The Best Cook in the World

by Rick Bragg

  Saint Peter smiles.

  “Because in heaven,” he says, “we feed each other.”

  · 12 ·

  THE SECOND GHOST

  Cracklin’ Cornbread

  One of my great-uncles, Bill Hamilton, the guitar picker and shoe kicker who invited himself to dinner, and invited in the Holy Ghost

  1941

  THE SEQUENCE of events that led to the miracle on the Dalton Road involved not one but two separate revelations of the Holy Ghost. My grandfather, who was not a churched man, missed the second revelation altogether, because the hysteria and theatrics from the first manifestation made him so mad he left, walking in the dark for a distant crossing, where he swung himself up onto a westbound train.

  It was autumn, and one of his guitar-picking, deadbeat brothers-in-law, Bill Hamilton, showed up uninvited for a fine supper of potato dumplings at their rented house in the mountains outside Rome. After scraping the platter clean and licking his spoon, Bill was picking a soulful rendition of “Great Speckle Bird” on his Martin guitar when he suddenly got happy, raised his pick hand to the Lord, and began to shout and praise and prophesy. He sensed the burning specter of the Holy Ghost and welcomed it into the unworthy vessel of his body, and became so overwhelmed with grace he commenced to run to and fro in the Spirit, and inadvertently kicked both of Charlie Bundrum’s work boots across the house. One flew under a low, heavy iron bed, where it could not easily be retrieved, and the other seemed to have vanished into thin air, though it would later be found beneath the chifforobe.

  Charlie became so angry at that foolishness he gathered his tools and left. There was rumored to be work in North Alabama for a man who could drive a straight nail, and even if there was not, at least he would be gone from these freeloading, guitar-picking, proselytizing shoe-kickers. Ava tongue-lashed him viciously as he walked out the door, leaving her with five children and a washtub full of cracklin’ meat to render into lard before the weather warmed.

  “It ain’t I don’t believe in the Holy Ghost,” he called to her over his shoulder as he vanished into the night. “It’s just that I don’t believe He’s a’-livin’ in Bill Hamilton.”

  The second revelation, a day or so later, was a good bit harder to deny.

  * * *

  • • •

  It happened in the early afternoon. That morning, the air had been chill, hog-killing weather—you never killed a hog till after the first frost—but by the afternoon the air was sticky and warm. The sky was still blue, but she could hear thunder to the west, out over Alabama. Ava, in a severe ankle-length dress and old-fashioned button-up high-top shoes, hunched over a giant bubbling cast-iron cauldron. Her hair fell to below her waist, as black as ten feet down, but in just the past year a single streak of silvery white had begun to snake through. She stirred the pot with a long steel ladle, the handle wrapped in rags to keep it from burning her hands, and when she lifted it from the pot to threaten the children, it smoked in the air.

  My mother, still the baby of the family, sat watching from the dirt a safe distance away; the black pot would hiss and spit every now and then, like something alive, and glowed a dull red on the outside. The boys, James and William, watched from the far end of the yard, where they had been banished, too. They were just now in their teens, and tracked in mayhem the way other children tracked dirt; Ava had drawn a line in the clay, and told all her children that if they crossed it and came near the dangerous bubbling pot she would sell them to Gypsies.

  “She’s witchin’ Daddy,” James said.

  His imagination, and ability to lie, were boundless.

  “No,” said William, “she’s just makin’ lard.”

  My mother was fascinated by her brothers and listened closely to what they said, unless they were tormenting her and her sisters for sport. “They were so mean,” my mother told me. “They put me in a sack one time and hung me in a tree.”

  Ava was not, my mother realized, in fact hexing her man, but did curse him steadily between stanzas of “Victory in Jesus” as she stirred the smoking pot. Of a thousand hymns inside her head, this was her new favorite, and she sang at least part of it every day over every meal she cooked, whether she was joyous, melancholy, or mad. In a house full of Philistines, it was the only church her man and boys were likely to receive.

  O victory in Jesus…

  All the children crept as close as they could. Imagine a thousand skillets, all filled with the best bacon in the world, all going at once, and you might get close to the smell that wafted across the yard, down the road, and into the pines. The children stood or sat as if entranced, and their stomachs gurgled and growled. “My Lord, there just ain’t no better smell in this world,” my mother told me.

