The Recipe Cops

by Keith Weaver

  Joe had left a few brief instructions. Closed casket. Simple ceremony. Texts as indicated to be read. Music as indicated to be played. Immediate cremation after the ceremony. Gathering after the ceremony at Joe’s favourite pub, Bend in the River.

  Sanford had asked the bank manager, Mr. Cartwright, if he would lead everyone through a giving of thanks, and Cartwright agreed without hesitation. He and Sanford had gone through the elements Joe had suggested, a few changes were made, and then Cartwright insisted that he, Cartwright, be allowed to contact all the people who might wish to say something.

  Sanford had hoped that the day of the funeral would not be dreary, and it wasn’t. A brilliant sun beamed down onto the gathering. Although Joe was not at all religious in the conventional sense, the ceremony was held in the garden behind the small Anglican church. Unlike some countries in Europe, but common in Canada, there was no churchyard on the grounds of the church. But the garden behind the church was an oasis, enclosed by large maple trees, delimited by a colourful floral border, and having four trellises supporting roses, clematis, climbing hydrangea, and honeysuckle. This was where the farewell to Joe took place. Chairs had been set out in the open areas, and this worked well because the trellises made the setting attractive and appealing, by preventing a typical and unimaginative rectilinear layout.

  Sound speakers were discreetly hidden behind foliage. There was no lectern or stand, and a wireless microphone allowed anyone who wanted to speak to do so from wherever they were most comfortable. Cartwright got the ceremony underway, and it was clear from the outset that he had met all those who would speak and had delivered to them his expectations. The programme came off flawlessly, and in graceful simplicity. Sanford could not have hoped for better.

  Cartwright was an accomplished speaker. He began by stating in a strong and steady voice that this was a giving of thanks for the life of his friend, and without notes he summarized what Joe had meant to him and to many others.

  Eight people spoke. The most affecting was the least articulate, but he honoured Joe’s memory in words of such simple dignity that tears came to the eyes of even the most stoic. Sanford spoke last. His message was simply that Joe had been a beacon throughout Sanford’s life, and remained so still.

  More than a hundred people attended. Sanford managed to greet most of them individually. Joe’s impact on each person, how they admired him, how they were sometimes overwhelmed by him, were the common threads. The lovely church garden was an ideal place to remember Joe, and many people stayed for more than an hour.

  Then, Cartwright announced that the pace was about to change, that they were all going to Bend in the River to celebrate Joe in food and drink, exactly as he wanted them to. Sanford had arranged with Cartwright beforehand to have a generous food buffet laid out, one that he, Sanford, would pay for, and that the first round of drinks would also be on him, so that a toast could be made to Joe’s memory, to his generous life, and to his legacy that resided in them all. Once everyone was in the pub and supplied a drink, the switch from formality to thankful celebration took less than a minute to complete. From there, it was a scene of recollection, laughter, and discussion that would have warmed Joe’s heart. The celebration carried on for hours.

  Sanford returned to Joe’s place well after midnight. It had been an exhausting but cathartic day. On top of that, Sanford was tipsier than he had been in years. As a result, he stripped, crashed, and was out for the count within five minutes of crossing the threshold.

  Having had the sense at least to down several large tumblers of water before falling into oblivion, Sanford awoke being able to apprehend a brilliant sunny day by means of a clear and painless head. He lay in bed listening to the familiar chorus of birds outside, but then a quiet “woof” reminded him that Reggie had to be fed.

  Throwing off the covers, but rising slowly in case the clear head was just a cruel joke, Sanford went to the chest of drawers where he had placed his clothes the day he had arrived. The chest of drawers was not there. Uh-oh. Had he been far drunker than he thought? Looking around more carefully, he realized that he was not in Joe’s bedroom. In fact, he had staggered into a spare room next door, which apparently Joe always kept completely made up, and ready for a guest, for some reason. Looking out the door of this spare room, Sanford quickly got his bearings, and recognized right away Joe’s room, its door standing open, immediately to his left. Sanford also realized that the room he had just awoken in was far removed from the guest room he had stayed in during his many visits to Joe as an adult, a room that was at the other end of the house. Sanford was about to go next door to Joe’s room to dress for the day, when his eye was caught by the large bookcase on the wall facing the foot of the bed.

