by Rick Bragg
“And I was losin’ my holt,” he later explained, so he slid one hand down to the shell in front of the hind legs, then quickly grabbed the other side. He lifted it bodily out of the water—the turtle snapping at his knuckles, just out of reach—and he staggered to the bank.
His people had gathered there. They did not cheer or slap hands. You did not cheer groceries.
My mother did not see any romance in it at all.
“What’s happenin’?” people asked.
“Daddy caught a turtle,” she said.
It was as big around as a washtub, and so heavy he could only stagger up the bank. Still, he knew. He could not so easily have bested, or even lifted, the real Ol’ Mossy Back. The snapper had gone into that hole a legend, but came out as something less. It was still a fine turtle, but it was just a damn big turtle.
“Is that him?” all his kin asked him, one by one.
He just shook his head.
It was supper, was all.
* * *
• • •
They killed him quickly. Charlie did not let anyone poke the snapper with a stick or tease it. He held out a branch as thick as his wrist, and as the snapper struck out, to sink its beak into the wood, Charlie beheaded it with one quick swing of his roofing hatchet. He cut the bottom shell away with a sharp knife, and the top, and threw the entrails into the water, to be devoured by the catfish.
It has been said by my people that there are seven types of meat in a turtle, but my mother believes there are only two primary kinds: clean-tasting white meat, and a fishier-tasting abomination closer to the hindquarters of the beast.
“Stay away from the tail. There’s meat in it, but it has a terrible taste,” she said. Some people ate it, she said, and made a face.
The recipe, like most camp cooking, leaned heavily on things that could be carried in a burlap bag. The meat was cut into chunks, and boiled in an iron pot in a tomato-based broth with tomatoes and onions, with a strong dose of hot sauce and some chili powder. Like the creature itself, the soup had bite. The turtle, cleaned, had only about six or so pounds of usable meat, and made three gallons of rich, hearty soup. Rich people would have put sherry in theirs, but no one around that campfire had even the vaguest notion of what sherry was, unless it was one of the Johnson girls.
As they ate, they talked about the mossy back that had gotten away, but no one—not one soul—questioned whether that had indeed been him that my grandfather had followed into the cave. He just slipped by my grandpa somehow, just eluded him, by an inch or less, there in the murk and the mud. There must have been two turtles in that hole, they reckoned. That must have been how it was, my grandfather said, more or less.
* * *
• • •
The snappers are smaller now. They are not endangered or threatened; it is just that the real monsters seem to have passed into antiquity, in the way the great billfish have been snatched from the oceans. Even a ten-pound snapper will bring the kinfolks out now, to watch it crawl across the ground or chomp down on a stick. My mother still gets one or two smaller turtles every now and then from well-meaning fishermen, but she lets my brothers clean the carcasses. There are just some things an old woman should not have to do, and cleaning a turtle is a lot of work for a couple of handfuls of meat.
“It’s not like cleaning a chicken. It’s hard to tell how much meat you’ll wind up with when you first start cleaning a turtle, but you need about a good pound or pound and a half to make a good soup,” she said, though the basic recipe is much the same, whether you have a pound of meat or three pounds.
“The thing you have to remember about turtle meat is that it’s tough, even if the turtles ain’t real big, and you have to cook it a long, long time to get it right. For a soup, you want it to cook till it comes apart, like the pork in a Brunswick stew. It can have kind of a sweet taste. If I’m gonna eat it, I’d rather eat it fried, but Daddy liked turtle soup, so that’s what we’re gonna do.”
Turtle Soup
WHAT YOU WILL NEED
1½ to 2 pounds turtle meat
2 slices thick-cut bacon or salt pork, cut into fourths
1 tablespoon salt (at least)
1 teaspoon black pepper
1 small head white cabbage
1 quart crushed tomatoes (home-canned is better)
4 to 6 medium potatoes, coarsely chopped
2 large onions, chopped
1 quart tomato juice (home-canned, if possible)
½ teaspoon hot sauce
1 tablespoon chili powder
HOW TO COOK IT
Cut the turtle into chunks. “The size don’t matter so much,’cause it’s gonna come apart as it cooks,” my mother says.
