by Rick Bragg
She crawled into the seat of the truck beside her sister. They left Ava standing in the yard, surveying her victims, a bonelike rattling of the dry, crushed corn in her apron pocket.
* * *
• • •
Once the bloodletting was done, and the nasty hell of cleaning and plucking, she went to work on the finer parts of the perfect chicken dinner. She prepared the meal methodically, so as to concentrate on the frying process without distraction.
It was summer, and she had already snapped a mess of beans. (I will not live long enough to get into exactly what a mess is. When I asked my mother, first she said, a little irritated, “I don’t know, just enough.”) Ava put her beans on to cook, and added some fatback, and quartered some white potatoes. Then she patted out her biscuits, but did not put them on yet to bake; she set them aside, covered with a towel, to put them in the oven at the perfect time, so they would come out when the chicken was ready to put on a plate.
She cut her chicken up with almost no waste. Instead of ending the process with just two legs, two wings, two breasts, and two thighs, she had liver to fry, and gizzards, and backbone, and the neck.
She did not soak them in buttermilk. She did not marinate them in anything. These were true free-range birds, raised on corn and whatever in the yard they could peck. They had never been fed a speck of fish meal, which exudes from modern-day mass-produced chickens. They had never been dosed with hormones, or antibiotics. They were big in the leg and thigh but small in the breast, and they tasted clean.
She laid the chicken out on a clean pan and, after making sure the pieces were moist enough to hold on to the meager seasoning, sprinkled each piece—top, bottom, and side—with salt and black pepper. Then she took a handful of flour and dusted each piece—top, bottom, and sides. That was all.
Some people liked to mix their flour and seasonings in a brown paper bag, add the chicken pieces, and shake the hell out of them, but Ava saw that as the waste of a good bag, and too much shaking for a married woman.
She used a twelve-inch skillet, the biggest one she had, but she had cooked a whole chicken in a smaller one. She put about two inches of lard in it, and got the lard hot enough to roil and spit but not burn, then moved it to the side of the woodstove, to let it moderate a little bit. That was all the science she needed. Then she carefully, carefully placed the pieces in the hot grease….
* * *
• • •
Charlie and the girls were having a grand time toodling around Calhoun County, Alabama. First they got some parched peanuts from an old man at the side of the road, and that made them thirsty, so they drove to the Mill Branch, which was not haunted in the daylight and not yet polluted with horror stories. Charlie plucked a crawfish from the clear water, examined it, let the girls examine it, and turned it loose. It backstroked away, as fast as a bullet. The Mill Branch in daylight was like a park in the middle of the wilder woods, a place that just seemed to belong to everybody. People brought their children to wade in the frigid water, and turned their radios to anything with a steel guitar. They would put their RC Colas and Nehi grape sodas in the cold water to chill, and buy foot-long hot dogs and hamburgers in town and drive all the way to the Mill Branch to eat them in the shade of the trees. The girls could smell the chili, mustard, and onions on the breeze, reminding them that suppertime was nigh, and Charlie said he guessed they needed to be heading home.
Halfway there, he remembered they needed chicken feed and meal, and he told the girls he would run into Green’s Store real quick, and they would be home in plenty of time. His intentions, his girls believe, were good.
Since the beginning of time, old men had gathered in front of Green’s Store in warm weather to chew tobacco and spit and lie, and talk about crops and work and dogs and guns, but not wives, because a man had to have some relief. They would compare knives, and argue about whether it was going to rain or just act like it. They talked about who was in the hospital and what their prospectus was as to living or dying, and whether or not they were on the prayer list, and whether all the prayer in the world would do some of them any good. They talked about state government, and whether they could survive that banality and dishonesty for one more year (but would, perversely, send the same people down there to Montgomery every term, over and over again, till they were indicted or died of old age or someone saw their car parked outside a place they oughtn’t be). They would brag on old trucks, and look suspiciously on any man who got a new one, because why in the world would a man want a nice truck just to haul manure and stumps and sticky grandchildren? They talked and talked, and sometimes they did not talk at all, but would spend long minutes gazing off into the gently swaying Johnsongrass, or at the passing cars, or clouds, which got them to forecasting the weather again. The loop of conversation seldom changed, just the timbre of the voices, as old men gave up their seats on the bench to other old men, who clicked smoothly, effortlessly into place.