  Ava had worked over the hot fire all afternoon, and had all but rendered thirty pounds of cubed, perfect, pure-white pork fat in her ten-gallon iron wash pot. She was trying to fish the last batch of golden cracklin’s from the hot, roiling oil when she smelled the rain. She told the boys to run to the house and take their sisters with them, and not to dawdle about it. She did not tell them a storm was coming; she never would have said it that way. She said, in the vernacular of her people, “It’s comin’ up a cloud.”

  The first gusts, fierce and sudden, cracked tree limbs along the Old Dalton Road and rushed beneath the cauldron like a bellows. Flames shot into the air higher than her head, and red-orange cinders skittered across the swept dirt of the yard. A few hot cinders landed in the folds of her heavy skirt and in her long hair, which had begun to whip like snakes in the air; as she beat them out with her free hand, she slapped her own face so hard, by accident, she almost knocked herself down. The boys had not moved an inch. If their momma was going to burst into flame, or be carried off into the sky, flapping, by a great whirlwind, they intended to stay right where they were and watch it transpire. Across the yard, they heard the tempo and volume of her voice rise to meet the storm. She sang louder when she was scared.

  My Savior forever…

  She went quiet suddenly and dropped the spoon in the grass. There had been no way to tell how bad it was until it was almost on top of them; there was no dark magic in that, either, no great mystery, only the nature of things in the hills of northwestern Georgia. The high ridges, deep hollers, and thick trees boxed the people in. The storms came rumbling fast and unseen, like a train through a dark tunnel.

  Ava took off for the old whitewashed house at a dead run, both hands steadying a biscuit pan heaped high with golden cracklin’s, a delicacy as dear as beefsteak, slammed it on the table, then darted back outside to gather her children. She yelled one last time to the nitwit boys, who had finally regained their hearing and some sense, and to Edna and Juanita, the older girls. She scooped my mother, the baby, from the dirt like a good shortstop, and ran again for the door.

  The children could see, past Ava’s blowing skirt in that open door, what must have looked like the end of the world. The first raindrops hit the roiling hot grease in the giant wash pot with a sound like gunshots. Fire spiked into the air, then geysers of white smoke. The wind shook the thin walls of the old house, and the front window banged loud in its sash. The rented house was ragged and flimsy, and even as she and her children sheltered inside, Ava knew it was like taking refuge inside a cardboard box. She would be afraid of weather all her life, but knew the difference between straight-line winds, which would knock down a tree or break a window, and tornadoes, which would bring Judgment Day, killing livestock and people and leaving the land in sticks.

  It was a green sky she dreaded most; a green sky had the devil in it. And even as she counted the heads of her children, to make sure she had not missed one, an odd, pink lightning arced overhead, and the skies changed from black to that dreaded, roiling, dirty green. As they watched, spellbound, a thin, writhing cyclone dropped out of the clouds like a worm out of a rotten apple and began to tear the ridge apart.

  There was no car to flee in, no storm shelter to run to. The tall pine
s around them twisted in the wind, and limbs snapped like Popsicle sticks, and even the hardwoods, the great oaks, began to come apart. The girls clutched at Ava’s skirts like they were drowning, and began to sob. The boys were pale, silent. Ava pulled them all close as the storm crossed the ridge, stabbed into the holler, and bore down.

  It’ll turn, she told herself.

  But the tornado did not zig and zag, or climb and fall in the sky. It did not act right. It chewed its way across the valley and down the road in a straight line, roaring like some great machine, and Ava slammed the door shut and made it fast with a slab of board held in place with a tenpenny nail. There was only one window in the room, and Ava pushed her children as far from it as she could.

  It’ll turn.

  The rain hammered the tin roof, and then came the roar itself, more like a machine than a thing of nature. Her children wailed, and she told them to hush, but the truth is, she felt like screaming herself, like beating at the walls herself, from the inside. It was not just the danger but the hatefulness of it, of knowing that the last thing her children might ever feel was terror. The boys forgot to pretend to be brave and stood fixed to her side. The little girls swung on her skirts, about to drag her to the floor.

