Hornswoggled - An Alafair Tucker Mystery

by Donis Casey

  It was black as night outside, now, and the kerosene lamps cast an eerie yellow glow around the room. The storm raged and the music grew louder, as they beat back the Devil.

  A blinding bolt of lightning split the darkness, striking a hackberry tree twenty yards from the house, rending it top to bottom. The thunderclap shook the house, followed by a crack as half the tree smashed to the ground. The front door flew open and crashed against the wall. The lamps guttered and blew out, leaving the house in darkness. Two or three girls shrieked, the baby howled, and some boys hollered. The music ceased abruptly, except for the pipe, which breathed out a nasal tone before it died.

  And then it was silent. The storm seemed to hold its breath for a moment, as did all the people in that room. Even the wind had stopped.

  Out of the silence came three raps at the window—loud, slow, and clear.

  Ruth screamed and threw herself into her father’s arms. Sophronia and Blanche buried their faces in Alafair’s lap, whimpering, and Charlie burrowed between her skirt and her chair like a rabbit going to ground. Nobody else breathed.

  Except for Peter McBride. He cast a long glance at Sally before he spoke. “Sha, now, young’uns!” he exclaimed. “It’s only your Grandpa Jim Tucker, wanting to know if we’re all right.” He stood up, clutching his bagpipe to his side. “Don’t fret yourself, Jim,” he called. “Your family is fine.”

  The rain began to fall again, softly and straight down. Alafair stood up and retrieved some matches from beside the stove, and with children trailing on her arms and legs, went around and relit the lamps. Everyone was breathing now, safe again, all together. All except Alice, Alafair thought. She suddenly felt a deep kinship with Jim Tucker, who had such love for his family that he reached out from the other side to know that they were safe. Then and there she made a plea to Shaw’s father, whom she had never known, to keep an eye on Alice.

  Alafair’s Recipes

  FISH

  Oklahoma creeks and farm ponds are home to catfish, perch, and crappy (a type of perch, pronounced “croppy,” and not “crappy” at all). All of these varieties of fish have tender white flesh and are very bony, requiring the utmost care to eat.

  CLEANING FISH

  Wash and scrape the scales. Cut off the head, slice down the belly from stem to stern, and pull out the innards. Butterfly the fish and peel out the backbone and as many of the larger bones as possible. Rinse the fish again. Fish guts make very good fertilizer for the garden. You can keep the cats and dogs out of the garden better if the viscera are well composted before using.

  FRYING FISH

  Large fish may be cut into fillets, small fish may be halved or fried whole. Dip the cleaned fish in cornmeal—or in egg, then flour—or nothing at all if you are a purist. Put enough drippings or lard in the bottom of an iron skillet to float the fish. Heat the fat, but don’t let it smoke. Fry the fish slowly, flesh side down, turning when lightly browned.

  You can reuse fat in which fish has been fried, but it will be fishy-tasting, so don’t combine it with other meat-drippings.

  MASHED POTATOES

  The queen of vegetables, the ultimate comfort food, infinite use for the leftovers.

  Boil peeled and quartered potatoes in salted water to cover until very soft. Drain off most of the water and mash the potatoes with a potato masher. Save the potato water to use for soup, or drink it with a little salt, like tea. It’s very nutritious.

  Add hot milk (How much? It depends on how tender you like your potatoes. Add about a quarter cup at a time, mash awhile, and see how it looks) and butter, and beat until fluffy.

  Place into a serving dish, make a small well in the top of the mound of potatoes, and place therein a dollop of butter to melt.

  POTATO PATTIES

  There are as many ways to make potato patties as there are potatoes in the world. This is Alafair’s usual workaday recipe.

  2 cups leftover mashed potatoes

  1 cup bread crumbs

  Flour for dredging

  In a bowl, thoroughly mix crumbs and potatoes with your hands. Form the patties with hands to desired size (3" in diameter, 1/2" thick, is a handy size and holds together well). Dredge the patty in flour and fry in about 1/2" of hot fat. When one side is crispy brown, flip and fry the other side. Drain on a towel-covered plate. Variation: mix 1/4 cup of finely chopped onion in with the potatoes and bread crumbs before dredging.

  POTATO PATTY SANDWICHES

  Slather mustard on a piece of bread. Arrange several rings of sliced red onion on the bread, then one or two cold potato patties. Top with another slice of mustardy bread. Squash the top piece of bread down with hand until ingredients cohere. Especially good on whole wheat or rye bread.

  NOODLES

  1 beaten egg 2 tbs. milk

  1/2 tsp. salt 1 cup flour

  Combine egg, salt, milk; add enough flour to make a stiff dough. Roll a rectangle of dough very thin on a floured surface and let it sit for about 20 minutes. Slice noodles to desired length with a sharp knife, separate them and let them dry for a couple of hours. Drop into boiling soup or broth or boiling salted water and cook 10-15 minutes.

  For the over-arm method of stretching your noodles, place a clean dishtowel over your forearm. Slice your noodles about an inch wide, 1/2 inch thick, and a foot or so long. Peel the noodles up and arrange along your forearm rather like tinsel hanging over the bough of a Christmas tree. Go about your business (carefully) for a few minutes until gravity has stretched the noodles to twice their original length. When you remove them from your arm, you may either cut them into shorter segments or use them like linguini. One can also stretch one’s noodles by hanging them over a rack, but that isn’t nearly as interesting.

  BUTTER

  Strain the milk that comes right out of the cow through a cheesecloth into a clean milk can. Let the milk stand in a cool place until the cream separates and rises to the top. Skim off the cream into a separate container. The milk that is left in the can is what would nowadays be called “skim milk.” Alafair would have called it “bluejohn”.

