The Recipe Cops

by Keith Weaver

  Lying up there he could look straight up into Betty, a huge birch tree. It was Joe who called her Betty, short for Betula, which he said was her proper name. After Sanford had learned most of the alphabet, it took him a year to work out that Betty is shorter than Betula by only one letter. Betty was enormous, and stretched way out over the Air Attic, the gooseberry bush, the poison ivy clump; over the roof of his mother’s small and rather shabby garage, where there were jars full of nails, their lids fastened by screws to the underside of a row of shelving, this being one of the things left behind by the father he could not remember and never knew. On the other side, Betty extended out over the large flat rocks where he would lie and read a few years later. The lowest branches on Betty were too high off the ground for him to climb, and anyway his mother said he wasn’t to try. But high up in Betty there was at least one family of orioles every year. When he was younger, before he knew what they were called, he knew that he liked their black and orange jackets.

  Betty swayed gently. Her branches moved across the sky in complex patterns. Many times, there would be fair-weather clouds drifting past, and this made things even more complicated, since it sometimes looked like it was either Betty or the Air Attic that was moving. He would usually notice this suddenly, get the feeling that he had started to roll, and grip small irregularities on the surface in one of those fits of slightly fearful excitement. What he could see from the top was his world. The birds looked down at him curiously. Every now and then a small strip of white bark would flutter down, and each spring his first chore was to clear the dead leaves off the top of the Air Attic. He could still recall his startled embarrassment when it occurred to him that maybe he shouldn’t be looking up at Betty from underneath.

  It seemed that the days then were hot, summers were languid and endless, there was usually a light breeze, and when a car went by on the road past his house, clouds of dust rose like phantoms, and drifted quietly over the Air Attic. The dust would settle in his hair and make it feel dry and wiry. Tree frogs sang throughout the summer and on into September, although nobody could explain to him why a frog would climb a tree, and why they never sang that way on the ground. He remembered concluding, by the time he was five years old, that older people were not very bright.

  The Air Attic was his refuge, but he also had his work.

  His work consisted of studying. The place where he worked was right next to a large pine tree that stood within a few feet of the kitchen window. As he worked, he could hear his mother washing dishes, or clothes, or kneading bread, and humming. The pine tree didn’t have a name. Well, it probably did have a name, but Sanford didn’t know what it was. Next to the pine tree was his flower garden, although his mother did all the work in it. It contained only marigolds, because they were his favourite plant. He did his work on the concrete path that ran along the front of the garden.

  He studied the charcoal-coloured bark of the pine tree, and the honey-coloured drops of pine sap that oozed out of small cracks in the bark. The tree had its own smell, but most of all it had a gentle voice, and it sang to him. His mother described it as “soughing” or “sighing” or “whispering”, but it wasn’t any of these. He didn’t study the marigolds, but they perfumed his work area with a strong, sharp, and somewhat sickly odour. He had long since become accustomed to the smell, and would have missed it were it not there. The main thing he started off studying was the concrete. If he poured water onto it after it had been warmed in the sun, it would hiss. He studied this hissing for a long time.

  His work changed once he discovered the set of dark-brown, ribbed, Orange Crush bottles, the ones that had the Orange Crush label painted onto the glass. He had found them in Joe’s barn, and there were about fifteen of them, every one of them perfect – no chips, no nicks, no missing bits of paint. When he wasn’t using them, he wrapped them up in pieces of old sheet and stored them in a cardboard box under his bed. The focus of his study soon changed from the concrete path to the Orange Crush bottles and water. He had a small plastic bucket that would hold enough water to fill two Orange Crush bottles completely, and have a little left over. Using a funnel, he became expert at pouring water from the bucket into two of the Orange Crush bottles without spilling any at all, and then pouring that water into two other Orange Crush bottles, again without spilling any at all. He became adept enough that he could pour water back and forth between these two pairs of bottles repeatedly, without spilling any.

  Other images, vivid memories, swept over him in waves.

  Once more, he could see the cows, smell their warm, damp odours, hear them munching, moving about, uttering the occasional cough.

