The Madhatter's Guide To Chocolate

by Rhett DeVane

  A few feet into the woods, I paused to breathe deeply of the leaf mold and pine- scented air and caught a stealthy movement to my left side. A petite white-tailed doe, frozen in place, watched me briefly before flipping her tail at a ninety-degree angle and bounding out of sight. Unlike a number of locals, I didn’t lust for a shotgun as I watched her graceful exit. Mr. D had felt the same. Bright orange POSTED! NO HUNTING signs hung at even intervals along the fence line surrounding the 150 acres. As a child, I often imagined the deer, dove, and turkeys scurrying like the dickens to the safety of our property line.

  The catfish pond nestled in a depression at the base of two forested hills, fed by three natural springs that were seldom dry except in severe drought. Although it covered a little over an acre, the pond was deep and cool. I navigated the steep steps leading to an earthen dam. A tin-covered shed and two rusted lawn chairs complete with fishing-pole holders furnished the wide grassy embankment.

  I walked over to a rusted twenty-gallon drum and smacked the side several times with a piece of heavy lead pipe. “Dinner!” I yelled, laughing at the absurd notion that the fish were actually hovering near the water’s edge listening. It had to be done this way. It was a Davis ritual. After removing the weighted cover, I scooped a large coffee can full of commercial floating catfish food, reared back like a pro baseball pitcher (Jeez, Hattie. You throw like a girl!), and sent the food spraying skyward so that it landed in an arc across the surface of the smooth green water.

  I settled onto the sun-warmed grass and watched the greedy catfish wallow and flip, sometimes hemming several pieces into their whiskered mouths before slapping the surface and whipping underwater. The frenzy lasted for several minutes until every piece of food had been eaten, then peace returned to the water.

  After my father died, the upkeep of the pond fell to John and Margie. My mother could no longer negotiate the steep steps and had little desire to visit one of my dad’s favorite spots. I’m sure it made her too sad. At night, the sound of the peepers and bullfrogs started in slow, steadily rising to a fever pitch; a sound my father loved so much he installed a remote microphone with a receiving speaker next to their bed. Mom didn’t appreciate the call of the wild and wore earplugs on the occasions he insisted on falling asleep listening to nature’s music.

  The faint glimmer of early morning sun on the surface of the water calmed my turmoil. Reflections of my family appeared in my mind’s eye like a demented slide show. Fishing with my father and brother. Trying to bait a hook with a wiggling earthworm. Learning to remove a catfish without being finned. Blazing orange sunsets over the pond. My five-year-old cousin Byron falling into the water battling a large fish he was determined to land. My dad’s easy laughter. My mom shaking her head at us tracking pond mud onto her clean linoleum floor.

  A grief bubble popped to the surface of my mind like a dayglow cork. Loneliness settled into my belly with the weight of a cold stone. An orphan at forty. No parents. One older brother who disliked me for no apparent reason. My two biggest fans were gone, along with their unconditional love. All of my independence sucked right out of me, and I began to sob with heaving gulps of air fueling the next round. My stomach reeled.

  A poster from my adolescent bedroom came to mind: a raccoon with two claws on the rail of a floating dingy and the other two clinging precariously to the edge of a dock. It could go either way. As easily as the tears had come, the hysterical laughter ensued. Any minute now, the little guys in the white suits would come to lock me into my own padded room at the hospital uptown with no sharp utensils.

  Excerpt from Max the Madhatter’s notebook, February 12, 1959

  Piddie Longman made me a cathead biscuit – big around as my double fist! She brought a plate full of them to Mr. Dan’s shop. Fresh butter and tupelo honey to go on top. Next to her chocolate cake, it was the best thing I have ever tasted.

  Chapter Three

  BREAKFAST AT EVELYN’S

  Early the next morning, I rapped hard on Joe and Evelyn’s unlocked side door before entering. The knock was merely an announcement so I wouldn’t startle them. As with most folks in Chattahoochee, they had started securing doors primarily at night a few years back following a series of robberies that scared the locals into admitting bad things could happen, even here.

  “Come on back!” Evelyn’s voice echoed from deep within the house. “We’re out here in the kitchen!”