Charlie loved to hear old men talk.
He would have made an excellent old man.
“My mule was laying down this mornin’, and that mule don’t never lay down in the mornin’,” one old man said, from his place on the bench.
“What’s that mean?” another old man asked.
“Means it’ll rain,” the first old man said.
“No,” another old man said, “means it won’t rain.”
This took some time to untangle. By the time Charlie had heard the old men decide for the second or third time that it would probably not rain, prostrated mule or no, it occurred to him that the end of the world as they knew it had come and he had not even noticed. It was nearly six.
He hurried the children into the cab of the truck, and they sped away.
My aunt Juanita, being older than her sister, told the official narrative from there.
“Daddy drove with his foot flat on the floor,” she said. “He drove fast most of the time anyway, but I mean he had it in the wind.” The old truck roared and trembled, and her daddy, who usually drove with one bony wrist hooked over the wheel, gripped it now, white-knuckled, with both hands, downshifting on the big grade on the Nisbet Lake Road.
They were not people who thought only of their bellies, and food was not, despite its great importance in their lives, their only luxury. They twisted the crank off the Victrola and danced themselves half to death, and picked a mean banjo, and when the work was caught up they sat by that slow river and told stories of luster and passion and high adventure, painting pictures of their world and hanging them on the air. But Ava would have worked half a day on their supper, and the state of Alabama was not big enough for the man, or the children, who brought it all to naught.
Juanita remembers how he barely even slowed down as he made the hard left turn onto the Cove Road, and stomped the accelerator again, the tires sending a plume of red dust into the air, like a wake. The big trees on both sides of the narrow road crowded in and formed a ragged canopy overhead, and as they flashed from shade to sunlight again and again, the light almost blinded them.
Six o’clock had come and gone, and now it was just a question of whether or not Ava had noticed. They were within a mile of home, Juanita said, when it happened.
“Daddy was still just a-flyin’, and here she come, walking right out of the trees and growed-up weeds there at the side of the road, and”—Juanita took her palm and smacked it, hard, with one tiny fist—“and daddy hit her.”
She stopped talking then, as if out of respect.
“Hit who?”
“Clementine Ritter…Daddy run over her.”
“My God,” I said.
“It was awful, hon,” she said.
“My God,” I said again.
“She was my friend.”
My mother nodded in sympathy.
“What did y’all do?” I asked.
“Well,” Juanita said, “we piled out of the truck and run to see, but she hadn’t got knocked to the side. She’d gone right under the t
ruck. Daddy’d run over Clem Ritter’s head with his truck tire.”
“My God,” I said.
“Her head was all whomp-sided,” she said.
“I couldn’t look,” my mother said. “I had to cover my eyes.”
I truly did not know what to say.
“What did y’all do?”
“Well, son, there wasn’t nothin’ to do. Daddy picked her up, and slung her off into the weeds.”
I think a full minute went by.
“You didn’t do anything?” I asked, stunned. “You didn’t check to see if she was breathing, or try to go for a doctor, or…”
“No, son. I done told you. Momma had supper done.”
She said Charlie drove them home, and they went inside to eat. It was a glorious meal, and Ava was hardly angry at all, though saddened by the news of Clem Ritter.
“But…Y’all didn’t even report it?” I asked.
“No, son, we didn’t have to. Along about dark, we were out in the yard and here she come, just staggerin’ and weavin’ up the driveway, her head still all whomp-sided….”
It was another long, long minute before she bothered to tell me that Clem Ritter was a dog.
