The Best Cook in the World

by Rick Bragg

  He often said that, during the Depression and the years that followed, even as he bootlegged his whiskey behind the veil of the trees, or, once in a great while, slept off a drunk behind bars.

  “The children ain’t had no supper,” she said.

  “I’ll feed ’em,” he said.

  She snorted at that, a sound full of all the disdain of men in the whole wide, judgmental world. She told him not to keep the little girl out late or she would call the law on him, but gave him no instructions for the care and feeding of the boys. They could live on rock candy, tree bark, artichokes, and gunpowder indefinitely, and even if they fell off the truck would find their way home eventually, once they missed a meal or two. Nor did she worry about the boys’ freezing in the cold wind there on back of the truck, any more than she worried about the pine knot. Elementally, they were roughly the same thing.

  Just before he left, Charlie went to the woodstove and retrieved the remains of the previous day’s supper out of a small covered pot, the one Ava used to save bacon grease and other leavings too valuable to feed to the dogs or discard. It was mostly beef tallow, the cooked-down and leftover detritus from the fatty stew of beef, potatoes, and onions she had slow-cooked the day before. With six hungry children, there was little of substance left except the grease, but it was flavorful, aromatic, excellent grease, and Charlie took the cooked-down elixir and spooned it into a clean jar. Then, with the boys sitting on the back, the cabbage flying proudly overhead, he and the little girl headed off in the rough direction of the river.

  “He better not have took the good bucket,” she said to Juanita and Edna, and went inside to make a good, real supper for anyone with the sense to stay home on a chilly night.

  Charlie did not draw a safe breath until his taillights vanished beyond the first curve; you were never safe till the lights of the house went dark in the distance or around the first sharp curve, because, even bowlegged, she could run faster than a Model A could roll in low gear. My mother remembers that it was warm in the cab, not so much from the faulty heater in the old truck as from the warmth of the flat-six motor, which rose from the floorboards and through the firewall. At a crossroads, Charlie opened his door and shouted for the boys to come and sit in the cab because it was getting cold, but they were too hardheaded to sit in the cab with a girl, and proceeded to abuse with stones the rare mailboxes they passed.

  People like to talk about the emptiness of the great deserts or the endless plains or the frozen places, but a desolate dirt road in the mountain South, in a forest of black pines, can be one of the most lonesome places on earth. There is an almost unnerving dark in the tunnels of trees, where even people who have lived a lifetime here find themselves imagining the silliest things. But as the headlights of the old truck bored into the dark, her daddy began to talk to her, to tell her stories, history, and tales, and even sing a bit. She remembers the song, an old Jimmie Rodgers song from the Victrola, but mostly she just remembers being warm.

  All around the water tank, waiting for a train

  A thousand miles away from home, sleeping in the rain

  I walked up to a brakeman just to give him a line of talk

  He said “If you got money, boy, I’ll see that you don’t walk”

  They drove to a clearing not far from Mr. Hugh’s ferry, not a desolate place but one where the distant lamplight of shacks and whiskey fires glittered all around. Charlie gave the boys a hatchet and told them to cut two sturdy limbs, four feet long, with a V-notch at one end, then told them not to wander off and drown and threatened to kill them if they got into the whiskey, something they were prone to do. With my mother’s help, he gathered dead wood for a cook fire big enough to roast a bull calf. He placed flat rocks at three points on the ground, one for each of the iron pot’s three sturdy legs, and set it level or close to it, then piled the wood under and around the pot. Within easy reach of the fire, he sank the V-notched limbs deep in the ground, and, removing the skewered cabbage, laid the iron reinforcing rod into the notches. Then, with a steel S-hook, he hung the steel ladle to one side. It seemed like a whole lot of work, the boys grumbled, to hang a damn spoon, but Charlie was peculiar about his utensils. He told them only an animal lays his utensils in the river mud, and that left my mother wondering what a possum or raccoon or squirrel or such would need with a ladle in the first place, and she would ask him that, someday when the mean boys were not there to make fun of her and pull her hair. Charlie sent the boys to the river with the bucket to fetch water, and with another warning, not to drown each other. The Coosa was cleaner then; a man could cook with it. It has not run clean in my lifetime.

