The Best Cook in the World

by Rick Bragg

  1958

  THE MEN ON THE RIVER just called the creature “that Ol’ Mossy Back,” for the century of green moss and algae that had gathered on the rock-hard carapace that armored his back. The ones who had seen him up close, and were more or less sober, said he was as big around as a truck tire, and had to weigh close to a hundred pounds, give or take a jug or two. They said the great shell covered only a fraction of his body, leaving his head and muscular limbs exposed; it was more like a shield, a thing for battle, than a moving box to cower within. His head, on the end of a thick, serpentine neck, was the size of a softball, and his stubby tail was crowned with primeval scallops, like those of the dinosaurs he had outlasted and left entombed in the earth. If you somehow snagged him with a rod and reel, he would dig his sharp, hooked claws into the bottom and, his powerful legs pulling, drag you along the riverbank or into the current itself, until the line—or the rod—snapped in two.

  He was said to have dozens of hooks embedded in his leathery skin, going to rust, like something out of Melville. But no man had ever laid a hand on him, even those who had dared. Here in the foothills, in the easy, brown current of the Coosa, he reigned at the top of the food chain, eating anything and everything that drifted within range of his lunge, which was always a little farther than expected, and as quick as that of a striking snake. His jaws, tapering to a hooked beak, could snap a broomstick in two. Even accounting for myth, he was a great and terrible thing.

  No one knew, at least not then, how long his kind could live, but it was believed to be forever, and it was said that they never stopped growing. Even the lesser of the species could go to thirty or forty pounds, far too big to fish for in any gentlemanly fashion, or even with a three-pronged hook fixed to the end of a pool cue, the apparatus my grandfather Charlie used for giant catfish. You could catch the smaller of the snappers in a homemade trap, or foul-hook them with a snagging hook, but to take the big ones, a brave man had to descend into the murky pools of the Coosa and lay his shaking hands on that shell.

  The college boys down here, the ones sober enough to pay attention in biology class, knew him as Chelydra serpentina, for his snakelike neck. The greatest of them, the mossy back, had been alive for at least four generations of men, but most people knew him only as a shadow in the water, or glimpsed the top of his ridged shell, or that wicked snout lifting from the water. Once or twice in a man’s lifetime, he might see the creature crawl atop a half-submerged tree to bask in the sun, as if to assure people that he was indeed real, and that he was still here. My grandfather, who knew this river like his own tears, had seen him many times.

  But the next day, not only would the creature be gone, but the snag, the dead tree, would be, too, broken free from the mud of the bottom and vanished overnight, to roll in the current and reappear downstream, miles and miles away, or to disappear for good, snagged underneath the surface, to rot. So, when a fisherman claimed he had seen the creature, he could not even point precisely at where it used to be, and his people would josh him unmercifully for making up such a whopper of a tale.

  But that did not mean that they would not listen to it, again and again. Most of the wild and woolly things in their rich past were gone by 1958. A man might see a skulking bobcat, like a ghost, or step on a snake, but the woods and the riverbanks were losing their mystery, their monsters, as my grandfather’s life wound to a close. The last bears had been run to ground, and the last of the panthers had vanished into the Smokies or the swamps far to the south.

  The mossy back was what was left.

  When they swam in the river, my mother and her sisters watched for him in the murk, in water the color of coffee with cream, and over the years, every nudge against their leg, every sighting of a big snapping turtle on the bank or on a floating log, became him. And maybe that was the way of it: that the great snapper was them and they were him, all of them living inside the same enduring myth. But you dared not say that to my grandfather; he intended, before his days were done, to catch him, and eat him.

  “Think of the pot of soup,” he often said, “that rascal would make.”

  * * *

  • • •

  My mother and the handsome man had their baby boy, my big brother. When Sam was a toddler, they practically lived on the river with my grandfather, with pretty much the whole clan. As people would get off work on the weekend, you would see their cars pull up to the bank, and if the water was high, my grandfather would ferry them across to a small, sandy island in his homemade boat. It was their island, the Bundrums’ island. That was understood.

