by Rick Bragg
“That could work,” Babe said.
But the hog did not want to help. It circled and circled the pen, gathering speed, and when Babe swung open the gate, the massive hog shot through the gap and flew out but somehow missed the ramp altogether. It ran headfirst into the jutting piece of broken iron bumper with a force that rocked the old truck back and forth on its springs, and fell dead.
“Well,” Babe said.
My mother was so mesmerized, she swallowed her marble.
“I couldn’t talk real plain when I was little. I don’t know why, I just couldn’t. I walked up to Momma and said to her, ‘I have swallered my marble.’ But Momma didn’t understand me, and thought I was sayin’, ‘I want some water,’ and she kept givin’ me water and givin’ me water. I like to drowned.”
I asked her if maybe she could talk fine all along but sounded funny because she always had a marble in her mouth; she said that had never occurred to her, and that perhaps that was so.
“Anyway, I didn’t have my jawbreaker no more, that night we moved. I’d done swallered it. I don’t know what happened to it after I swallered it. I mean, I guess…”
I told her, from meanness, it might still be in her, and that troubled her a good bit. But her pronunciation, she pointed out, did improve.
Either way, the hog was down, and unlikely to rise again. Charlie bent over it, unsure what to do. He had never had to check a hog for vital signs before. Hogs had always come in two clear and uncontrovertible states: alive and snuffling, and sausage. He nudged it with his boot. Then he nudged it harder. After a while, it was clear the hog was done for, at the worst possible time, at the worst possible place. How do you tiptoe out of a place, how do you slink, with a four-hundred-pound dead hog?
It had to be bled, at least, before they could travel with it, and they would have to winch it up on a stout limb to do that much, and all their tackle was already at the new house.
Charlie walked over to the truck and took a seat on the truck bed.
“Well…I…will…just…be…damned.”
“He was so discouraged,” my mother remembers. After a few minutes, his chin cupped in one hand, he crawled back into the truck and went rattling off in the direction of the new house. He came back sometime later with rope, his tool belt, a pair of wickedly sharp butcher knives, a handsaw, a hacksaw, a hatchet, and as many washtubs and buckets as he could quickly find. He would use the truck to raise the hog.
“Let’s get to it,” he said.
To my mother, watching from the shadows, it was like being “in a monster movie.” She pronounced it “mun-is-ter.”
They built a fire, but tried to shield it as much as they could in the trees. “They butchered that big hog right there, in the dead of night,” my mother said. “They hoisted it up and cleaned it, and scalded it, and scraped it, and cut it up into hams, and shoulders, and ribs, and bacon, and cracklin’ meat.” Charlie and Babe worked mostly in the dark. They did not try to perform the more complicated butchery, but loaded the meat into the tubs and pails and hauled it to the new house to be carved, salted, ground, and rendered. By dawn, there was nothing left to show there had ever been a hog there, or, for that matter, a family. There was almost no scrap. The soon-to-be chitlin’s, the lights, the liver, and even the head would be turned into souse, or hogshead cheese. It was still a wild place then, and as soon as they drove away for the last time, the night creatures would erase all evidence.
“Leave me out about seven or eight of the ribs for supper tonight,” Ava said as the men carried in the tubs of pork. “And cut ’em in two. We’ll have somethin’ good.” She said there was no reason the poor hog had to “suicide itself” for nothing; they might as well derive some joy from its passing.
“Why did it suicide itself, Momma?” my mother asked, suddenly talking much plainer. (The only thing they could figure, but not till many years later, was that it was the shock of the hog’s violent death that shook loose more than the marble.)
Ava just shook her head.