  At Joe’s barn, the cows were milked every morning. Joe had just two cows initially, then four, and although Sanford remembered several of the cows being retired and replaced by younger ones, the four always had the same four names: Clara, Cosima, Constanze, and Elsa. Each cow had its name burnt into a small piece of cedar that Joe had then fastened tastefully above each stall. Joe did a lot of wood burning. Each of the bins in the barn was labelled this way, and there were odd little signs all around his farm. Each day, at milking time, Sanford would walk to Joe’s barn, hold out his metal cup, and Joe half filled it with milk from one of the cows. He was a bit afraid of the cows because of their size, but they always looked at him with what he thought were kindly eyes. Half of this milk he would drink right away, while it was still warm. The other half he would save for his breakfast. While Joe finished the milking, Sanford would go off to a hay bale, and sit there sipping his milk. He asked Joe once if the milk tasted the same from all the cows. Joe said he didn’t know but that they could do a little test. Sure enough, the next morning Joe had four small glasses ready when Sanford turned up. He could no longer remember whether the milk tasted different or not, so it probably didn’t. As he finished one cow, Joe poured the milk from his milking pail into a large churn and then moved to the next cow. At the end, he pushed the lid onto the churn, carried it out of the barn, and placed it on a wagon. He and Joe then hauled the wagon to the house where Joe did some remarkable things with the milk. Sometimes he would stay to watch Joe separate the cream and then make butter, but sometimes he had too much work to do. When it was time for Sanford to return home and get back to work, Joe would telephone his mother saying that it was time to pick him up at the end of Joe’s lane. She would meet them, and walk him back across the road. He would then clean out and dry his metal cup and go to the Air Attic. Or he would collect the Orange Crush bottles he needed, and his small bucket, go out behind the house to the pump, which he could just operate, and fill the bucket with water. Then he would go to work next to the pine tree and the marigolds.

  The sounds and the magic of the evenings in his boyhood returned to him again.

  Behind Joe’s barn, there was a small swampy area with bulrushes, and in the evening he and Joe could hear the frogs croaking. (These must have been water frogs, and different from tree frogs.) Beyond the small swamp there was a very large meadow. At the far side of the meadow, there was a poplar forest, and at the edge of the forest there was a creek. Some evenings late in the spring they could hear dogs barking far away in the direction of this forest. His mother didn’t know whose dogs they were. Joe said they weren’t dogs at all, they were wolf cubs playing.

  Eventually it became too dark to see much, most of the birds stopped singing (except for the boring bobwhites), and the mosquitoes started biting, so he would go inside and to bed.

  But the strongest and brightest image, standing in for a reality he still could not believe had been lost, was that of his mother.

  He pictured her again: slim, sympathetic face, shortish hair worn in a plain, attractive cut, little or no makeup. Most noticeable about her were her eyes, brimming in empathy, always seeming to radiate deep, everlasting, unconditional love.

  Sanford spent time at each of the areas around his former home that held something special for him: the Air Attic; the garage, now looking even smal
ler and shabbier than he remembered; his small flower garden and its guardian pine tree; the stand of unruly sumacs that had claimed rough ground behind the garage, ground that was unsuitable for anything else; the large vegetable garden, now gone to grass; the rhubarb patch and his mother’s peony beds; and his large flat reading rocks. He now stretched out on these rocks again and for just a few seconds was twelve years old once more, among the familiar poplar trees, which uttered a happy collective chatter as their leaves fluttered like large chunks of tinsel. He was just coming out of this extended reverie when Anne appeared at the door carrying a tray that held tall frosted glasses of something fizzy.

  “Come and sit, Jim.”

  The only times she called Sanford “Jim” were when there was something personal in the air.

  While handing Sanford his glass of lemonade, and pushing a small plate of cookies toward him, Anne commiserated on the terrible and unexpected news about Joe, but her good humour couldn’t be suppressed for long. Soon she was all smiles as she asked, in genuine interest, after his life and doings in the fleshpots to the south.