  “We used to camp on it and stay for days—you know, one of them islands where the current had pushed up the gravel and the sand over time. The water was muddy and the banks were muddy, but the island was clean, and we rowed out in Daddy’s boat, and we built a fire, and we cooked and camped there and went swimming there,” said my mother. My brother Sam learned to walk in that gravel and sand, and toddled, literally, in my grandfather’s boot prints, dressed in a pair of blue leather cowboy boots, a blue cowboy hat, and a gun belt with a matching pair of six-shooters riding high on his waist. The pistols dragged in the sand as he walked, because he had legs as fat and short as a Quaker Oats box (and still does). He swears he remembers it, remembers the island of sand and the old man and the slow, brown water pushing by.

  He also swears he remembers catching, with his grandpa, a smaller monster, a snapper only about the size of a hubcap, not some slow box turtle or terrapin, harmless and helpless when you flipped him on his back. When his grandpa flipped this one over, it used the strong muscles in its long, wrist-thick neck to flip itself back onto its feet, and then it wanted to fight. He and his grandpa watched it escape to the river, because, his paw-paw said, he didn’t like to mess with the little ’uns.

  His paw-paw was just about done by then. He seemed to be shrinking away, almost folding inside himself. He still sang and laughed and drank and lived out loud, but to look at him, knowing what he had once been, would break their hearts. He did not take giant steps anymore, and staggered sometimes, even when sober. He had always been skinny, but now he was truly bones, and the best cooks in the world could not keep flesh on them. “I tried, God knows I tried,” my mother says now. They literally searched the landscape for things he might eat, anything that would give him strength, or just hope.

  The place he had been happiest in his life had been here, along this river, and in his last days he haunted its banks, surrounded by his children and grandchildren and cousins and kin.

  “He always said he could live on the water someday,” my mother said. “He almost did, one time. He found us a house on a creek….Now, why can’t I remember that creek’s name? But we didn’t move there. I guess somebody got it first. But he meant to.

  “So we went to the river, pretty much every day he wasn’t workin’. It was free to go to the river. Nobody really owned the river back then. It was where we went when we had something to celebrate.”

  Charlie fished from before dawn till after the sun had slipped behind the hills, using a pale-green closed-face Zebco 202, like every other workingman on earth. But sometimes he just let his bait float, forgotten, on the currents, just watching the water, as if expecting, with every glance, to find some new miracle there, or some old one.

  He had seen the mossy back as a young man, and as an old man, taunting him from the middle of the river or on some distant snag. Years passed, sometimes, between sightings, but he never stopped looking for him, and in his last days he walked the banks and the sandbars with my brother stumbling behind, both guns drawn. It may be that my brother saw the mossy back, too, but he cannot say for sure.

  “I was too little,” he said, “but it seems like I did.”

  The old men who lived along the river—hermits, drunks, muskrat trappers, whiskey cookers, men on the dodge, and one or two addled old men who had forgotten who they were hiding from or what they were hiding for—conferred with him about the creature, heaping on
their own histories, stories, and lies. He had been spotted as far north as the headwaters in Rome, as far south as the railroad bridge in Gadsden—which would have been a trick, seeing as how he would have had to crawl around a hydroelectric dam. They all swore that the creature had bitten clean in two a big fish they were trying to land, or had dismembered a close personal friend of theirs.

  No, others would argue, they knew for a fact that ol’ so-and-so lost that finger in basic training at Fort Benning, or maybe the cotton mill in Leesburg. That sometimes led to one man’s calling another man a damn liar or a son of a bitch who did not love the Lord, and sometimes knives were pulled.

  It was not a thing Charlie wanted his grandson to see or his family to be around, so he would sometimes move on down the river or tell the men to settle down before he cracked some damn heads, but it was useful information, still. If nothing else, it kept the story alive for another day, and there is such value in that. It made the campfire brighter, and the old quilts warmer, to believe that monsters still walked their earth.

