Bringing It to the Table (27 page)

Miss Ora came, still alert to see that I called her “Auntie,” with Aunt Lizzie and Uncle Homer Lord, who had come down to Hargrave the day before from Indianapolis. The Lords weren’t kin to the Feltners at all, except that Aunt Lizzie and Mrs. Feltner had been best friends when they were girls—which, Aunt Lizzie said, was as close kin as you could get.

And then Virgil and I and the boys with their pistols drove out the Bird’s Branch road to Uncle Jack Beechum’s place—where he had been “batching it,” as he said, since the death of his wife—and brought him to our house. He was the much younger brother of Mr. Feltner’s mother, Nancy Beechum Feltner. Mr. Feltner’s father, Ben, had been a father and a friend to Uncle Jack, who now was in a way the head of the family, though he never claimed such authority. Everybody looked up to him and loved him and, as sometimes was necessary, put up with him.

Uncle Jack didn’t try to have dignity, he just had it. A man of great strength in his day, he walked now with a cane, bent a little at the hips but still straight-backed. He was a big man, work-brittle, and there was no foolishness about him.

You would have thought Henry would not have dared to do it, but as we were going from the car to the house he ran in front of Uncle Jack and shot at him with his pistols. I didn’t think Uncle Jack would see anything funny in that, but he did. He gave a great snort of delight. He said, “
That
boy’ll put the cat in the churn.”

And so we all were there.

To get the children calmed down before dinner and so the little girls could have a nap afterwards, we opened the presents right away. The old parlor was crowded with the tree and the people and the presents and the pretty wrapping papers flying about. Nettie Banion and Joe and Aunt Fanny sat in the doorway, waiting to receive the presents everybody had brought for them. The boys sat beside Virgil, who was making a big to-do over their presents, in which he was still claiming half-interest. The boys were a little unsure about this, but they loved his carrying on, and they sat as close to him as they could get.

There were sixteen of us around the long table in the dining room. The table was so beautiful when we came in that it seemed almost a shame not to just stand and look at it. Mrs. Feltner had put on her best tablecloth and her good dishes and silverware that she never used except for company. And on the table at last, after our long preparations, were our ham, our turkey and dressing, and our scalloped oysters under their brown crust. There was a cut glass bowl of cranberry sauce. There were mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans and butter beans, corn pudding, and hot rolls. On the sideboard were our lovely cakes on cake stands and a big pitcher of custard that would be served with whipped cream.

It looked too good to touch, let alone eat, and yet of course we ate. Grandmam sat at Mr. Feltner’s right hand at his end of the table, and Uncle Jack sat at Mrs. Feltner’s right hand at her end. Virgil and I sat opposite Bess and Wheeler at the center. And the children in their chairs and high chairs were portioned out among the grownups, no two together.

Every meal at the Feltners was good, for Mrs. Feltner and Nettie Banion both were fine cooks, but this one was extra good, and there were many compliments. Of all the compliments Uncle Jack’s were the best, though he only increased the compliments of other people. He ate with great hunger and relish, and it was a joy to watch him. When somebody
would say, “That is a wonderful ham” or “This dressing is perfect,” Uncle Jack would solemnly shake his head and say, “Ay Lord, it is that!” And his words fell upon the table like a blessing.

Beyond that, he said little, and Grandmam too had little to say, but whatever they said was gracious. To have the two of them there, at opposite corners of the table, with their long endurance in their faces, and their present affection and pleasure, was a blessing of another kind.

Now Andy Catlett is speaking as an aging man looking back to the Christmastime of 1943 when he first traveled away from his parents alone. He went by bus ten miles to visit, first, his grandma and grandpa Catlett who lived on the Bird’s Branch road near Port William, and then his granny and granddaddy Feltner who lived on one of the outer edges of Port William itself.This passage and the two that follow are from
Andy Catlett: Early Travels.
Here he has just arrived and is visiting with Grandma Catlett in her kitchen.

 

 

R
URAL ELECTRIFICATION WAS on its way, I suppose, for it would soon arrive, but it had not arrived yet. On the back porch there was a large icebox that, when ice was available, preserved leftovers and cooled the milk in the summer. That and the battery-powered radio and the telephone were the only modern devices in the house. Its old economy of the farm household was still intact. The supply lines ran to the kitchen from the henhouse and garden, cellar and smokehouse, cropland and pasture. On the kitchen table were two quart jars of green beans, a quart jar of applesauce, and a pint jar of what I knew to be the wild black raspberries that abounded in the thickets and woods edges of that time. I thought, “Pie!”

“Are you going to make a pie?” I asked.

“Hmh!” she said. “Maybe. Would you like to have a pie?”

And I said, with my best manners, “Yes, mam.”