  She had always been an imperfect Pentecostal, mostly because Charlie so often needed a good cussing out, and a certain amount of backsliding was inevitable in the natural world. But it was a religion that suited her, a faith born in breadlines and street revivals, a sect of healers, mystics, and miracles. As the room turned to gloom, she was every inch a Christian and began to pray in the style of her people. That does not mean she gently folded her hands and humbly bowed her head and appealed to the saints. The Pentecostals do not go about God gently. They pray like they are ablaze, in a fire that cannot be doused or smothered but only blown out by a greater one, the way a bundle of TNT can blow out a burning well.

  Ava balled her hands into fists and threw back her head and invoked the Holy Ghost, and begged, sobbing, to have it course through her blood and bones and marrow and mind. And as she did, she began to shake. She gathered her skirts in her fingers and whirled round and round, sending her children tumbling or stumbling back across the floor. She bounced, and praised, and crashed to her knees, then thrust her skinny arms heavenward and began to speak in unknown tongues. The skeptics called it theater, religious hysteria, but the followers of the Pentecost knew it was the old language, maybe even the voice of God. It was not guttural or harsh but almost musical, like an antidote, somehow, for the cacophony outside. The children still sobbed, but now their eyes were fixed on her, and amazed. Even the baby, who was being squeezed half to death in the arms of the oldest girl, was rapt.

  They noticed, in time, that the shaking of the planks under their feet and in the walls had gone still, and the roar had faded, then died. Ava rose from the floor and opened the door. It was warped from the force of the wind, and she yanked it hard to open it, but there was nothing to see except a gentle rain and a litter of sticks and leaves. The tornado had taken a hard turn, and missed them clean.

  Ava dusted off the knees of her long dress and swung the baby back onto her hip. She was bone white, shaking. She did not seem joyous. She seemed mad.

  “Well, I’ll be goddamn,” she said weakly. “I thought He had us all that time.”

  It has never been exactly clear why she said it; her children would only guess. Ava, we do know, said what she felt, before her mind began to slip in middle age and after. Her family had retreated to the mountains as the Depression settled on the South like an eclipse of the sun, and they lost a child to it then, to a sickness that could have been cured with a few dollar bills. She had lost so much already, and then here comes an act of God, to take everything else she had. It may be, the way she saw it, He owed her one.

  Ava staggered out into the yard to check on the lard, to see what might be saved. The storm had come and gone in minutes, taking the rain with it, but the wind had spread sticks and specks of dead leaves across the cooling surface of the rendered fat. The underneath, she was relieved to see, was mostly clean. She would clean and strain the worst of it later, as well as she could. She laboriously scooped out the leaves and sticks and specks of other trash on the surface. After a while, she felt the eyes on her and noticed the children—all of them—still gathered around her expectantly, waiting for her to levitate, or break into a Tennessee two-step, or turn a stick into a snake. The boys, especially, were still dumbfounded. You could not beat them into church with a singletree, or hold them down for a hymn or a scrap of Scripture with mule harness and logging chains. But that afternoon they had witnessed a miracle with their own eyes, or at least what they believed a miracle to look like.

  “Momma turned it,” William told his big brother.

  James, a born storyteller, did not know what to say. He was used to making up his stories, like the catfish he hooked in the backwater, as big as a Studebaker, that had a dead hog inside when it was hauled to the bank and cut open. Sometimes it was a Duesenberg and a milk cow, but the plot was generally the same. But this? No one would believe this, even if it was God’s sanction.

  “Momma prayed it away,” William said.

  The boys decided they would get religion after all, and held revival there under the clearing sky, baptizing each other with wet tree limbs, and would have sung a hymn if they had known any songs except the very bad ones they’d learned from the men down on the river and sang, snickering, behind the outhouse. Then they got bored and just wandered off, to see if the baby would eat a mud pie.

  Ava, once she had her wind back, acted as if nothing much had happened; she still had work to do before nightfall, to feed her children. The air had gone chill again, and the sky was glittering and clear, the way it gets in the South only after a storm has blown the thick, wet air away. The children were whining from hunger when she strained and put up the last of the lard and went inside to finish supper.