In a large pot, render the fat from the bacon or salt pork, and set the meat aside. Place the turtle pieces in the pot, and brown the outside just till the skin begins to crisp slightly, turning once. Do not use flour to coat; this recipe does not require a roux. Do not try to cook the meat through; the turtle will cook to pieces in the liquid ingredients.
Cover the browned turtle with water, and bring to a boil. Add the salt and pepper, so they can cook into the meat, then simmer the turtle for 2 hours or so. “Turtle meat is tough. You want it to cook till it’s fallin’ apart. You may have to add water, but don’t drown it. You want to let the water cook out, leaving you a good, strong base.”
To the pot, add the cabbage, and the bacon or fatback. Then, after about 5 minutes, add the tomatoes and other ingredients, wet and dry, in any order you wish. Cook over medium heat until the potatoes are soft and the onions and cabbage begin to come to pieces—½ hour or so is more than enough—then reduce the heat and just let simmer for at least another 20 minutes. The potatoes might melt and fall to pieces if you let it simmer longer, but my people like it that way.
Though it seems an uncomplicated process, it can be hard to get right, she believes. “You have to taste,” she said.
Taste for salt and pepper, and add accordingly, but gradually. If it lacks kick, add more chili powder first. It you really like heat, add a dash or two more of hot sauce, to taste, as it cooks.
“If you douse the cooked stew with hot sauce after it’s done, it won’t taste as good. All you’ll taste is the hot sauce.”
Serve with potato salad and cornbread muffins or some good buttery crackers. She likes Captain’s Wafers, instead of the pasty and chalky saltines.
“Rich folks’ crackers,” we call them.
* * *
• • •
To be honest, I am not wild about turtle in most incarnations. But the soup I appreciate. It doesn’t taste like anything else, and you can almost taste the passing of time in this, too, maybe even taste the river itself. I know that may be romantic, but if you remove the backstory from food you remove the secrets, and even the taste somehow, we believe. In the same way, I believe that looking at that river is the closest I will ever come to really seeing my grandfather.
The rich folks, of course, mostly own the Coosa now. Their mansions and vacation homes ring the lakes and backwater and even line the main channel, but every now and then, if you can somehow block the Tudor mansions and two-story boat docks from your mind, you can almost imagine it the way it was. It is still littered, here and there, with fallen trees, and on those snags rest the terrapins and the wading birds and the other wild things. And every once in a great while, you will see that broad, flat creature, his great shell sloping from front to back, the dark, bony carapace scummed with moss.
I heard a bunch of dumbasses say once they liked to shoot the big snappers, for fun, and watch their bodies sink to the mud. I think my grandpa would have punched them in the mouth. Some people down here just need to be hit in the mouth now and again, or at least sent to bed without any supper.
It has been years since I saw a truly big snapper in the river, one of those monsters we used to tell about. The last time, I was close enough to see the ripple of fish in the current, and when they came too
close I saw the creature slip off his snag into the water among them and disappear. He was probably not the legend, either, not the Ol’ Mossy Back of my grandfather’s time. But it is nice to believe that he could, as the legend claims, live forever. I guess he would be about as big as a Fiat by now.
As my grandfather grew ill, and the visits to the river dwindled and finally stopped altogether, my brother Sam went looking for him, in the footsteps of other old men.
“We lived in a house on the Cove Road,” my mother said, “with Momma, and every day a farmer, Mr. Leon Boozer, would bring his hands to our well—we had good cold water—and they’d eat their lunch there. I think it was Lige Smith, and Ernest Smith, and Otis Meade that was his hands then. Well, for some reason, Sam always liked to be around them old men, and he would sit out there with them and even follow them around—he was still just a little-bitty boy and still just waddlin’ around—and they would give him part of their lunch to eat. I think it made him feel like he was real big, you know, grown-up, to eat lunch with the men.