* * *
• • •
There was no ice box, so the rest of the meat had to be salted right away, or smoked. It took all day to salt the bacon and fatback, hang the hams, grind and season the sausage, and cube the cracklin’s. As Charlie and Babe worked with the fresh pork, Ava baked a pan of biscuits and breaded and fried the liver for a late breakfast. “You always cooked the liver first,” my mother said, “because it would spoil the fastest.” There was no great joy in the Bundrum household over smothered pork liver; the children were not picky eaters, but it took a lot of gravy and onions to smother the viscosity of a big slab of pork liver. Her daddy and Babe ate it down to the bare platter, and had three or four biscuits apiece. Ava did not spoil her children much, but she promised them something better for supper that night, if they would only be patient.
My mother followed Ava around all afternoon, waiting for her to begin their feast. But all Ava did, at first, was put a pound of butter beans on to boil. Butter beans—what some people call large limas—are a staple here, usually served with cornbread and fried cabbage or potatoes. They are seen as inferior to the banquet bean, pintos. The butter bean, when blandly prepared, is chain-gang food, waxy, about as fancy as chalky black-eyed peas. But prepared and seasoned by a good cook—especially by one with some four hundred pounds of fat pork at her disposal—it was a much different prospect.
“Daddy brought Momma the ribs from that big hog, and the end of them ribs—the big spareribs is what people would call ’em now—was as big as his fist, with a lot of meat, and real, real fatty. Momma had Daddy cut the ribs in two, in half, and she just dropped them into beans. Momma cooked ’em about two, two and a half hours, and when she took the lid off her pot and tried to lift one of the ribs out, the meat just slipped off the bone. The pork fat had melted into the beans, and pooled on top of the butter beans, and that juice was just clear as water.” The only other seasonings had been salt, a little sugar, and a small diced onion. Her momma fried cabbage, and boiled potatoes, and made not cornbread but a pan of hot biscuits, some of which she set aside, buttered, and served for dessert with blackberry jam.
“Easy as pie,” my mother said, of the meal. “I mean, easy.”
The great Johnny Cash was said to have spent long hours contemplating whether or not pigs could see the wind. He was also said to have emptied more than a few pill bottles as he contemplated this. But if pigs can indeed see the wind, then who knows what they might think about, what they might scheme or plot, there in the middle of a dark night. I don’t believe the hog on Carpenter’s Lane suicided itself. I think the pig was just making a run for it; whether they can see the wind or not, they apparently cannot see in the dark.
Spareribs Stewed in Butter Beans
WHAT YOU WILL NEED
1 pound butter beans
8 to 10 meaty pork spareribs
1 small onion, diced
1 tablespoon salt
½ teaspoon sugar
7 to 8 cups water (or more if needed)
HOW TO COOK IT
As with pintos, you have to set some time aside for picking through the butter beans. Find a good chair, and tell your worrisome, telephone-addicted kin that you are getting a CAT scan and will not be able to talk for a while. The beans should be white to cream-colored; remove and discard anything suspicious.
It is not necessary to soak the butter beans beforehand, though they will cook faster if you do. The whole point of this dish is to cook it slowly, slowly, and let the simple ingredients and flavors mingle.
This is an easy dish. In a large pot, combine all the ingredients, and bring to a good boil for just a few minutes. Then simmer for about 2 hours, being sure to stir occasionally. The rib meat should be tender, if not falling off the bone, and the beans should be soft but not mushy, though some breakage is unavoidable. You can make them more creamy by taking a potato masher or large spoon and breaking up some of the beans, or even adding milk or cream at the end,
as many people do with white beans, but my mother thinks this is foolish. Cook ’em right and they’ll be perfect in texture.
If you have a good butcher, or are good with a saw and have good insurance, you can cut the ribs in two before cooking (they are more convenient to dish up and cook if cut in two, but some cooks prefer whole ribs, for the way they look on the plate).
Do not pepper the beans beforehand. Pepper to taste, plate by plate.
Some chefs believe in searing the ribs in a little fat, along with the diced onion, before adding them to the beans to slow-cook. We are not them.
“There just ain’t no need. The pork fat is where the taste is, and the fat will render into the beans, drop by drop, as it all cooks together.” Amen.