  It had been cold but dry, and the dead wood along the river would catch fast and burn quick. He would not even need the fat pine he had brought. He sent the boys to gather greener wood, for a slower burn. Then he began to wipe the ax head clean with a cloth. It looked like one of her momma’s dish towels, cut from a flour sack. She would raise holy hell about that for sure if she missed it.

  “Can I light the fire, Daddy?” William said.

  James punched him in the arm hard enough to break bone.

  “I’ll light it,” James said, as if it was his birthright.

  “Not yet, boys,” Charlie said.

  The Coosa is a deep, muddy, silent river, a place for big catfish and fat bass and glittering crappie, not a rocky stream where the water tumbles over the clean stones and the trout jump in clear water as cold as ice. The Coosa does not rush, or gurgle, or splash. The big brown rivers only whisper to us here, as the deep currents push south to the Gulf. Charlie told the boys to stop fighting and be by God quiet for a change, if such was even possible, and took a seat on the ground, his back against a fallen tree, to listen. I am told he did this all his life, sometimes wandering far off into a field or deep into the woods to sit and listen and just be in a natural way. Sometimes he drank, but mostly he just sat and breathed. He loved his wife, but she did not come with an “off” switch, and talked nonstop for three decades, talked him right on out of the world. When the babies came, the peace was busted for good. But here along these banks, once he got the two dumbasses settled down, a man could hear himself think, or sing, or just be.

  He sang when he cooked, or pounded nails up on a roofline, or when he was sitting on the porch watching the lightning bugs, or out in the driveway, leaning on the fender of his truck, a pint fruit jar of liquor in his fist. He had a fine, strong, clear voice, and his little girl pretended to sing with him, “ ’cause I didn’t really know the words then. It was one of them records we had, the ones that warped and melted.”

  Well I haven’t got a nickel, not a penny can I show

  He said “Get off, you railroad bum” and he slammed the boxcar door

  In the distance, off toward Alabama, he heard a train whistle blow.

  “Light it now,” he said.

  * * *

  • • •

  “Why did you bring such a big pot, Daddy?” my mother asked him.

  “We’ll have company here, child, d’rectly,” he said.

  The time of the hobo was at its end in this country, some people said, and good riddance. They said the Great Depression was banished to history. A New Deal had been dealt, and a big war was driving the history of the nation now. But in the mountain South, the recovery was slow to take. Men still rode the boxcars in search of something better than soup lines and chain gangs, from the white sand of the coast to the rail yard in Chattanooga, up the Eastern Seaboard, and into the dusty West. What they had found, often, was more chain gangs, more hardship, but, here and there, the kindness of a stranger.

  Charlie chased work on the rails himself, across five counties and five hundred miles, roofing, tearing down barns for scrap lumber, digging wells, digging ditches, anything for meat and beans. Now and then, he would sit in his truck at a lonely crossing as an endless string of freight cars bumped past him, loaded with coal, or timber, or nothing. And he would glimpse, through the door
of a freight car, a group of men with smutty coats and grimy faces, the lingering hoboes, chasing the myth of some promised land. Once, he saw a young man sitting cross-legged atop a freight car, staring straight ahead like a sultan, like he owned the rattling steel beneath him and all the land it would transverse. Charlie would never ride one so far as that.

  But show him a man who claimed he never thought about running away and he would show you a liar. For a long time, after the death of the child, he wished he could follow that whistle to a place where a man’s labor was still worth something, maybe follow it to any place as long as it was a long way from here. He never could, of course, because of the faces looking back at him around that rough kitchen table, and he didn’t expect anyone to pin a medal on his overalls for it, but he did mention it, as the years passed by, and he never looked down his nose at the men who had no such anchor and just drifted, floated, as if the lines that held them close to something had been cut clean away.