“And one day, Ernest’s wife had cooked ’em all some turtle to eat. Her name was Thannie Matildie Tiffany Jane Sharon Susan Charlemagne Smith. It was real long, but that was her real name. I ain’t sure why she needed a name that long, but that’s what it was. Anyway, that ain’t the point of it….The point of it is, she made them that turtle to eat—I believe she fried it— and they gave it to Sam. I reckon they thought it would be funny to see the little boy eatin’ turtle, like he would make a face at it or somethin’. But he just eat it all up, ever’ bit of it, and he told ’em that, awwww, shoot, that wadn’t nothin’ to him, to eat no blame turtle. His paw-paw used to give him turtle all the blame time.”
“My paw-paw caught a turtle one time,” he said.
The men smiled.
“He caught the biggest turtle they was.”
That was not the truth of it, of course, but legends get started with less.
“You got any more of that turtle meat?”
· 24 ·
OFFERINGS
Smothered Cubed Steak
My big brother, Sam, and little brother, Mark
1958
THEY SAY a poor man makes the paper only twice in the Deep South, unless he breaks the law or plays football. The newspapers record the happenstance of his birth, and the inevitability of his death. If he was not an important man, or at least born to important people, it is unlikely that, either time, a great deal of ink was spilled. A lot of great men have lived and died down here inside a paragraph or two.
When I was a boy, I read of a great Grecian king, and how there were even greater kings than Agamemnon, but there was no one to sing about them in glorious tomes.
I wish I had been around, wish I had been working at some old Underwood, when my grandfather passed. I would have written the hell out of his obituary; I would have drained a tanker of ink, and killed a lot of trees, over his memory. I would not have used any fancy or flowery words, or maybe even any big ones, because I don’t really know that many big ones that I can spell, and would not have cluttered his memory with foolishness like that, anyway. But I could have come close, I believe, to a glorious tome. My people deserved it.
But they didn’t need me.
They didn’t even need the newspaper.
The word went quickly, sadly out, as if on some kind of dark wing, and by the evening of his death, a glowing string of headlights crawled slowly up the Cove Road, to park amid the ragweed and Johnsongrass along the blacktop, till they strung out for a quarter-mile or more. There were old Chevys with a single headlight and electrician’s tape holding on the taillights, and ancient Fords on bald tires, and a Nash Rambler that wouldn’t go in reverse. There were pickups with logging chain coiled in the beds, curling in rust, and probably a crushed can of PBR or two. There were Buicks and Oldsmobiles, big, heavy cars hung with chrome and wicked tail fins. There were all kinds of cars, because a good carpenter and roofer makes all kinds of friends, rich and poor. Few men are more appreciated than one who can keep the rain off your head and run off a little good liquor now and then. And a good talker to boot? Of course they would come, by the dozens.
The men came first, deacons, backsliders, and unapologetic sinners, old men with ancient black broadcloth suitcoats over their newest overalls, prosperous men in suits from the Sears, Roebuck catalogue, and young men in ducktails and rolled-up blue jeans and shiny penny-loafer shoes, side by side, heavy tool belts clanking against their waists, good lumber on their shoulders. With Winstons and nonfiltered Camels dangling from their lips, they sawed, hammered, planed, and sanded smooth a simple pine coffin, with no velvet or satin, for this was for a workingman to lie on, a man like them, and they would not insult his memory with such things. But every board was cured, and the seams were watertight, and the joints were true. You could not slip a sheet of notebook paper between them, it was said, you could have dragged a silk scarf across it and not snagged a splinter anywhere.
They helped the undertaker lay him out in the front room, in the blue suit and white shirt he had bought to go see James when he was in basic training over in Mississippi. They folded his big hands over his breast, and it was odd, for such tough men, how gentle they were with him.
“It’s all I could stand to look at, was his hands,” my mother said. They were big, scarred, and as rough as sandpaper, the knuckles bulging from where he had broken them against the heads of foolish men, the fingers cut a thousand times by fishhooks, razor-sharp hawkbill knives, and a few million nails.
