by Rick Bragg
She left only a handful of figs. Edna, who had apparently developed the ability to supervise even when in dreamland, asked her why she was quitting before she was done.
“I thought I’d leave a few, in case Ray wanted a few when he come home.”
“You’ve done stripped it pretty good,” Edna said.
“Yeah, but…”
“And he did tell you to get ’em all,” she said.
My mother took the last fruit.
And they shall eat up thine harvest and thy bread, which thy sons and thy daughters should eat: they shall eat up thy flocks and thine herds: they shall eat up thy vines and thy fig trees: they shall impoverish thy fenced cities, wherein thou trustedst, with the sword.
—JEREMIAH 5:17
Edna nodded, satisfied. She hated to see a thing half done, even if she was only spectating.
“She could also be just the least little bit greedy,” my aunt Juanita said, many years later.
My mother went to the car and came back with a pint of pear preserves she had put up that year. She placed it carefully between the screen and the door, so it would be impossible to miss.
She rode home cradling her figs, not quite a gallon. “I was a little bit disappointed. The way they talked, there’d be a bushel-basketfull. I guess I was a little greedy, too.
“But they were perfect. I had meant to eat a few, and then put the rest of ’em up in some preserves. But once I got started, I couldn’t stop, and I eat every one of them. I didn’t put up even one little-bitty jar, not for y’all, not for nobody. They were the best figs I’ve ever eat.”
When my aunt Juanita saw Ray in town a few days later, she asked him how he liked the pear preserves that her sister had left him.
Ray told her he had not seen them.
“Well, Margaret left you some in the door, after her and Edna went to your house to pick the trees,” Juanita said.
“Nobody picked my figs,” Ray said. “I was expectin’ ’em to, but they never showed up. I even waited for ’em, waited for ’em all day, but I never saw them. My fig tree’s still just full of figs, ’cept for what the birds got.”
“Well,” Juanita said.
“Well,” Ray said, always the Samaritan. “You tell Margaret I appreciate the preserves anyway, and appreciate her thinkin’ about me.”
“I wonder,” Juanita said, “whose they did get. We can’t tell her—it’ll kill her. She ain’t never stole nothin’ in her life,” giving her a pass on the government cheese and the onion, too, I suppose.
“I won’t tell nobody,” Ray said.
“I won’t, neither,” Juanita said, and called my mother as soon as she got home.
• • •
And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind.
—REVELATION 6:13
“Dear God, I stole ’em,” my mother said.
She and Edna had apparently turned a block too soon, and wound up at the one nearly identical house with a single fig tree.
“That’s how you know there’s an ol’ devil in this world,” she said.
“It wasn’t my fault,” my aunt Juanita said. “My directions was perfect.”
“It wasn’t my fault,” my aunt Edna said. “I follered the directions.”
“It was my fault, for trustin’ ’em in the first place,” my mother said.
She thought, somewhat bitterly, that she should have known better. She had grown up and grown old riding around with them, hopelessly lost.
“We got lost coming home from Florida and went through Heflin twice. We went up and down one highway so many times that the people who lived on it got to know us.”
Her imagination galloped away with her. “You think they could put me in prison, for stealing? I mean, nobody would put you in prison for stealing a fig, or a few figs, but a whole tree? They’d put you in prison for a tree-full. They’d put me in jail…in Piedmont jail. And I just got deathly sick.”
What, she wondered, if there had been people at home who had been there the whole time, watching, faces pressed to the window, to watch one old woman strip their tree of figs while another old woman—the lookout, obviously—had such contempt for the law that she stole a chair and took a nap?
“Is it something they could put you in prison for?” she asked her sisters.
“No,” Edna said.
“Yes,” Juanita said.
Edna told her it was unlikely the Piedmont police would jail a poor widow woman for stealing fruit, and if they did, it was unlikely they would jail her, the unknowing wheelman…or -woman. It wasn’t like she left with the tires smoking, she said.
“Edna always just kind of took things in stride,” my mother said, “but she wasn’t the one going to Tutwiler.” Tutwiler is the women’s prison in Wetumpka.
What bothered Edna was there was a whole big tree of figs in Piedmont still unpicked, and rotting on the vine. It was not, as we have said, that she enjoyed figs herself; it was the principle of the thing.
“You want to go back to Ray’s house and get the rest of them figs?” my mother asked, incredulous.
“Why, sure,” Edna said.
“I’d have to disguise myself,” my mother told her. “What if the people who owned that other house drove up? They’d think I was doin’ it to somebody else’s fig tree, and they’d call the police.”
She told Edna she could drive her own self to Piedmont and pick the legal figs.
“I don’t like figs,” Edna said.
* * *
• • •
“Well,” my mother said, “wild horses couldn’t have drug me back to Piedmont.” She did not go to Piedmont for about fifteen years. Unsure of the statute of limitations, she changed her eye doctor from the one in Piedmont to the one in Gadsden, just in case.
The sisters did feel sorry for her, after a while. Juanita and Edna tried to tell her that she had more than paid for a measly paper sack of figs with her pint of excellent pear preserves.