  My mother wondered, briefly, how anyone would know to gather here at this place, at this precise time, which her belly told her was almost suppertime. Surely, the aroma did not waft so far. Her daddy told her later it was the fire. Men were drawn to a fire on a riverbank or a railroad track or a mountain ridge or any other lonely place, drawn to the promise of food or a bottle or just company.

  Charlie built his bonfire near a known stopping-off place, where such men got off to scrounge for food, or buy liquor, or just build a fire and spend a night away from the railroad bulls. He had, over the years, made a dollar or two selling whiskey at this spot, for it was a natural fact that a man would go hungry and ragged and homeless but would not go thirsty, and though a man can beg food and clothing along the tracks, a drink usually meant cash on the barrel head. But Charlie hadn’t run off any liquor in a while; he had only the single gallon, which he left in the cab of the truck with his Belgium shotgun. He did not often drink in front of his children, though he had wobbled into the house with its taint on his soul.

  The iron wash pot was beginning to smoke. Charlie took the old ax head, polished clean now, and tossed it into the empty pot. It rang like a church bell. His daughter tugged at his coattail.

  “Why…?” she asked.

  “It’s just what you do,” he said.

  It might have been a stone, or a horseshoe, or a nail, or anything, really, anything that would be the base, a kind of seed, for a meal to grow from, even a rock; some people called it stone soup. Every culture in every land had some version of the story of a cook or a lonely traveler who somehow coerces others, with only a hunk of iron or a rock as a starter, to contribute a potato here and a carrot there, culminating, in time, in something delicious, hearty, and complete, from nothing edible in itself.

  It would have made a better story if Charlie had coaxed a fine pot of soup from the ax head alone. If he had believed in the fairy tales, he would have let the iron be his only contribution, and let the passersby do the rest. But Charlie hedged his bet. Vegetable soup without some kind of savory starter was no soup at all, so he brought the tallow. It was a method that would endure in our family until the modern day. He hedged even more by bringing the canned tomatoes, which provided the liquid and the overriding flavor—tomatoes overpower everything—and the cabbage, which is the soul of good vegetable soup here in the foothills. He had promised Ava, after all, that he would feed the children something good.

  He emptied in the tallow, first, with the detritus from the beef and potatoes and onions, and as it hit the hot iron it began to sizzle, and a delicious smell almost leapt into the cold night air. He stirred it around a bit with the paddle, then, when the fat had liquefied in the bottom of the big iron pot, he opened the big can of crushed tomatoes with his pocketknife and added it to the pot, to begin the stock. He added some river water to keep it from burning, and added freshly quartered potatoes and halved onions, and began to chop up the cabbage with his big pocketknife.

  Over the next half-hour or so, as the soup began to bubble, the raggedy men came walking up, one or two at a time. They smelled the elixir on the breeze and helloed the tall man and children around the fire. Children were not unusual in such settings; this was still Steinbeck’s America, where whole families traveled as far as their overloaded trucks would go, then just existed, along rivers, in fields, wherever their inertia placed them. Charlie told the men to sit, as if the weeds and the river mud and the washed-up trees were his living room, till there were about six or seven in all.

  “What’s in the pot, brother?” they asked him, one by one.

  “Ax-head soup,” he said.

  The younger men were puzzled, but the older men were not. Most of them carried some kind of bag or knapsack, and one by one they sidled up to the light of the fire and rummaged around inside for some kind of contribution. No one rode the rails without something—a can, a sack, something scrounged, stolen, donated, or purchased with a few hours of pushing a broom or sinking a post or just listening to a preacher shout about the lake of fire. Some had a few winter vegetables, a turnip or a carrot or two, which they handed to Charlie to wash and cut up. Others had a can of corn, or lima beans, or peas. One man—an old man who looked like he had lived two lifetimes on the L&N—said he had some snuff, was all. Another man had been hoarding a second head of white cabbage, and the raggedy men were glad of that, because even a fool knows you can’t have good soup without enough cabbage to sweeten it, and cabbage cooks to nothing. Charlie dumped in the mixture of salt, sugar, and black pepper, and stirred.