  * * *

  • • •

  This, too, was one of the happiest times of my mother’s life. In the evenings, my grandfather built a big cook fire on the clean gravel of the island; some nights they ate like poor fishermen, and some nights they ate like kings.

  “We eat sardines and crackers and sliced onions, and Daddy would buy wedges of hoop cheese in a black rind—good sharp, hard, perfect cheese—and I don’t know why it tasted so good, but it did. You won’t get me to eat no sardines now,” my mother said. “We had Vienna sausages—Daddy put hot sauce on ’em—and pork and beans, and he always had candy in his overalls for Sam.”

  I told her of a passage from the Southern writer Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, from The Yearling, where one of the rough-and-tumble Forrester boys, content beside a campfire, said he would rather eat cold biscuit in the woods than cake in the indoors. And my mother said yes, that was the way it was, but she still wasn’t going to eat no more sardines for the rest of her natural life.

  Other nights, they ate like sultans. On the campfire, they fried crisp hoecakes or flapjacks and stirred up big cast-iron skillets of potatoes and onions. They made Brunswick stew—they called it camp stew—from pork, chicken, and sometimes rabbit or squirrel, and concocted a spicy fish stew from the succulent crappie they pulled from the river, or from the big river catfish my grandfather caught along the bottom or sometimes took by hand, feeling for them under the overhangs and caves at the muddy banks.

  This process was called, for reasons that have never made much sense to me, “noodling.” A catfish noodler felt under the banks until he located a catfish, and tried to get the fish to clamp down on his hand or arm. The catfish had sandpaperlike teeth inside its mouth, and though its bite might abrade the flesh of the hunter, it was unlikely to do more lasting damage, unless it somehow dragged the noodler underwater and he drowned.

  Cleaning them was troublesome, and you could tell novices from their festering puncture wounds. The catfish were booby-trapped with sharp, poisonous spines, and too slick to get a good grip on. My grandfather had not been a novice for a long time. He would pick out a tree on the river’s edge, and nail the catfish to it by driving a tenpenny spike through its skull, then, with a pair of of pliers, snatching the entire skin off the flesh with one fierce downward jerk. Then you filleted them, to fry over the fire in big iron skillets and smoking kettles, or cut into chunks for soup. My grandfather was partial to soup. He could devour a gallon of it, people said, even as he began to fail.

  He preferred turtle.

  “I’ll have turtle yit,” he swore, “before I die.”

  After supper, they told their own lies and stories, about bootlegging and faith healing and run-over dogs, “then we wrapped up in them old quilts,” my mother said, “ and we went to sleep. I thought about snakes, I guess, but not enough to keep me up.” They went to sleep sometimes while the thin man was still talking, as if he knew there was not enough time left to relive all the wondrous things he had witnessed. I am older now than he was then, and am only beginning to understand how fearful that can be.

  One day, when the weather had begun to turn and the first few red leaves had begun to color the banks of the river, they saw him. It was him, wasn’t it? It had to be him. He almost seemed to pose on a gray, weather-beaten snag not far off the bank, the sun on his back, his beaked head raised as if to sniff the breeze for dinner. He feasted on water moccasins, other turtles, birds that pecked along the banks, ducks that he took from under the water, bullfrogs, and small and big fish of every kind. But for almost an hour he just posed there, the moss on his black shell drying to wisps of dark green, and Charlie Bundrum told the grandchildren to hush and be still and just watch.

  Finally, the creature slid into the water and disappeared, like the submarine he was, only to reappear farther downstream; he seemed to be heading for the bank, not far upriver from where they stood. My grandfather made up his mind. He hurried after him, moving more or less parallel, trying to guess where the creature might reach the mud bank.