  Pour a mixture of three parts cream to one part whole milk into a butter churn which has been scalded with boiling water and then rinsed with cool water. Churn fast at first, then more slowly as the butter forms. How long this takes varies with the weather. When the butter has formed, spoon out the bits with a perforated ladle and plunge into cold water. The butter will float off the ladle. Collect the butter from the water and place it on a work surface. Sprinkle with a little salt (1 tbs. to 1 lb. of butter). Press and knead with wooden spoons or shapers to drain off extra liquid and work in the salt. Form the butter into a loaf and place in a cool location to harden. Butter can be pressed into molds to make fancy or festive shapes.

  SUGAR TIT

  (ADA Very Much Disapproved)

  Place about 1 tbs. of sugar in a mound toward one corner of a clean cotton dish towel. Fold the corner of the towel up over the sugar and tie the corner into a large knot with the sugar inside. Leave the rest of the towel loose. You should now have something that looks like a comet with a small head and a very long tail. Give the knotted towel to the baby to suck. The sugar will liquefy in the baby’s saliva and give the knot a sweet taste. Chewing the hard knot will massage and soothe sore gums, and the bulk of the dishcloth will keep the child from swallowing the knot. How it is that a child who sucked sugar tits during infancy ever avoided decay long enough to sprout any teeth at all is a question for the ages.

  OATMEAL

  Soak one cup of oats in a quart of water overnight. Boil for about 30 minutes in the morning. Without soaking, oats would require a couple of hours of steady cooking to make it digestible. Alafair would not have had access to instant oatmeal.

  Serve with cream and sugar and a dollop of butter, or in the Highland way, add a pinch of salt and eat while standing by the fire. Why this must be eaten standing up is unknown. Perhaps if one’s digestive tract were not perfectly straight, oatmeal in this semisolid, g
elatinous state might be in danger of getting caught on something before it reached the stomach.

  WILTED LETTUCE

  1 bunch of leaf lettuce 4 slices of bacon

  6 thinly sliced radishes 2 chopped green onions

  Shred lettuce into a warmed serving bowl. Toss with radishes and onions, season with salt and pepper to taste.

  Fry the bacon until crisp and crumble over salad. Pour the hot bacon grease over the lettuce. Toss to coat. Serve right away.

  PHOEBE’S FAVORITE CHESS PIE

  The chess pie that one finds in restaurants these days, if one finds it at all, often resembles a lemon custard. Alafair’s chess pie was plain, gritty, straightforward, and inexplicably delicious.

  1 cup sugar 1/2 cup sweet milk

  3 heaping tbs. cornmeal 1 tsp. vanilla

  1 egg pinch of salt

  1/2 cup of butter

  Mix sugar and meal. Add beaten egg and butter and mix well. Add milk and vanilla. Pour into uncooked pie shell. Bake slowly at 300 degrees until firm.

  TEA SYRUP

  Like your iced tea sweet? This will do it for you. The idea behind tea syrup, which is an ultra-sweet tea concentrate, is that one can make iced tea without having to steep the leaves in boiling water and then cool it down every time she wants a glass, or even a pitcher. Here are a couple of recipes:

  6 cups of water

  1 cup of tea leaves

  4 cups of sugar

  Bring the water to a rolling boil, then add the tea leaves. Remove from heat and let it set for 15 minutes. Pour the hot tea through a strainer into the sugar and stir until the sugar is dissolved. Store the syrup in a bottle or other handy glass container. Use one cup of the syrup to about one quart of cold water to make a pitcher of tea. This will keep in the ice box for up to two weeks.

  Simply must use tea bags? Here is a recipe using tea bags that will yield a smaller amount of syrup.

  3 cups of water

  10 tea bags

  3 cups of sugar

  Boil all ingredients together in a large pot for 10 minutes. Cool down and pour into a bottle. Keep refrigerated. Mix four or five parts water to one part syrup, depending on how strong you like it.

  Place Names

  Boynton (BOYN-ton) —located in eastern Oklahoma, in Muskogee County, 60 miles southeast of Tulsa. Named for E.W. Boynton, chief engineer on the Shawnee, Oklahoma, and Missouri Coal and Railway line, which ran through the town.

  Checotah (shuh-KO-tuh) —named for Samuel Checote, Chief of the Creek Nation, this town is located in McIntosh County, about fifteen miles south of Muskogee.

  Council Hill —A former Creek meeting place, now a town situated some ten miles south of Boynton, in Muskogee County.

  Lone Elm (lone ELL-um) —a tiny spot in the hills near Mulberry, which is just east of Fort Smith, in extreme northwestern Arkansas. The name of the town comes from a freestanding elm tree. The locals, however, who included Alafair’s birth family, the Gunns, would never have called the tree an “elm.” The Ozark pronunciation is “ELL-um.” Just like it is in parts of Ireland. Lone Elm was a major stage coach station on the Old Wire Road, which ran from Memphis to Santa Fe. Contingents of the Cherokee Nation passed through Lone Elm on the Trail of Tears in 1838 and 1839, and often stopped to refill their water tanks on the Little Mulberry Creek.

  Muskogee (mus-KO-ghee) —located about 15 miles northeast of Boynton. County seat of Muskogee County and location of the Federal courthouse. Named for the Muscogee (Creek) Indian Nation.

  Okmulgee (ok-MUL-ghee) —located about 15 miles west of Boynton. County seat of Okmulgee County, and capital of the Creek Nation.

  Tahlequah (TAL-eh-kwah) —located some 50 miles northeast of Boynton. County seat of Cherokee County and capital of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.

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