“Why, you can get seven dollars for ’em in the Smokies, and you know you could get at least five dollars for ’em down here,” Juanita said.
I asked why they were worth more in the Smokies.
“Tourists,” my mother said.
Ray told my aunt Juanita to tell my mother that she had committed no great sin, because there was no larceny in her heart.
“I got some muscadines there, ripe, if you want them,” he said.
Edna said she would be by directly.
“I like muscadines,” she said, but could not get my mother to go with her.
* * *
• • •
My mother sought solace in her Bible in the days after her larceny, but even in those pages there was no comfort. It seemed as if every chapter and verse threw her crime right back in her face.
Genesis, of course, offered no refuge. She could see, in her mind, Adam and Eve being seduced by the serpent under the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, then stumbling from the Garden of Eden, in sin.
And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.
—GENESIS 3:7
The Piedmont figs went unclaimed, and rotted on the vine.
We needed, obviously, some sort of closure. Every few years, I asked her if she wanted to go back to Piedmont, to the mistaken house with the mistaken fig trees, to apologize to the people there.
“What if they hold a grudge?” she asked. What if they’d just been laying for her all these years? She imagined that jar of pear preserves—empty, of course—sitting on a shelf in the Piedmont Police Department, with her fingerprints all over it. She was too old, she said, to do any serious time.
“And poor ol’ Ray’s done gone on, and he ain’t here to stand up for me. I wouldn’t even have a witness.”
The experience has not, however, turned her against figs in general.
�
��I still like the taste of figs. I’d eat some right now if I had some. I mean, I ain’t crazy.”
But even after all these years, she still has had no luck with cultivating a fig tree of her own, and wonders if that might be some kind of punishment for 1986. It can happen. The Bible says so.
I have smitten you with blasting and mildew: when your gardens and your vineyards and your fig trees and your olive trees increased, the palmerworm devoured them: yet have ye not returned unto me, saith the Lord.
—AMOS 4:9
We do not know exactly what a palmerworm is, but it sounds terrible. I told her that, with all the Lord has to worry about, it is doubtful He sent a plague unto her fig trees. I do not believe plagues are as specific as that, but my knowledge of the Bible is not as broad or as deep as I would like.
“I’ve mostly got over it now,” my mother said, lying. Every time she walks past a pack of Newtons in the grocery store, she feels a tiny twinge of shame. She did not put up fig preserves for years, but she is over that, too. Her only regret is that she did not get to make some for Ray, before he passed. I asked her if she thought of Ray every time she messed with figs, and she said of course she did, and I told her that is a fine way to remember a person.
Ray Brock’s Fig Preserves
(Makes at least 3 pints)
WHAT YOU WILL NEED
½ gallon figs (at least)
3 cups sugar
HOW TO COOK IT
“First thing about figs is that figs is something you don’t mash, you don’t bruise, you don’t hurt. You be gentle with figs.”
Pick through the figs by hand. Figs should be ripe but firm. If you are unsure, taste one. Make sure to remove all stems. Throw out the ones with bad places: “If you find a mushy one, throw it out,” she said.
Wash them all thoroughly.
Place the whole figs in a large bowl, and cover them with the sugar. Use a spoon or your hands to make sure all the figs come into contact with the sugar—again, working gently.
“Let ’em sit in the sugar, covered, overnight,” my mother says. “They will make their own liquid to cook in.”
Place them in a pot, and cook over low heat, stirring often.
“They’ll come apart and make their own syrup. When they’ve come apart, and almost all the liquid—not all, but just a little—has cooked out of ’em, they’re ready.”
Being careful not to get burned, which is a hard-and-fast rule for any canning project, “put ’em in the canning jars while they’re still hot.” Fill almost to the top, to the neck of the jar, but do not allow the figs to touch the underside of the lid. Do not pack the preserves in. “I don’t know no better way to say that,” she said.
“Be sure to use new lids. You can reuse rings, but not the lids.” Figs will absorb the hint of any rust, or any ghost of what was in the jar before, like tomatoes. You can smell tomatoes on lids long after they are thoroughly washed.
You can put the preserves up in pint jars—there may be some left after three jars—but it may be best to put them in ½-pint jars, to cut down on waste. They will keep a year or longer, but in the refrigerator they seem to lose some of their flavor, though none of the sweetness.
Some people use them in cakes, fruitcakes, or pies.
“They make fine Christmas presents. Just put a bow on top,” she said.
This same process, she believes, works with just about any preserves, from apples to pears, as long as they are not stolen. But whereas other fruits may need spices, the figs need only the sugar.
* * *
• • •
She really had intended to make Ray some preserves with the figs from his tree, if they had in fact been picked from his tree, and if she had not eaten them all before she found out they were stolen from people she is still afraid to face, twenty years later. If you are those people and you are, by any chance, reading this, do not come after us, or talk bad about us in Piedmont. Remember, we know where you live, more or less.