Serve as Ava did, with potatoes and cabbage. A modern-day version, which my mother swears by, is slightly lighter and provides a delicious contrast. Substitute a purple-cabbage-and-carrot coleslaw for the fried cabbage, and maybe some collards or turnip greens. My people see no sin in eating potatoes with beans, even starchy ones like butter beans. Whole generations of my people would have considered a meal too delicate without two or three starches served side by side, but since it is unlikely you will rise from this meal and go lay some railroad track or dig a mine shaft, you can do as you wish.
* * *
• • •
“Get me some good ribs and I’ll make it for you,” my mother told me of the dish, so I did, and it was of course as delicious as it sounds. It reminded me of a dish I had in a French restaurant in New York, a cassoulet of beans, ham, and sausage. It was called French country food, and cost about fifty dollars. Nothing with “country” in its definition should cost fifty dollars, but it was delicious, too, almost as delicious as what my mother made for ten dollars and change. But no one told me a single story as I ate it there on the Upper East Side, or at least not any stories about depressed pigs or missing marbles, or anything that really stuck in my mind. I think things taste better with a story on the side.
I remember, after I had finished and paid the bill, that there was not a cab anywhere in that part of Manhattan, and as I moved down the chilly sidewalk I had to admit to myself that there was one great advantage in a nice anonymous French pig. The whole time I was at dinner, I not once had to worry about what that pig was thinking at the end. But, then, I don’t speak much French, anyway.
· 17 ·
CLEMENTINE
Fried Chicken, Fried Chicken Gravy (Water Gravy), Fresh Green Beans with Golden Potatoes
Juanita, upside down
1948
MY PEOPLE would not, despite what some of my kinfolks have claimed, step over a dead body to get to the supper table. They would, however, drag one out of the middle of the road and leave it in the weeds to get back to the house on time if my grandma was frying chicken. This has occurred.
* * *
• • •
Ava came out onto the porch with a handful of shelled corn in her apron pocket, and murder in her eye.
“We’ll have chicken tonight,” was all she said.
She did not have to say: And don’t be late.
It was implied.
Fried chicken did not mean merely chicken, fried, but a feast of hot biscuits and chicken gravy, and her famous green beans slow-cooked with golden potatoes, and more. It was perhaps her holy trinity of food. The chicken they fried had little to do with what passes for chicken in the modern day, which is barely food and tastes of what seems to be chlorine and cardboard and fish meal. In my mother’s day, and on into my childhood, fried chicken was one of the meals our great cooks used to show off, to bring comfort to the bereaved, to appease a landlord, or to show their undeserving families that they still loved them in spite of everything. It was a meal you thought about all day, a thing you could almost taste in its promise.
No one fried a chicken like Ava Bundrum, except maybe Edna, her oldest girl, or Sis Morrison, of course. My mother, though barely in elementary school, was learning the secrets already. My kin can debate good fried chicken for hours, but agree on a few points. Seasoning should be spare, and breading light; more important was that good, clean taste, and the juiciness. The crust should be almost no crust at all.
Though cold chicken is a delicacy in itself, Ava insisted that her chicken be almost too hot to touch as they all sat down to eat. To be late for it, to let such a blessing get cold, from carelessness or poor planning or even a broken timepiece, would be an abomination, akin to spitting in church, or talking loud while fishing for bream, or interrupting an old person in mid-story. It was still good if it cooled a bit, just not the delicacy it was if eaten in the fifteen to twenty minutes after it was lifted from hot, spitting grease. Sooner than that could result in lasting injury to the fingertips, lips, and tongue.
Ava said they would have supper at six.
And don’t be late hung on the very air.