“People loved my daddy,” my mother said.
Maybe that is true of any good man on such a day, even any man at all.
But it was true of him the day before he died, and the day after, and all the days to come.
Like most of the houses Charlie Bundrum had rented, almost all his life, this one was hidden in deep woods, far off the little country road, “and we didn’t have no porch light,” my mother said. As the dark fell, Ambrose Parris ran a drop cord onto the porch and rigged a bright light on it, so the people who came after they got off from work could find their way to him through the trees. Ambrose knew his way around electricity.
The men moved to the porch, to stand and smoke, and let the gentler people fill the house. Hubert Parris was there, and Bill Hulsey, Earl Woods, Claude Bundrum, Hoyt Fair, and big Fred McCreeless, who wept like a child. The McFalls came, came by the carloads, from the big house out by the curve of the railroad track. Charlie had been friends with all of them, and though they looked just alike, that army of blond-haired people, he could tell them apart from across a thousand acres. Even my daddy was there, reappearing as if by magic and as sober as a church, and he wept, too; he said the only man he had ever truly respected was lying yonder, dead. He told how my grandpa could grab your hands and look in your face and tell you, looking at you, what you were worth. It was an awful thing at first, but my daddy did not stop taking Charlie’s hand, and he never stopped offering it, because sometimes men did change.
There were other men, many others, who came to help, to observe the traditions, and to register their respect—carpenters, electricians, steelworkers, farmers, cattlemen, landowners, and movers alike.
“Did not any women come?” I asked my mother as she talked of that day.
“They came later,” she said.
“Why later?” I asked.
“They were busy,” she said.
“At what?” I said.
“They were cooking,” she said.
In her kitchen by the railroad track, Mrs. Ethel McFall cooked all day. One car would not hold all the food Mrs. Ethel had cooked, but, then, she was used to cooking for an army, since there were McFalls beyond counting on the Roy Webb Road. But she and her brood were just a few of the people who carried food up the trail to the house on the Cove Road, following Ambrose Parris’s beacon. In dozens of kitchens, as far away as Rome, the old women cooked for the mourners who would fill the house, because it mattered that you
came, and it mattered if you walked up to the door with a big pot in your hands.
Louise Bundrum came, and Margaret Bundrum came, and other kin from Jacksonville, and Elsie McFall, Bobby Jean Bragg, and Mrs. Vivian Woods, whom my grandfather and Aunt Juanita had nicknamed, for reasons no one knows, Petunia Perkins. “There were so many, hon, I can’t remember ’em all,” my mother said.
They moved slowly, carefully, through the grass to the porch, so as not to spill their offerings, and passed up great platters of meat loaf, fried chicken, and pork roasts, mounds of biscuits and still-warm discs of cornbread, and deep pots of pinto beans and Great Northern beans and black-eyed peas. They carried mounds of fried potatoes still in the skillet, which could be warmed up without fuss. There was potato salad, stewed cabbage, stewed squash, and mounds of slaw, and a few hundred or so deviled eggs, and platters of sliced onion, sliced tomato, and pickles, what they called “the green plate.” They passed up coconut cakes, and pineapple upside-down cakes, and, of course, cold and baked banana puddings, and chocolate pies, and a blackberry cobbler as big as they had ever seen. Velma Bragg sent a peach cobbler as big as a wagon.
They brought coffeepots, and filled, perked, and poured as fast as it could be made, and washed the dishes like the little house was a meat-and-three, and refilled the plates almost immediately, because the two things they understood best in this world were work and food; food had always made life worth living, so how could it not ease, at least in the slightest way, the pain of a good man’s death?
“And I couldn’t eat a bite,” my mother said. “Me and Juanita just sat there,” as the kind people came one by one to tell them how sorry they were, and they mechanically shook hands, were patted a thousand, two thousand times, but there was really nothing to say, because how do you make sense of it when someone puts out the sun?