  His little buddy Jessie Clines lived in a tumbledown shack on the river’s edge, and, like Charlie, he earned some side money making liquor. Charlie saw him come shuffling up in his old army clothes, toting absolutely nothing, but smiling in that lost way he had. He was not what you would call a sharp man. Mr. Hugh, the ferryman, rode up on his mule; he did not believe in cars, and hoped to live long enough to see that stinking, rattling fad fade completely away. He brought a jar full of hot peppers, and more vegetables. That meant the ingredients in the pot were cooked in varying times and to varying textures, and even though my mother did not know it then, she was witnessing another secret of the thing: the layers of flavor and texture in what seemed such a haphazard dish. There was not much science to it, as to doneness; if the last turnip or potato tossed into the pot was done, the first had to be.

  The men sat against the trees and the logs thrown up there by the flooding river, and watched the fire and smelled the soup, and my mother sat in her daddy’s lap and listened to the strange men talk. Even William and James sat still for a while to hear. It seemed that the men had all lived versions of the same story. It had been romantic when they left, to ride free and easy through the country, beholden to no man. But the fact is, the poverty followed them like a hound, and the rails were just a prison on wheels, and sometimes it seemed that the freedom they thought they had attained lasted only for the time it took to vanish around the first blind curve. They found the steel road to be dangerous and inhuman, prowled by railroad bulls who beat them bloody with ax handles and shotgun butts and even killed some of them, without consequence, because nobody did time for killing a bum. They had endured frostbite and starvation, and in the end, when they got where they were going, they discovered it was not even there. There was no promised land. California was a terminus, nothing more. Canada was cold. Mexico was starving, its own self.

  “Florida was purty,” Charlie offered. He had ridden there with his tools, south to the Gulf of Mexico. He swung a hammer there till the work ran out, then rode the train back home.

  “Ay-yuh,” said a man in an accent none of them had heard before. They all agreed Florida was pretty, but a man could starve to death picking grapefruit. You couldn’t even steal enough grapefruit to live on. It was the only thing on God’s earth a man could eat, eat a bushel, and get even skinnier.

  “Et a thousand,” Charlie concurred.

  The soup simmered as the wood turned to coals, and Charlie got up eve
ry now and then to stir it with the broken boat paddle. The oil from the starter would bubble up to form a thin orange film on top of the red soup, and Charlie scooped up a potato and judged it done. The soup could have simmered a little more, but these were hungry men. Some of them had tin plates or cups and spoons in their bundles, and some just drank it from the tin cans the vegetables had come in. When everyone had a serving, Charlie passed out the squares of cornbread Ava had cooked, and the men thanked him as if it were steak. Some of them had not had good cornbread for years.

  As the level of the soup dwindled, the ax blade became visible, and the old men, especially, smiled about that.

  “Best soup I ever et,” said one of the men.

  “Ay-yuh,” said the man who talked funny.

  “I wisht I’d brung some coffee,” Charlie told them.

  “Coffee’s dear,” one man said.

  “Right dear,” another man said.

  By the end of the evening, there was nothing left of the soup but that lump of steel. Charlie wiped the ax blade clean; he would whittle a new handle for it someday, when he had the time. Ava was hard on ax handles; her aim was off a bit, and she broke an ax handle for about every cord of wood she cut. That caused the men to reminisce about great wood-chopping and wood-splitting women they had known; they agreed that Canada, probably, had the best female wood splitters on God’s green earth. They supposed it had to be that way, up in the tundra.

  That got them to talking about cold weather; it seemed all of them had been frozen to death at least once. One man said he had died in North Dakota, but was resurrected, like Lazarus, when thawed on a southbound train. We do not know for sure that James was inspired by such lying, but I bet he was. Charlie questioned the man as to why he went to North Dakota in the first place. The man said he got drunk in Chicago, and if there was more to it he did not say.

  It was the most of the world the children had ever heard of.