ava did not tell him, as he rode away with the boy gripping him around the middle, that the few handfuls of flour she had scraped together for biscuit dough were the last in the house, the last of pretty much everything. She had a little lard, a little sugar, some spices, and some milk and butter—thank God for the cow. She did not tell him that there was no money, none, in the house.