  Bookcases were not remarkable items in Joe’s house, but the contents of this one were, and that is what had caught Sanford’s attention. Almost all the books on these shelves were in Italian. There was half a shelf of books on learning Italian, another half shelf of dictionaries, phrase books, and grammars, and then the rest. The rest included some classics, some travel volumes, and a good number of nineteenth and twentieth century novels. There were well-thumbed copies of Fiabe italiane, Le avventure di Pinocchio, volumes by Guareschi, and two very dog-eared copies, one in Italian (Il Gattopardo) and the other in English (The Leopard). Sanford recognized a handful of names, but then passed on to other names that were blurry in his mind: D’Annunzio, Moravia, Bassani, Pirandello. Other, more contemporary names caught his eye: Calvino, Eco, Sciascia.

  There must be almost two hundred books here, Sanford thought, not counting the reference volumes. How? When? Why did Joe accumulate all these books? All this was unexpected, and Sanford found it intriguing, mystifying. How could he not have been aware of such an interest, apparently deep, in Italian literature? Sanford pulled two books from the shelves, one in English and the other in Italian. They were The Oil Jar and Other Stories, and Undici Novelle. They were by an author familiar to him only in name, Pirandello. Judging by the use these books had seen, the frayed page edges, the notes and pencil markings, the interest had been deep indeed. There was no comparable trove in any other foreign language elsewhere in the house, at least not that Sanford had located thus far. Then came the greatest surprise of all.

  Looking more closely at the copy of Undici Novelle that he held in his hands, Sanford realized that Joe’s annotations in the margins were all in Italian. How could he possibly not have known this about Joe? Joe! One of the people he knew best!

  Mulling over this odd discovery, Sanford washed, shaved, got dressed, then went out into a day of moist, pine-scented crystalline air to feed Reggie and run around with him. Reggie bounded about and yelped in pleasure. The two of them ran about the place, Sanford laughing, clapping his hands, and shouting, Reggie barking, wagging his tail as though it would twist off, going down on his front paws and daring Sanford to catch him, and generally behaving like a happy dog letting off steam. Sanford eventually caught Reggie, they rolled about growling at each other, the main result of which was that Sanford had to go back inside and change after he had fed Reggie and topped up his water bowl.

  Having the funeral behind him, and most of the work on finances completed, Sanford set about finishing his first run through Joe’s literary files. A few decisions came to him right away.

  First, he would have the best of Joe’s review and commentary pieces put together as a book, even if he had to fund it himself. There was breadth, astuteness, acuity, freshness, humour, intellectual frivolity, and substance there, and even a first sorting left enough material for a book of 300 to 400 pages. Second, he would prepare four or five of Joe’s essays for submission to various journals, after passing them by a few trusted reviewers. Third, he would produce an appreciation of Joe and his life and work. Other options might become obvious as time passed. Although he promised himself that he would not stop and do any detailed reading during this pass through Joe’s work, more than once he found himself five or ten pages into
a completely absorbing essay or critique. At seven thirty that evening, he realized that he had read a quarter of the 90-page memorandum entitled “Portals in Literature and Life”, and that he had become transfixed.

  He closed the document, marked where he had got to in the total collection, and rose to feed Reggie and himself.

  Joe’s golden prose echoed in his mind, and he was stunned at the wealth of knowledge that glowed from the pages of Joe’s essays.

  After dinner, Sanford took a long walk, enjoying the sunset, listening to the emerging night birds, mulling over little phrases and sentences from Joe’s work that had burrowed nooks in his mind, trying to reconcile how he had fallen so short of recognizing the literary store that Joe had been amassing, and wondering why Joe, whom Sanford regarded as a lifelong companion, had kept all this under a bushel for so many years.