  Before he could reply, she dived off into an account of a recent trip she had made to visit her daughter in British Columbia, and she rattled on happily about that for a few minutes. It was not long, however, before her conversation circled back to Sanford.

  “But how are you? You’ve been hit by two terrible blows.” She paused here, eyeing him solicitously, then resumed on a different tack. “How is your work? Have you done much travelling? And are you still leaving all those eligible women in despair?”

  It became evident that she warmed to him, mostly in a motherly sort of way. Her matchmaking efforts were very low-key and done mostly on a reflex pro forma basis, but somewhere inside she nursed a small ember from Pride and Prejudice, a harmless and often quite appealing bias that some people seem prone to retaining once they have imbibed it. In Anne’s case, her own life hadn’t really worked out according to the script, since her husband, to whom she had been married happily, or so she thought, for more than twenty-five years, suddenly abandoned his successful woodworking, furniture making, and small building supplies operation on the edge of town, and flitted to Mexico with a twenty-eight-year-old secretary. In a late-onset attack of insanity sparked by his lovesickness, he had burnt all his boats by deeding his business and their house to Anne. She didn’t hesitate to claim legal ownership, and after six months she sold their house in a neighbouring village (“too big, too draughty, too him”).

  Sanford had recognized that Anne was a feisty soul, but her colours were really nailed to the mast when Mr. Ferguson had crawled home begging forgiveness. “Demasiado tarde, Jose”, she told him, explaining that that particular quantity of water was not only well and truly under the bridge, it had drained through lakes, seen the insides of several sewage plants, made mud for pigs to roll in, and was now resting in a quiet patch of the South Pacific. In short, he was told to vaya con Dios.

  He went, but it was doubtful that he had God for company.

  “Is everything okay with your house?” Sanford asked, if only to shift his thoughts to more practical, not to mention conversationally safer, areas.

  “You mean your house, surely.”

  “Well, yes of course, it is my house, but while you’re living in it I like to think of you as more than just a lodger.”

  “Yes, everything is fine with the house.”

  They finished their drinks and Sanford thanked Anne and then left.

  Three

  There was nothing to be done on Joe’s house – no repairs, no touch-up painting, not even grass cutting. Joe had remained on top of everything.

  Joe had sold his cows a few years earlier. He did it reluctantly, but his reluctance was not because he was particularly attached to them; rather, as he had explained to Sanford during a visit, because it had been a routine of his life for so many years and it felt like he was being deprived of something essential. But he had wanted to get away more, and after daily milking was no longer a tie, he had visited Sanford several times in Toronto, and stayed for up to a week. Even so, Sanford detected that Joe quite often felt it had been a mistake to part from his cows.

  Joe had filled his hours, he explained, by spending more time and more imagination on his vegetable and flower gardens, and by doing more writing. He still had a dozen or so other activities that kept him occupied and interested. Some of this Sanford remembered from Joe’s visits to Toronto. But Sanford’s most delicious recollections, the sensuous sepia-tinged memories, were from his early youth.

  Seven-year-olds don’t always keep good track of time, either as hours or months. Sanford could only guess that his recollection dated from late April. He had already used his wagon to pull a load of cow dung back to his family garden from Joe’s barn. Some of this dung was spread around the patch where the rhubarb grew. He described this operation to his friend Murray, and after that whenever Murray was at the Sanfords’ place and was offered lunch, he would always decline any rhubarb pie. The rest of the cow dung Sanford mixed with the freshly turned soil in his mother’s vegetable garden. But before he did that, it was another of his jobs to grub out the weeds and grass that were just beginning to grow. Most people didn’t like doing this, but he found it pleasant.

