Bringing It to the Table (30 page)

 

 

T
O GET MY own hair cut, I had continued to go down to Hargrave. When I lived in Port William, this was easy enough to arrange. I would hear that somebody was going and would speak for a ride. From the house on the river, it was not so easy. Sometimes it would come to hitchhiking, which could take half a day. I happened to mention this to Danny.

He said, “Why, Jayber, you don’t need to go to Hargrave to get your hair cut. Lyda can cut it.”

It was evening. He had finished running his lines and was going home. “Come on,” he said.

So we went up to his truck and I rode home with him.

“Lyda,” he said, “Jayber here needs to get his hair cut.”

She said, “Well, he’ll have to eat his supper first. I can’t stop now.”

I said, “Oh, now, I hate to put you to the trouble.”

“One more mouth won’t make any difference here,” she said.

“Naw, Jayber,” Burley called from the porch swing, “it won’t be any trouble. Come on up. I’ll have supper on the table in a few minutes.”

Lyda took a swipe at his shoulder with the rag she had in her hand. “
You’ll
have it on the table!
That’ll
be a fair fine day in Hell!”

“That’s where they’ve got something cooking all the time,” Burley said. “Come on up, Jayber.”

By then all the children and dogs knew there was a stranger on the place, and they had come to look. They all crowded around me as if maybe I had my pockets full of candy.

“Get back! Get back!” Danny said. “Give a man room to walk!” He made a parting motion with his hands.

Children and dogs fell back to each side like the waters of the Red Sea, leaving a sort of aisle that Danny and I walked through to the washstand by the rain barrel at the corner of the porch. Danny picked up the wash pan, smote the surface of the water in the barrel with the bottom of the pan to drive the wigglers down, dipped the pan half full of water, set it down on the washstand, and stepped aside, gesturing welcome with his hand. “There’s soap and a towel if you’d like to wash up,” he said to me, and then to the children and dogs who had clustered around again, “Get back!”

The children and dogs fell back, never ceasing to watch me. I washed up, threw the water out, dipped the pan for Danny, and made my way amongst the children and dogs up onto the porch. “Sit down, Jayber,” Burley said, and I sat down.

When he had washed, Danny refilled the pan and stood there watching while the children washed, the bigger ones seeing to the littler ones, who wanted to splash more than wash. Danny said, “Keep your hands off of them dogs, now, till after supper.”

You might think that so many young children would make a considerable uproar at a meal, but when Lyda called us in to supper those children (from Will, who was fourteen, right down to Rosie, who was four) went in and sat down in their places and never made a peep. I thought at first that that probably was because I was there, but in fact it was pretty much according to rule. But this wasn’t spiritlessness: It was discipline. Out from under Lyda’s gaze, the children were noisy enough. When Reuben and the two girls were little, they talked all the time, all at the same time, in high chirps, like a tree full of sparrows.

When the meal was over, the children scraped and stacked the dishes, which Burley then washed and Will dried and put away.

There was a running joke between Burley and Lyda about Burley’s reluctance and incompetence at housework, but of course Burley had lived alone for a long time before Danny and Lyda came, and he could do all the household work, if not to Lyda’s taste at least well enough. When they came, since it was his house, he might have treated them as the beneficiaries of his hospitality, but instead he made himself their guest. They responded, as maybe they didn’t have to do, by being hospitable to him. He was, I think, a good guest, helping especially Lyda in every way he could. She caught his trick of dealing with this arrangement and their large affection for each other as an endlessly branching joke, in which they said the opposite of what they meant. If Burley complained that he was behind in his housework because she was always underfoot and in the way, he meant that she was anything but in the way and he was thankful to have her there. If Lyda said that it would have been a mercy if she had married one husband instead of two bachelors, that meant that she loved them both more than enough to put up with them. And so on.

While Burley and Will did the dishes and Danny and Royal and Coulter and Fount went out to feed the dogs and do a few last chores (the children having milked and fed before supper), Lyda gave me my
haircut. The sight of their mother cutting a stranger’s hair was so shocking that Rachel and Rosie whispered and giggled throughout the operation, and Reuben could bear to watch only from under the table.