· 34 ·
SPRING
Fresh Field Peas with Pork, Stewed Squash and Sweet Onions, Fried Okra, Sweet Corn, Fried Green Tomatoes
Ava, in old age
2017
THE KITCHEN still makes her seem young, even after all this time, in the same way that, when she was just a girl wrapped in all those friendly ghosts and drawing on all their wisdom, it made her seem old and wise and skilled beyond her years. But the kitchen is, as she said, all about the past, and the ghosts crowd into it more and more with every passing year. An old person gets a little tired sometimes, living in the past, so deep into that past, even if it tastes so good.
But the garden, now, the garden is different.
The garden is about the future, and hope, and plans.
And, of course, there is the food.
She may look down the turned rows and see her daddy walking there, cursing a never-ending field of tomatoes, but the garden is mostly about new things, and the loose red dirt under her feet actually seems to draw the years from her, through her shoes. She feels that way every spring, just seems to get her breath somehow, when she smells the turned earth, and she can walk across it when it is red, clean, and brand-new, and not a weed—not one—dares to raise its ugly head.
“Red clay ain’t the best dirt, and this mountain dirt has got a lot of rocks in it. We picked dump trucks full of rocks from this dirt, and one still pushes up ever’ now and then. But mostly it’s good, I believe.”
She sees the winter as a kind of purgatory, and behaves as if she lives in a frozen tundra, huddled in some gulag. She wears layers and layers of flannel and thermal and quilted everything, and punches at her television, trying to find a weatherman, this time, with a sunny disposition. She would settle for a kind lie, rather than one more forecast for thirty-seven degrees and rain with a chance of something called a “wintry mix,” as if it were a party snack. She says, over and over, the same thing: if she can just get into March, if she can just get started on her garden, she believes she would feel all right. It has been that way for as long as I can remember, but it got worse when the years piled up on her, when the sickness surprised her, like a thief.
The devil tried to do her in, finally, by taking her spring.
“I am not going to miss another spring,” she said, within days of coming home last summer.
“I’m not going to miss another garden.”
It was the weeds she hated the most, of course, or, more, the idea of the weeds. She could almost feel them there in her hospital room, choking, covering over the ground, leaving room for nothing good to grow. She lost to the weeds for the first time that spring, and lost much of the year around it. It was just the spring she missed; you could have the winter.
When she came home from the hospital, my brother had laid out a garden for her, and even with a late start he brought in a good crop of the things she loves to cook and eat. But it was not the same. She was too weak to work it with him, or even really to walk it. This year would be different, because it had to be.
It hasn’t happened yet. The days are still cold now, as I write this, but I still know precisely how it will be. She and my brother will first lay out her garden in their minds, side by side in the living room, in front of a fire, and they will plan and plant it together, in sweet corn, tomatoes, field peas, green beans, squash, okra, hot pepper, and onions, white and green. Later, they will plant greens, turnips and collards and mustard, and more.
They will talk, and talk, and talk, about seed, and tomato plants, and fertilizer, and dirt. They will talk a hundred hours about the dirt alone, the chemical nature of it, and drought, and irrigation, and flood. They will discuss blight, and caterpillars, and deer, and birds, and rabbits, and he will want to talk about pesticides, and she will tell him not in her garden, buster, and they will argue, but she will win, because we let her win—not in fear but in recompense, for everything that has come before this day. You know what I mean.
They will talk, and talk, and
I will not have a damn thing to say. I talk all the time, talk too much, about things I know or pretend to know something about, words on paper, but this is useless and trivial, because when you have finished there is not one damn thing in a bushel basket. It is not important compared with the failing electrical system on the old Yanmar tractor, or the new drain they will cut to channel the rainwater, and whether or not the rains will come at all. Last year, the corn baked in the field. They will discuss whether they will need a new scarecrow, or just stick with the aluminum pie tins they have hung around the garden to scare the birds away. I don’t think the birds are scared a damn bit, and the deer are laughing at us, but no one cares what I have to say. They will talk, for hours, about snakes, most of it myth. It still amazes me how people who can tell a false bloom from a real one on a squash plant, who can tell a tomato’s heritage from fifty yards away, still believe that hanging a dead rattler in a tree will make it rain.
“You can’t do nothin’ about the deer,” my mother says. “You can’t build a fence high enough.” My brother Sam nods. You have to figure some loss. The thing is, she does not even really mind the deer, or the birds, or the rabbits; she will swap some green stuff, here and there, to see all that life sneaking through the rows.
They do inventory in their heads, how many tomatoes to cook green, eat fresh, and can. She tells him they will have to be sure to pick the squash as soon as it comes in, and he nods impatiently, because what is he, Momma, a moron?
Watermelons? They almost forgot about watermelons, and cantaloupe, and mush melon. They would have to disscuss peas. Purple hulls, or crowders?
“I like watermelon,” I say, but no one seems to be listening.
In a way I cannot truly explain, my silence is the best it gets, here in my mother’s house. I let all this knowledge, the lore, the traditions, run around me and through me, and I listen to it the way some people listen to that music my mother talked about, that music played and sung in a language people might not understand anymore. Certainly, I have lost it somewhere. But you still know it’s pretty, know it has much, much to do with you, with who you are, even if you no longer know the steps, or the words.