  If he could catch him in the shallows, by God, if he could just get a grip on him, away from those jaws…

  He watched, helpless, as the snapper, with just his shell and his snout above water, moved into the shallows and headed toward the lip of the bank and…disappeared. Charlie had forgotten about the caves. As the river rose and fell, on a timetable decided by the power company’s hydroelectric whim, as the currents carved the mud from the banks with every rising tide, this created dark overhangs and deep holes into the banks, just the kind of places where a monster would dwell.

  Charlie marked, in his mind, the spot on the overhang where the snapper had disappeared, and found a place upriver where he could more easily enter the river. He waded in his overalls and work boots to the place where he believed the turtle to have disappeared. But when he got there, he found not just a hollowed-out overhang but a dark hole, a true cave, one that extended several feet into the bank. He had to go on his knees to fit inside the opening, his head just above the waterline, the roots from the trees above poking through the ceiling of mud, so many and so thick he had to push through them, like a bad dream. He had to crouch chest-deep, but there was enough light filtering through the roots to see he was wedged into a space as deep and wide as he was tall, about six by six feet. If the snapper was here, he was certainly just underneath him, in the tea-colored water.

  He was a brave man, everybody said, but his heart lurched just a little bit when he felt something heavy brush against his leg.

  * * *

  • • •

  My mother had seen her daddy and the other men hunt for turtles this way before, “to just reach under the water and feel for them, and grab them by the tail—the smaller ones, I mean—and throw ’em up on the bank. Some men took their shoes and socks off and used their big toe to feel with.” Her daddy rejected this as undignified, and said that, though a roofer could get by with nine fingers, he needed all his toes, to level his feet and keep him from leaning too far to one side and falling off the roof.

  The snapping turtle does not like to be handled. If you had the poor sense to grab the turtle on either side of the shell, the snapper would simply snake his long neck around and bite you, though it seemed impossible; the big ones truly could easily dismember and maim a man.

  But older turtle-hunters had learned they could grasp the sides of the shell just in front of the back legs, which was just, just out of reach of the snapping jaws. You could, sometimes, get a grip on the tail and carry a turtle that way, but if you let him swing too close to your leg, he would bite you there, too.

  “The old saying was that if a snapping turtle bit you it wouldn’t turn loose till it thundered,” my mother said, but she could not recall if she had ever actually seen a turtle clamp down on anyone, or if it happened to occur in a thunderstorm. The truth is that when a turtle clamped down it tore away at the flesh where it bit—the beak was ma
de to do that—and then just bit again.

  This was what my grandfather was feeling around for in the dark.

  * * *

  • • •

  Charlie had never been a smoker—he took his tobacco as snuff, when he took it at all—but he was not the man he used to be, and lost his wind quickly. He was already weary, and he had not yet put a hand on the thing. The technique was to keep your hands flat, your palms and fingers more level, instead of just letting your fingers dangle like bait. At first, all he felt was water, silt, and mud.

  Finally, his fingers brushed the top of the hard shell. If he had touched the head, or touched too close to the jaws, he might have been maimed.

  He felt, quickly, lightly, carefully, for the seams in the carapace, hoping the turtle would not thrash away, and gently slid his fingers around the rim of the shell till he felt it go smooth. He froze. The front part of the shell, the part closest to the head, was smoother and more even on the sides and front. His hand was moving toward the mouth. He reversed and slid his hand in the other direction, until he felt the edges of the shell taper and become more jagged, spear-shaped. This was the area behind the back legs, over the tail. He could not grab the short legs. The claws were like fishhooks.

  He took a breath and grabbed for the prehistoric tail—hoping he had a good grip—and hauled backward and up, trying to back out of the hole as quickly as he could at the same time, and somehow keep the creature off the bottom, to keep it from getting a grip in the roots and mud. For several long minutes, they pulled against each other, till, finally, he felt the creature lose its grip, just a little, and he dragged it out into the sunlight. The turtle arced its neck around and its beak snapped at the water and air. Charlie kept moving, fell twice, went under, but dragged it through the water and then along the bank, till he got his legs under him and tried to lift it out of the water by its tail.