  Earlier in the day, she had put a pot of Great Northerns and ham bone on the stove to simmer, and by evening the beans were about done. Her Charlie had to sell the choice cuts of the hogs he raised then—the loin and chops and fresh ham and shoulder—to pay his debts. But there was still fatback, and soup bones, hog jowl, and pig’s feet, cuts that would become delicacies by necessity. The cornbread was the centerpiece of this meal, though.

  By kerosene light, Ava mixed up her meal, salt, and soda, then stirred in cold water. When the consistency was perfect—not too thin, not too thick—she stirred in two handfuls of the fresh, crisp cracklin’s. She poured the cracklin’-cornmeal mixture into her iron skillet, which she greased with freshly rendered lard, and put it on to bake. She sang over it, of course. It rises better if you do. Everyone knows this.

  She cubed some potatoes, about the same size as gambling dice, and set them to fry on top of the stove in a little lard, adding a little water now and then so the potatoes would keep tender as they cooked. She took a small onion and shaved it into the potatoes, because anything else is just ignorant, even if you don’t like onion. It smelled so good, the children gathered around the stove and watched it all cook, as if they could will the skillet to give up supper a few minutes sooner. It was just dried beans, taters, meal, and the parts of the hog the better-off people would not have. It took a cook to make it into something fine. “I just wisht I’d of had more onion,” to add another layer of flavor to the beans, Ava told her children. “If I’d had a extry onion, I’d of showed y’all sumpin’.” It is a recurring theme in our family history. We were always, as a family, one onion short.

  The cornbread came out a light, golden brown, thick with cracklin’s in the middle; the cracklin’s had gone almost liquid except on the top of the cake, where they were crisped like bacon. Some people used egg as a way to enrich the taste and give it a spongier texture, and some used buttermilk for taste and texture; Ava disdained all this as getting fancy, as trying too hard, and expensive, besides.

  She cut the cornmea
l into cake slices, and James and William snatched it off the stove and ate it right there, flipping the hot bread from hand to hand and trying to suck air in around the hot mouthfuls to cool it. She threatened to beat them, but she just didn’t have the wind, and broke off a little bit of crust for herself. The bread itself tasted of that rendered pork, and here and there were chewy, tiny pieces of the skin. They ate it down to crumbs, and only then set in on the beans and the potatoes and a little surprise Ava had in the oven: some roasted pig’s feet, all fat, cartilage, and goodness. Charlie loved pig’s feet, which was mostly why she cooked them that night, so the children could tell him how good they had been. Ava knew how to hurt a man.

  But it was the bread that they would remember. It is difficult to explain the luster of a cracklin’ to someone who has never had a good one. I can’t write pretty enough to describe it; you just have to taste it. The best way to appreciate and understand a cracklin’ is to hold a still-warm nugget between your thumb and forefinger and gently press them together. The essence that oozes out of the cracklin’ is all that is good about Southern cooking, literally rendered into a speck of happiness. That was what Ava and her children tasted in the hours after the storm, when it turned out the End of Days was not upon them after all.

  Over in Calhoun County, Charlie stood in line to be picked for construction and roofing crews, and at night he camped in the pines with other men who came to chase work at the army base, dining on canned Vienna sausage and pork and beans. He kept his tools close by his side, in case the police came to roust them for vagrancy, but at least no one was getting happy around the campfire and booting beanie weenies all about the place.

  Charlie, when he was drinking and sometimes when he was not, said the Lord could be slow to deliver the common man, if He delivered him at all. This was why that freeloading Bill Hamilton made him so mad, him a-pickin’ in a Tampa beer joint one week in his checkedy sport coat, then preaching and dancing and acting a fool when he came home hungry, his pockets turned out. There ort to be a limit, he liked to say, on how many times a man could backslide and still get to come back to the Lord. Charlie paid his own way, and did not ask for help from anyone, even from beyond the firmament. When his children told him what had happened, what their momma had done when the storm was about to get them, he merely nodded his head. Ava was certainly touched by something, he always said, so why could it not be God?