  Seven

  As often happened when in the country, Sanford awoke the next day before six o’clock, refreshed and in rhythm with the morning. The bedroom curtains glowed from the sunlight trying to force its way through and promised another brilliant day. But as Sanford lay in bed, preparing to rise, and reviewing his mental list of things to do that day, he was aware of whispering undercurrents. Ignoring these whispers, he rose, showered, shaved, dressed, made the bed, prepared and ate a full breakfast, and was seated at Joe’s desk before 7:30. He had to finish his first pass through the rest of Joe’s writing that day and then move on to the personal items that slept quietly in the third drawer of the grey filing cabinet.

  Because of the previous day’s exhilaration at reading Joe’s material, Sanford was eager to work through the remaining items. The morning turned out to be far from disappointing.

  He found poems, Joe’s poems, and they blew him away. He found fiction, short stories that were stunning in the sophistication of their plots and the elegance of their execution. He found the outline of a novel and more than a hundred pages of notes for it. Oddly, and seemingly out of place, he found a very thick file that contained more than four hundred recipes, almost all of them carefully annotated. All this he would need to go through in greater detail later.

  When he had finished, at just before 2 pm, what he had set out that morning to complete, he was convinced that two more volumes could be published, and that his own duty of reading and reflection, of coming to terms with a side of Joe that he barely knew, had hardly even anticipated, had just increased by an order of magnitude.

  Taking a break before embarking on the last segment of Joe’s files, Sanford went out once more to the sylvan glade. Brushing the fresh crop of pine needles from the table surface, Sanford ran his hand along the edge of the tabletop and one of the bench stones. Freshly quarried stone can have sharp edges, and he remembered Joe telling him about this, and about the work he undertook to round all these edges using an assortment of power tools. Feeling them now, he recalled how smooth they felt to his young fingers, as though they had been worn by centuries of water flow. The first day he and Joe sat down at their new retreat came back to him now in sharp clarity. Joe was proud, and excited, about their new meeting place.

  “We need an inaugural meeting”, Joe declared.

  “A what?”

  “Sorry. A first meeting. A kick-off meeting.”

  Sanford remembered recognizing that a ceremony of some sort was needed.

  “We need something special”, Sanford said.

  “Yes”, Joe responded. “What do you think it should be?”

  Sanford remembered thinking about this for a few minutes.

  “Do you remember when we welcomed the cows into their new stalls?”

  Joe’s eyes lit up. “Yes! And that’s an excellent idea.”

  Joe had built new stalls when his complement of cows had gone from two to four. The two old stalls were creaky, saturated in urine, and the wood was beginning to flake away in spots. Joe had basically reorganized the layout of half the ground floor of his small barn, had built new feed bins at one end, rewired the place for lighting, and in the half of the barn next to the big doors where the cows entered and left, he had built four new, large stalls where each of the cows had plenty of room, and milking them was less an exercise in trying to compete with an 800-pound animal for too little space. During this construction, the cows had been housed in temporary stalls outside under a lean-to. Their first time into the new stalls was preceded by Joe “blessing” each stall and splashing a little milk over the fresh wood.

  “What should we splash onto the new stones?” Sanford had asked.

  Joe pondered this for a moment.

  “It hasn’t rained since our retreat was built”, he said pensively, “which means that these stones have never seen rain, or any other water like that.”

  “But isn’t it wet in the ground?” Sanford countered.

  “Yes, but in the ground these stones had no real surfaces, they were just part of a very large block of stone until they were quarried. So, if we splashed water onto them, that would be our way of giving them something essential to life. What do you think, Jim?”

  Sanford recalled clearly having puzzled that out. Just water? Ordinary water? But Joe was right, as usual. If somebody was dying of thirst, then water would be very far from ordinary. It would be special, important, something to give thanks for.

  “Yes. Water is what it should be.”

  “Okay”, Joe pronounced decisively, bringing his hands down onto the table stone. “Why don’t you go and get your metal cup, the one you have your milk from every morning. I have my own special mug. We’ll fill them with water from the pump. That water comes from limestone deep underground, so water going from stone to stone has a nice sound to it. Then we can pour the water over the stones here. Do you agree?”