  Aunt Piddie rounded the corner, flinging her walker ahead for balance.

  “Morning, Aunt Pid.” I reached out to steady her. “You’re moving awfully fast for first thing.”

  “Whew!” She blew, holding a liver-spotted hand to her chest. “It’s a damn shame, gettin’ old.” Piddie lowered her voice. “I had to beat you in there. She’s makin’ pancakes. Don’t you dare touch them. You’ll have the stomach scours for a week. I got up early and made you some catheads.”

  “You didn’t have to do that!”

  Piddie’s nostrils flared, and she pursed her lips. “Yeah, I did. I love you enough to spare you Evelyn’s cookin’. Joe’s built up a tolerance to it over the years. It’s liable to set you back.”

  “You eat it!”

  “Better than a laxative. Her cookin’ keeps me regular.”

  We laughed like a couple of kids up to no good.

  “What y’all doin’ out there?” Evelyn called. “The pancakes are almost ready.”

  For someone whose cooking was cursed for fifty miles, Evelyn had an impressive kitchen. Copper-bottomed pans were suspended from a wrought iron grate. Every conceivable gadget and appliance stood ready on the long granite countertops. It was a galley to make Martha Stewart do a remote show: luxury kitchens of the rural South, today on Martha Stewart Weekend. The only thing that impaired the culinary perfection of Evelyn’s kitchen was the wild abundance of sea life pictures, figurines, and shells.

  Wow. Not just the dolphins, but the entire coast seems to be represented.

  “Did you raid Sea World, Ev?” I asked.

  Piddie snorted. “Ain’t hard to pick up on this year’s theme, is it?”

  Evelyn sniffed and flipped a pancake that had turned pitch-black on one side. Her starched red gingham apron quivered. Joe glanced at the griddle and swallowed hard.

  “I took the opportunity to redecorate the kitchen last year when Joe decided to install central heat and air. Mama’d keep the space heaters in the bathrooms going so hot that you could barely do your business without nearly singeing the hair off your legs. Anyway, we floated a note at Gadsden State Bank for the improvements. Of course, it’s the SunTrust Bank now, on account of them bein’ bought out, and all.”

  “I can’t help I have low blood,” Piddie retorted. “Evelyn would rather freeze her poor old mama out before she’d let loose a red cent to keep the house a degree or two warmer. I’ll bet she has a dime of the first dollar she earned.”

  I grabbed a seashell-embellished mug. The coffee smelled strong. Lucky for me, I liked it that way.

  “Sooo…” Piddie said. “Tell us about that good-lookin’ feller. Is he your beau? Your mama mentioned you were sweet on some rich business man.”

  “Garrett? Oh, he’s just someone I’ve been seeing off and on for a while.”

  “Lord!” Piddie fanned herself with a manatee print napkin. “What a prime specimen of a male. When I saw him standin’ there at your mama’s funeral, he near’bout took my breath away. Even at my age!”

  Evelyn piled a charred pancake on the growing pile and slipped the plate in front of Joe. He sighed, drowned the stack with butter light syrup, sawed a hunk, and began to eat.

  Evelyn gestured with a greasy spatula. “He is a nice-looking young man, Hattie.”

  “Yeah, well. You know what they say. Looks aren’t everything.” I picked up one of Piddie’s cathead biscuits, still warm from the oven. For something made with lard, it was almost weightless.

  Piddie’s cornflower blue eyes sparkled. “He looks like one of those hunky men on the c
over of a romance novel. Face all golden and carved. Sun-bleached blonde hair a’blowin’ in the wind. Leanin’ over some woman with a cleavage you could drive a truck through.”

  Evelyn shook her head. “That’s stretching it just a bit, Mama.”

  “Looks like he’s one of those smooth men. Is he, Hattie?”

  “I’m not sure I know what you mean, Pid.” I bit into a buttered biscuit and almost moaned aloud.

  She leaned in conspiratorially, her voice barely above a whisper. “Not all ape-hairy like my Carlton was. I can recall as clear as it was yesterday, the first time I saw him without a shirt on…almost dropped the pear pie I was totin’. Hairiest man that ever lived. I had to trim around his neck so his T-shirts wouldn’t bind.”