She was soon done with the potatoes. She shut the draft on the stove, taming the fire, changed the water on the potatoes, clapped a lid onto the pot, and set it on the stove to boil. She got out another pot, emptied the beans into it, added salt, some pepper, and a fine piece of fat pork. She was talking at large, commenting on her work, telling what she had learned from relatives’ letters and Christmas cards and from listening in on the party line. I was up and following her around by then, to make sure I got the benefit of everything.

She washed her hands at the washstand by the back door and dried them. I followed her into the cool pantry and watched as she measured out flour and lard and the other ingredients and began making the dough for a pie crust. She rolled out the dough to the right thickness, pressed it into a pie pan, and, holding the pan on the fingertips of her left hand, passed a knife around its edge to carve off the surplus dough.

As she went about her preparations for dinner, she was commenting to herself, with grunts of determination or approval, on her progress. I knew even then that it was a wonder to see her at her work, and I know it more completely now. Her kitchen would be counted a poor thing by modern standards. There was of course no electrical equipment at all. The cooking utensils, excepting the invincible iron skillet and griddle, were chipped or dented or patched. The kitchen knives were worn lean with sharpening. Everything was signed with the wear of a lifetime or more. She was a fine cook. She did not do much in the way of exact measurement. She seasoned to taste. She mixed by experience and to the right consistency. The dough for a pie crust or biscuits, for instance, had to be neither too flabby nor too stiff; it was right when it felt right. She did not own a cookbook or a written recipe.

Meanwhile, she had prepared the raspberries, adding flour and sugar to the juice and heating it in a saucepan. Now she poured berries and juice into the dough-lined pan. She balled up the surplus dough, worked it briskly with her hands on the broken marble dresser top that she used for such work, sprinkled flour over it, rolled it flat, and then she sliced it rapidly into strips, which she laid in a beautiful lattice over the filling. As a final touch she sprinkled over the top a thin layer of sugar that in the heat of the oven would turn crisp and brown. And then she slid the pie into the oven.

She was being extravagant with the sugar for my sake, as I was more or less aware, and as I took for granted. But knowledge grows with age, and gratitude grows with knowledge. Now I am as grateful to her as I should have been then, and I am troubled with love for her, knowing how she was wrung all her life between her cherished resentments and her fierce affections. A peculiar sorrow hovered about her, and not only for the inevitable losses and griefs of her years; it came also from her settled conviction of the tendency of things to be unsatisfactory, to fail to live up to expectation, to fall short. She was haunted, I think, by the suspicion of a comedown always lurking behind the best appearances. I wonder now if she had ever read
Paradise Lost
. That poem, with its cosmos of Heaven and Hell and Paradise and the Fallen World, was a presence felt by most of her generation, if only by way of preachers who had read it. Whether or not she had read it for herself, the lostness of Paradise was the prime fact of her world, and she felt it keenly.

Once the pie was out of the way, she went ahead and made biscuit dough, flattened it with her rolling pin, cut out the biscuits, and laid them into the pans ready for the oven when the time would come.

She had cooked breakfast, strained the morning milk, made the beds, set the house to rights, washed the breakfast dishes, and cleaned up the kitchen before I got there. Now she let me help her, and we carried the
crocks of morning milk from the back porch down into the cellar, and brought the crocks of last night’s milk up from the cellar to the kitchen for skimming.

 

 

I WENT AROUND the house and in at the kitchen door, pried off my overshoes, handed the paper to Grandma, took off my wraps, and washed my hands.

“Try combing that hair of yours,” Grandma said. “Nobody ever saw the like. It’s a regular straw stack.”

Knowing it would do no good, I took the comb from the shelf where the water bucket sat and passed it several times through my hair.

Grandma watched me, and then she laughed. “You
are
the limit!” Her laugh was affectionate and indulgent, and yet it was a laugh with a history, conveying her perfected assurance that some things were hopeless. “Well, give up,” she finally said. “Come and eat.”

She had made a splendid dinner, a feast, little affected by wartime stringencies, which, except for the rationing of coffee and sugar, were little felt in such households. It hadn’t been long since hog-killing, and so there was not only a platter of fresh sausage but also a bowl of souse soaking in vinegar. There was a bowl of sausage gravy, another of mashed potatoes, another of green beans, another of apple sauce. There was a pan of hot biscuits, to be buttered or gravied, and another in the oven. There was a handsome cake of freshly churned butter, the top marked in squares neatly carved with the edge of the butter paddle. There was a pitcher of buttermilk and one of sweet milk. And finally there was the pie, still warm, the top crust crisp and sugary and brown.

Oh, I ate as one eats who has not eaten for days, as if my legs were hollow, as if I were bigger inside than outside, and Grandma urged me on as if I were her champion in a tournament of eating.