* * *
• • •
I should have guessed. I should have recalled Ike, the unfortunate rooster that Sis threw down on with her snub-nosed .22, and how long it took my people to bother to tell me that Ike was a fowl. The sad thing is, my aunt Juanita was not even trying to put me on. Clem Ritter was her friend, her best friend.
“Clementime Ritter—we called her Clem for short,” my aunt Juanita said. “I guess she was one of the ugliest dogs I have ever seen. I can’t remember exactly how we got her, but it might have been in the mailbox. The Bonds—they lived right down the road—was bad to put stuff in our mailbox to scare us, and I think we might have got her out of the mailbox.
“I didn’t have no name for her for a long time, because she was my dog and I wanted to give her a good one. I think it was two or three years before I did. I named her for a woman I read about in a magazine, in this story about this woman who suspected this other woman, Clementine Ritter, was runnin’ around with her husband. And one day the husband played like he was goin’ fishin’, but he didn’t go fishin’, and he went and hid with Clem Ritter in the haystack. The wife heard ’em gigglin’ in the haystack, and she killed ’em both. I think she shot ’em. I don’t know how we got that magazine—I’m sure somebody gave it to us—but I think maybe it was one of them True Crime magazines. And, anyway, I liked the name Clem Ritter. She was just an ol’ mutt dog, ever’ color you can think of. But she was my dog. She got all right, after a while, but her head was whomp-sided for a real, real long time.”
All I could think was, only my aunt Juanita would name her dog after a villainess in a crime magazine.
“What happened to her?” I asked, but should not have.
“The insurance man run over her with a store,” my aunt Juanita said.
I decided to wait this one out, too.
“Dee Roper was the insurance man, but he drove one of them rolling stores, like a peddler’s truck, in his second job, and he run over Clem Ritter out right past the mailbox,” she explained.
“Momma cussed him out, said, ‘You have kilt our dog, you SB,’ ” my mother recalled later. “He just stood there and took it. He never said a word.”
“She had a hard life,” my mother said, and I believe she was talking about the dog.
“It was a good supper, though,” my mother added, after a while.
“It was,” Juanita said.
* * *
• • •
No one mourned the chicken. My mother remembers mostly the crust, how crisp and thin it was, ranging from a dark brown to almost black in some places, and the crumbs that fell away were tiny, powdery. Ava cooked it over, at most, medium heat, or what would be medium heat on an electric or gas stove. My mother watched her cook it that way, perhaps, a hundred times, pushing the bigger pieces, the thighs and breasts, to the center of the skillet, and the legs and wings to the outside. She put the gizzards in about halfway through—gizzards are like eating a jai alai ball no matter how skillfully you prepare them—and then, finally, the liver, which they considered a delicacy. She remembers that her mother made water gravy, and if there had been no chicken at all there would have been reason for joy with that gravy spooned over hot biscuit.
“We always had fresh tomatoes in the summer, and Momma would slice ’em thick and salt and pepper them, and I think we had fresh cantaloupe, too. But the best thing on the table was those green beans cooked with Irish potatoes. You could see the fat from the pork shining on those potatoes, and in those beans.”
Juanita was upset about Clem Ritter’s injury, but not so upset she did not eat.
Clem Ritter got the scraps, her whomp-sidedness affecting her appetite not at all.
It was a good day in the end, the sisters agreed.
* * *
• • •
If our people really did fly a banner over their cooking, this plate of fried chicken and delicious sides, not the pig, would probably be stitched upon it, if they ever actually took a vote. But, like the cracklin’ cornbread, good fried chicken, for such a common-sounding thing, is hard to duplicate in modern times. It has to do with the awful decline in the flesh of the chicken itself.
Ava’s chickens did not live in their own filth for a lifetime. They were cooped sometimes, to protect them from marauding foxes and occasional coons, but mostly they roosted in the trees. There is something right and peaceful about that, in the setting sun, when a chicken rises to its roost for the night, unless, of course, you are trying to eat it.
Modern-day chicken is so inferior that she almost never fries chicken anymore. When she does, it is a celebration of something, or because I begged her really, really hard.