  “Mama, I don’t think this conversation is really appropriate for the breakfast table.” She settled into a seat with a slice of buttered toast.

  “And balls like a Chia pet!” Piddie stabbed the air with a bony finger.

  “Mama!”

  “Good Lord, Piddie,” Joe joined in.

  “Never in my life would I have ever dreamed I’d have such a prude for a daughter. Me! Liddyanne Davis Longman. Evelyn, do you go to church to repent after you and Joe have sex?”

  Joe smiled and ducked his balding head closer to the pancake pile.

  “I’m going to choose not to react to that.” Evelyn left the table to get a cup of coffee.

  “You’ve been givin’ her those thur-apee books of yours again. Haven’t you, Joe? She sounds more and more every day like the junk you tell your patients up there in the Hooch.”

  Joe fell into the trained therapist role, his voice even and calm. “Now, Mama Piddie. Evelyn tries really hard to hold her temper. And, I’d prefer if you would refer to the institution where I am employed by its proper title—Florida State Hospital.” Joe sipped the last of his coffee.

  Piddie flung her hand in the air. “It’ll always be the Hooch to me.”

  “Well,” Joe said as he cleared his dirty dishes to the sink, “I think I’ll leave it with you ladies. I’ve got to run up to the post office.” He leaned over and pecked Evelyn on the cheek. “Good breakfast, hon.”

  I bit into a second biscuit. The phrase melt in your mouth had to have come from someone’s first taste of a cathead made with lard.

  “Good, aren’t they?” Piddie glowed. “I didn’t scrimp on ’em either, even though I had to borrow some lard from Mrs. Ginny Pridgett two doors down.”

  Evelyn’s hazel eyes widened. “You brought lard into my house?!”

  Piddie threw her arms into the air, and the waddles on the undersides flapped like wet sheets in the breeze. “Watch out! Here come the fat police! Yes, I brought lard into the house. Had to, to cook a decent batch of catheads. If not, they would’ve tasted like hockey pucks—like those dang canned things you beat on the side of the counter to open.”

  The two women glared at each other.

  I tried to break the tension. “You’re lucky to have a guy like Joe who’ll at least put his dishes into the sink. I’m so tired of men who expect someone to constantly pick up after them.”

  Evelyn cast one last smoldering glance toward her mother, then smiled in my direction. “I got him young and trained him right.”

  “Speaking of men…Bobby said something to me yesterday that I’d really like to know more about. He said everyone in this town thinks I’m gay.”

  Evelyn shifted uneasily in her seat and cleared her throat. “Well, there were rumors.”

  “You were partly responsible,” Piddie said. She chuckled at my confounded expression. “Close your mouth, Hattie. You’ll let flies in.”

  “I live over forty miles away! And, I’m not even here that much! How could I be responsible?”

  “It had everything to do with that busy body Elvina Houston. You remember the first time you came to your mama’s driving your new pick-up?”

  I nodded dumbly.

  “Well, Elvina was there. They’d had a Ladies Circle meetin’ at the house, and, as always, Elvina was the last to leave. She can never bear the thought of missing anything. Either that, or she’s afraid everyone will talk about her if she goes home early. You came spinnin’ up in that shiny red pick-up truck wearin’ jeans and boots.”

  I chuckled. “Yeah, I remember. My mom nearly pitched a fit and fell in it. ‘’Cause’, she said, ‘ladies don’t drive trucks.’ ”

  “Now. Elvina took that football and ran for a touchdown. By the time she made the rounds, folks believed that truck was one hundred percent proof positive why you hadn’t married and popped out a load of younguns … because you swing the other way!”

  “Jeez-o-pete! I got the truck because it was easier to carry a massage table. That, plus I wasn’t going to pay all the money for a new SUV.” I sat straight up. “I suppose Mom had to listen to the rumors, too?”

  “Afraid so.” Evelyn nodded. “She had her hair done once a week uptown, and…most everything that passes for truth comes out of Mandy’s Cut ’n’ Curl. You could learn anything about anybody in there. Your name came up a few times.”