  So, that year, and one can say it was late April for the sake of the discussion, he was helping Joe in Joe’s garden. It was the first time Sanford had done this. Joe’s garden was huge. It was located in a large area outside his back door. The path from the back door went along the left side of the garden in a straight line to the barn. This wasn’t just an earthen path. Joe had laid down large flagstones to make a four-foot-wide avenue all the way to the barn. He said he did this to avoid having the path churned into an unpleasant streak of mud in the spring. This would always happen, he said, because he had to go to the barn at least four times a day. He carried the milk from the barn to the house on a large sturdy wagon. He also used the wagon to carry to the barn the bags of feed that were delivered to his back door by the tall gangly man from the feed mill. The feed mill man was called Grant, as Sanford recalled, and he said very little. In fact, all Sanford ever recalled hearing him say was “Yup”.

  The garden was enclosed on all four sides by heavy wire mesh fencing. The fence was tall, much taller than Sanford was then, and the fencing wire was fastened to thick posts set into holes filled by concrete. The distance between fence posts was four of Sanford’s big paces. The garden was eighteen by sixteen fence posts. At first, Sanford thought Joe was just being neat. After all, plants don’t need to be fenced in. But when Sanford watched him that day replacing one of the posts, he realized that nobody would take that much trouble unless they had to. First, Joe had to unfasten the fencing from the decayed post, cut off the old post close to the ground, break up the concrete around the bottom of the post, then dig out the pieces of concrete. It was a lot of effort, but Joe wouldn’t let Sanford help. He said the tools were too heavy and that he didn’t want Sanford dropping anything on his feet. After Joe hollowed out the hole where the old post had been, he set the new post in place, adjusted it for height, mixed the concrete that he needed, and then poured it into the hole around the post, while Sanford held the post vertical. He then fastened the wire to the new post so that the post would stand straight while the concrete hardened. That was really the first time Sanford had looked carefully at Joe’s garden, and he was surprised to see how even, and neat, and tidy it all was. The posts were all the same size, height, and spacing.

  Inside the fencing, the garden was divided into six large sections and one smaller section. One section had raspberry canes, a second was planted in asparagus, a third potatoes, a fourth lettuce and cabbage, a fifth different kinds of onions, and in the sixth was growing what Joe called root vegetables. The seventh smaller section was a herb garden. Along the side of the garden opposite the path leading to the barn, Joe had managed to encourage some blackberry canes to grow, and they now clung to supports a
few feet from the fencing, over a span of three posts. Not far from these blackberry plants was a large patch of wild strawberries. Joe said that it wasn’t worth growing tame strawberries; the wild ones tasted much better.

  It was during that year Sanford also came to a realization. He realized that Joe could not possibly eat all this food by himself. Even if Sanford counted the times that he had lunch at Joe’s place, it still couldn’t account for the amount of food Joe produced.

  One day Sanford looked at one of the rows and the seed package that sat like a hat on top of one of the wooden pegs. “Joe”, he said, “you have thirty-six heads of cabbage growing here.”

  “Yes. Six more than last year.”

  “How do you eat it all?”

  “I don’t eat it all myself. I use a lot of it to cook the Lions Club dinners.”

  Joe explained, “I love cooking. I learned to cook many years ago, and it didn’t take long before I realized that cooking with very fresh food makes all the difference. You might remember that I gave a talk to the students here in Stanley Falls about food, vitamins, and cooking, and I explained a few different dishes and how they came to be. Partly a history of cooking. Only a few of the students had any real interest. But it was about a week later when William McCauley came to see me. His son was one of the students at my talk, and he told his father how interesting it was. So, William went to speak to the teacher, Miss Roberts, who had talked to me afterwards, and had asked me eventually what recipes I used. I guess she told William that I knew what I was doing. Anyway, when William visited, he spent a lot of time talking to me about cooking, and he spent even more time touring my garden and asking how long I had been doing this. Well, eventually he wanted to know if I would be interested in putting on a special meal for a few of the members of the local Lions Club. I said no. He asked me again a couple of weeks later and said he wanted to hire me to do it. Fifty dollars plus the cost of the food for preparing a meal for eight. He kept asking me, and finally I said yes, but just this once. Well, it turned out to be great fun, and so I’ve been preparing one meal a month ever since for the local Lions Club. I had to expand the garden. It was a lot smaller than it is now, and now I do cooking on contract. And that’s where most of these vegetables go.”