The household had changed a lot in the second half of the decade, in the postwar years. Charlie had found steadier work, building barracks at Fort McClellan in Calhoun County, where the war and the Cold War had spurred years of new construction. Edna had married a navy man named Charlie Sanders, which had drawn the beloved storyteller Mr. Hugh Sanders, his father, into the family in a more official capacity; everyone agreed this was a good thing, even if the curly-headed, lantern-jawed son-in-law should somehow turn out not to be. James and William had married but not gone much farther than out of sight, still close enough to come to eat, invited or not, four or five meals a week.
That morning, Ava had seen her husband glancing at the dirt road like it was a magic carpet.
“If you go loafering today,” Ava warned him, reading his mind, “take some of these children.”
Ava was just beginning to show tiny flashes of the dementia that would descend in middle age and force an occasional Jekyll-Hyde transformation in her character. It made her hard to live with when it descended, and everyone learned to walk soft around her when it did. Sometimes, though, it was hard to tell if it was the light touch of madness, or if one of her nitwits had merely made her justifiably upset.
Charlie was unreliable when it came to a sit-down meal. They had learned not to wait on him as he lingered at the lumberyard, telling tales; he would stop at a crossroads and talk an hour if he happened to see some kin on the road, and sometimes white whiskey was involved. But Ava registered every missed meal, every tardiness. She might cuss and gripe for three full days, and everyone suffered when she finally lost her temper. There would be no biscuit, morning, noon, or night. There would be no beans, just cornbread and buttermilk three times a day. They could live on maypops and artichokes for all she cared, and she would be so hard to live with no one within the house would have much appetite anyway.
In those days, it was not a matter of turning a switch on an electric stove, or lighting a pilot light. To prepare a meal meant chopping and splitting wood, building a fire, and—in summer—cooking within an envelope of heat that was damned near unbearable. A simple pound of butter, with milking and churning, was a half-day’s work. A bushel of green beans took an hour or more to pick, and more time to snap. And to procure and clean and cook a chicken—well, a chicken was a by God endeavor.
His usual nonchalance would not be tolerated today.
Ava told him she would watch the youngest girls, Jo and Sue, and Charlie gave his Juanita and my mother, Margaret, a choice: would they rather take a ride with him, which meant a whole afternoon of stories and maybe some penny candy or a bag of parched peanuts, or stay home and help their momma cook supper? Juanita almost knocked my mother down getting to the truck. Juanita, even as a little girl, was a bony tomboy. And though she would become a good cook herself one day, she saw no reason to worship cooking, or study it, or act a fool over it. A lot of bony people, of course, are like that.
It was different with her little sister. My mother loved to watch her momma cook, loved to help, or at least get in the way. It was not only because she loved
to eat, but because she loved the artistry and science in it, even if it was just a pot of beans boiling on the stove. So much of what old Jim had preached had turned out to be gospel. They saw it now, saw the difference in a cook who loved to eat and a plain old person who loved to eat, and she loved to see a meal come together, fire by fire. At this point, she had been little more than a spectator, just a little girl allowed to stir a bowl of dressing, a hindrance shooed out of the way whenever a hot pot was carried across the room or a skillet was spitting from the stove.
“You’re too little yet,” Ava told her, year after year.
“Well, I’m bigger than Juaniter,” she said. She meant “taller.”
“I won’t have you burnt,” Ava said, and that was that.
“Only a fool works around a hot skillet with children hanging on them, or if their mind ain’t on it,” the old man had once told her, more as a warning than advice.
“So I just watched,” my mother said, “but I loved to watch. At first, I had stood in the chair, and then behind Momma but a little off to one side, so I could see, but not so close that she’d bump into me with a hot skillet or a hot pan. But I watched.”
This day was a true conundrum for her. The chance to go loafering with her daddy was the one thing that would keep her from her momma’s side, keep her from the kitchen. She would have stayed, stayed and continued her education, but this was chicken day, and as much as she loved to eat it, chicken meant more than just the artistry, just the craft. Chicken meant mayhem.
Her little heart could not bear what was to come, there in the yard.