  “I don’t have much control over what people say.” I shook my head in disbelief, then smiled with the memory of my mother entering the house with her hair freshly coifed. “Dad used to kid her that she was going up to ‘challenge the beauty parlor’.”

  “It used to make your mama madder than a wet hen when she’d come home with her hair all fluffed up and sprayed stiff, and your daddy would say ‘I see they couldn’t fit you in today, Tillie,’” Piddie added.

  Evelyn nodded. “Your daddy was a piece of work, for sure.”

  Piddie held up her pudgy hand. “Your mama wasn’t one to gossip, now. She was…what does Joe call it, Evelyn?”

  “A facilitator.”

  “Yeah, that’s it. She’d just sit and nod. Every now and then, she’d own as how ‘she didn’t know that’ or ‘is that so?’. Whoever was in the shop could launch off for hours with just that little bit of proddin’.”

  “Mama never said anything about hearing any rumors about me.”

  “She mentioned somethin’ to me once awhile back,” Piddie said. “She said she’d raised a decent young woman with a good heart and she didn’t much care what floated your boat as long as you were happy.”

  Tears popped into the corners of my eyes.

  Piddie offered me a napkin “Here, honey. I didn’t mean to make you start up.”

  I dabbed the corners of my eyes. “You didn’t, Pid. I guess it’ll be like when Dad died. I’ll just have to leak every now and then.”

  Piddie patted my hand. “You just go right on, whenever you feel burdened. Better outside than in.”

  Evelyn leaned close. Her floral cologne threatened my sinuses. “You never did tell us about Garrett. You serious about him?”

  “I was. It’s difficult to be with him.”

  Evelyn lowered her voice. “He’s not married, is he?”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes.”

  My cousin and aunt gasped in unison. The midday soap opera couldn’t be as good as the real-life drama of their miscreant relative.

  I grinned impishly. “Married to his job. Married to his computer. Married to his car.”

  “Too bad.” Piddie sniffed. “I’ll bet you made a fine-lookin’ couple.”

  “Yeah, for about the first six months or so. We traveled together. It was fantastic. He was warm and caring. Then, he just changed. Maybe he was being himself, and I was a brief vacation. There were other things, too. He totally flipped when I broached the subject of adopting a baby. He already has a grown daughter and was dead set against raising another child. I don’t know…” I sighed heavily. “I begged for his attention for so long. One day, my flame for him just died.”

  Piddie jumped like she had been stuck by a cattle prod. “Eww! Flame! I almost forgot. Remember your old high school flame, Jake Witherspoon? He’s moved back into town and bought out the Twin City Florist uptown.”


  “Jake Witherspoon, a florist?”

  Piddie nodded. “How can I put this to you easy, Hattie. He was once your flame, now he is a flame.”

  “Jake Witherspoon is gay?!”

  “As a three dollar bill. As the birds in May. As—”

  “I think she gets the idea, Mama.”

  I rolled my eyes and shrugged. “It’s not that I care if he’s homosexual. Actually, it makes a little more sense to me now, thinking back. He was the only boy in town who never tried to coax me into the back seat of his parents’ car.”

  Piddie smiled. Her age-yellowed teeth showed in an uneven line. “You two were an item for a while, weren’t you?”

  “He was more like my best buddy. I haven’t seen him in years. His mama died last year when Garrett and I were in the Tetons. I remember sending a sympathy card to his mom’s address when I got home and found out.”

  One of the silk flowers adorning my aunt’s towering mound of curls fell to the floor. She retrieved the fake bloom and pressed it back into service. “You should stop in and see him. He did most of the flowers for your mama’s funeral. It’s unbelievable what he has done with that old shop. He’s also helped redecorate half the houses in town. Not Evelyn’s, obviously.”

  Evelyn smirked at her mother. “Don’t start up with me.”

  I rose and deposited the coffee cup in the sink. “I have to meet Bobby at the attorney’s office at 10. Maybe I’ll stop by his shop and see if he can have lunch.”

  Excerpt from Max the Madhatter’s notebook, May 2, 1959

  Inspiration comes from different places. I see it in the petals of the magnolia blooms beside the Ward A building. And, in the azaleas flowering in clumps outside the dental infirmary. The smallest thing, noticed, can lead to the greatest revelations.