“Buy a whole chicken,” my mother said, “and if it comes with the good stuff, cook all of it, the gizzard, and liver, and back, and neck, because all those pieces will flavor the other pieces, make it taste…better.” What she was trying to say was: deeper, richer. “Leave the skin on,” she said, in a way that made me think that, if you skinned your chicken to make it healthier, you should be slapped.
Think about it. Anyone who thinks paring a little skin off a piece of fried chicken will somehow turn it into health food is probably the same person who orders a Diet Coke with a cheese Whopper. Surrender to its goodness, and eat like a gerbil for two days after that if it makes you feel better, in recompense.
“Folly,” my mother said, but the way she said it made it sound more like “dumbasses.”
Here, as close as we can get, is the modern-day incarnation of the feast my grandmother prepared on the day my grandfather ran over Clem Ritter’s head.
Fried Chicken
WHAT YOU WILL NEED
1 frying chicken, whole
2 to 3 cups flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon black pepper
1 to 2 pounds lard (enough to form at least a 2-inch pool in the skillet)
HOW TO COOK IT
Cut up the chicken at the joints, being sure to save the liver, gizzards, back, neck, or anything else, even if you are not sure what it is. Or, have a butcher do it.
Salt and pepper the pieces, lightly. Using your hands, dust the damp pieces— top, bottom, and sides—as completely as you can with flour. Do not dredge in egg wash, etc. The point is to have a light, barely there crust.
Cover and set aside.
In a large cast-iron skillet (though some people swear by a Dutch oven for this), heat the lard over medium-high heat until it liquefies and heats up, but do not turn the heat so high that it begins to smoke. Lard is not as forgiving as modern-day cooking oils. Gently, carefully drop in the chicken pieces, let them crisp for a moment, then reduce the heat to medium. Do not worry about turning the chicken before you reduce the heat.
Here is where my mother’s recipe and
her mother’s differ from most. Some people cook only a few pieces at a time, to make sure the chicken crisps correctly, and turn the chicken only once. My people do crowd the skillet, trying to leave just a little room between the pieces; a little room between them will be enough to let the hot oil do its job. Over medium heat, cook the chicken between 30 and 40 minutes (stoves vary), turning it four times. I am not sure what the science of this is; I guess it’s just because my mother says so. In between gyrations, cover the skillet with a lid—again, being careful, because steam can build up in just a few minutes.
My mother places the bigger pieces in the middle of the skillet, and the wings and legs on the outside.
Add gizzards and livers about halfway through the process. Some people cook livers only a few minutes, but my mother has such a fear of undercooked poultry—it’s a cultural thing—that she crisps the organ meats a little more than necessary. A crispy liver is pretty tasty, though.
This is not a complicated endeavor, my mother says. If you don’t know whether your chicken is done, remove the thigh, cut into it, and look, being careful not to burn yourself or burn up the rest of the chicken. You can stick a meat thermometer into it if you have one and know how to use it, but in this you are on your own. We have never used one.
My mother just uses a fork to turn the pieces and lift them from the skillet, but she is more adept than most of us. I recommend tongs, good ones that grip securely. Hot grease is unforgiving. I know.
Let the chicken cool at least 10 minutes; the thighs retain heat, and I’ve seen them smoke when I took a bite, even after 10 minutes.
NOTE She knows many people say crowding the skillet will result in soggy chicken. “I don’t crowd it. I make sure there’s just enough space. It’ll taste better, having it all cook together, white, dark, livers, the bony pieces,” my mother says; this is what Ava always believed.
NOTE Some of you will be unable to bring yourselves to fry chicken in lard. It is not a sin to feel this way. My mother often fries her chicken in cooking oil, usually vegetable oil. Some people swear by peanut oil. Some swear by Crisco. The process is not much different, though very smart people will go on and on about burn ratios and such. I do not associate with them. Neither does my mother. She still cooks it in lard about a third of the time, for the sake of history.