  “Yes”, Sanford had said, beginning to become excited about a secret ceremony. Then he hesitated. “But, when we blessed the stalls, they had the cows’ names on them. Shouldn’t these stones, this place, have its own name?”

  Joe had looked at him, then smiled suddenly.

  “You’re right, Jim! It should have its own name. What would you like to call it?”

  Sanford had thought for a few minutes, then said impatiently, “I can’t think of a good name. What do you think it should be?”

  Joe looked up, and then an odd half-smile crept across his face. He began talking about the pine trees, and both he and Sanford looked around at them. They stood there, tall, stately, a graceful stand of trees, sweeping in a long collective arc through almost ninety degrees, falling just short of enveloping the barn in a soft, gentle embrace. Joe’s voice dropped, so that Sanford had to strain to hear him, but even then he was unsure of the words. Joe said something about hills, and music, and warm nights, and he spoke several names, the reverence in his voice coming through clearly. Sanford listened to the trees, which were in turn, it seemed, listening to Joe, but then, breaking a relative lull, the trees around them uttered a peaceful but insistent whisper – a collaboration of winds and pines sounding like a drawn-out “Yyyeeeeesssssssssss”.

  “The trees liked that”, Sanford said suddenly.

  Joe blinked, looked confused.

  “What you just said. I don’t know what you meant, but the trees liked it.”

  Joe inclined his head, still somewhere else mentally.

  “‘The Recipe Cops’”, Sanford said. “I think that’s what you said. I don’t know what it means, but the trees liked it. And they’ve been here a long time.”

  Joe blinked again. “Indeed they have. And their opinion matters. So ‘The Recipe Cops’ it is.”

  It took only a few minutes for the two of them to retrieve their cups, their chalices, and to fill them. They stood across from each other at the great table stone.

  “This is something special, a special place”, Sanford said. “What would you say about it Joe?”

  Joe thought for a moment.

  “I think, Jim, that it was a time to gather stones together, and that’s what we’ve done. So, let�
��s anoint our special place, ‘The Recipe Cops’”, and they both poured their cups of water over the stone.

  Sitting now at the stone table, decades later, Sanford had the same ethereal feeling that he sensed back then. But now it was mellowed by years of Joe’s company, uncounted numbers of conversations he had had with Joe, when Joe had suggested, proposed, guided, advised, and in general led Sanford out of the darkness and into the light, partly by walking him repeatedly into the seclusion and the shelter of this sacred little spot.

  Reflecting back over Joe’s literary works that he had skimmed through during the past two days, considering with delight but also a kind of astonishment the new side of Joe thus revealed, Sanford eventually returned to the house and to Joe’s office after a break of almost three hours. There was one last set of Joe’s files to review, then the difficult review phase of his work would be finished, and he could revert to a more measured process of dealing with the individual items, over time, and in some final and definitive way. The thought rested uneasily, because this would mean that his last act as Joe’s friend would come to an end.

  Eight

  Sanford read over once again the instructions Joe had left for dealing with his files.

  Five general areas: Reggie, practical matters and Joe’s financial estate, the library, Joe’s writing, and the material Joe referred to as “Personal”.

  Priorities: Joe’s request to deal with “Personal” last. It was now time to deal with the personal stuff.

  The files Sanford needed were in the third drawer from the top of Joe’s filing cabinet. There were six files altogether, and rather than being labelled using names or text, five of them were numbered. The sixth had no markings of any sort, but was thinner than the others, and contained something solid. Sanford opened this unmarked file first.

  Inside, wrapped in multiple layers of thin white paper, was a piece of wood. It was a carefully cut rectangle of cedar, the edges rounded, and the rich wood scent rose into the room as soon as Sanford unwrapped it. The Recipe Cops was burnt into the wood. Sanford had never seen this artefact before, but by the feel and smell of the wood it had been made fairly recently. On the back of the piece of wood, a small card was taped and in Joe’s handwriting stated simply “For Jim”.