 

 

E
VEN OLD, YOUR husband is the young man you remember now. Even dead, he is the man you remember, not as he was but as he is, alive still in your love. Death is a sort of lens, though I used to think of it as a wall or a shut door. It changes things and makes them clear. Maybe it is the truest way of knowing this dream, this brief and timeless life. Sometimes when I try to remember Nathan, I can’t see him exactly enough. Other times, when I haven’t thought of him, he comes to me unbidden, and I see him more clearly, I think, than ever I did. Am I awake then, or there, or here?

It is the fall of the year. We have had Thanksgiving. Caleb and Alice were here. And Margaret came, reconciled by now maybe to Virgie’s absence, but not one of us spoke of Virgie. I fixed a big dinner, enough to keep us all in leftovers for a while: a young gobbler that Coulter Branch shot and gave to me, dressing and gravy, mashed potatoes, green beans,
corn pudding, hot rolls, a cushaw pie. We sat down to it, the four of us, like stray pieces of several puzzles. Nathan would have asked the blessing, and I should have, I tried to, but that turned out to be a silence I could not speak in. I only sat with my head down, while the others waited for me to say something out loud. And then, to change the subject, I said, “Caleb, take a roll and pass ’em.”

(1989)

M
ANY TIMES, AFTER I have finished a lecture on the decline of American farming and rural life, someone in the audience has asked, “What can city people do?”

“Eat responsibly,” I have usually answered. Of course, I have tried to explain what I meant by that, but afterwards I have invariably felt that there was more to be said than I had been able to say. Now I would like to attempt a better explanation.

I begin with the proposition that eating is an agricultural act. Eating ends the annual drama of the food economy that begins with planting and birth. Most eaters, however, are no longer aware that this is true. They think of food as an agricultural product, perhaps, but they do not think of themselves as “consumers.” If they think beyond that, they recognize that they are passive consumers. They buy what they want—or what they have been persuaded to want—within the limits of what they can get. They pay, mostly without protest, what they are charged. And they mostly ignore certain critical questions about the quality and the cost of what they are sold: How fresh is it? How pure or clean is it, how free of dangerous chemicals? How far was it transported, and what did
transportation add to the cost? How much did manufacturing or packaging or advertising add to the cost? When the food product has been manufactured or “processed” or “precooked,” how has that affected its quality or price or nutritional value?

Most urban shoppers would tell you that food is produced on farms. But most of them do not know what farms, or what kinds of farms, or where the farms are, or what knowledge or skills are involved in farming. They apparently have little doubt that farms will continue to produce, but they do not know how or over what obstacles. For them, then, food is pretty much an abstract idea—something they do not know or imagine—until it appears on the grocery shelf or on the table.

The specialization of production induces specialization of consumption. Patrons of the entertainment industry, for example, entertain themselves less and less and have become more and more passively dependent on commercial suppliers. This is certainly true also of patrons of the food industry, who have tended more and more to be
mere
consumers—passive, uncritical, and dependent. Indeed, this sort of consumption may be said to be one of the chief goals of industrial production. The food industrialists have by now persuaded millions of consumers to prefer food that is already prepared. They will grow, deliver, and cook your food for you and (just like your mother) beg you to eat it. That they do not yet offer to insert it, prechewed, into your mouth is only because they have found no profitable way to do so. We may rest assured that they would be glad to find such a way. The ideal industrial food consumer would be strapped to a table with a tube running from the food factory directly into his or her stomach.

Perhaps I exaggerate, but not by much. The industrial eater is, in fact, one who does not know that eating is an agricultural act, who no longer knows or imagines the connections between eating and the land, and who is therefore necessarily passive and uncritical—in short, a victim. When food, in the minds of eaters, is no longer associated with farming
and with the land, then the eaters are suffering a kind of cultural amnesia that is misleading and dangerous. The current version of the “dream home” of the future involves “effortless” shopping from a list of available goods on a television monitor and heating precooked food by remote control. Of course, this implies and depends on a perfect ignorance of the history of the food that is consumed. It requires that the citizenry should give up their hereditary and sensible aversion to buying a pig in a poke. It wishes to make the selling of pigs in pokes an honorable and glamorous activity. The dreamer in this dream home will perforce know nothing about the kind or quality of this food, or where it came from, or how it was produced and prepared, or what ingredients, additives, and residues it contains—unless, that is, the dreamer undertakes a close and constant study of the food industry, in which case he or she might as well wake up and play an active and responsible part in the economy of food.

There is, then, a politics of food that, like any politics, involves our freedom. We still (sometimes) remember that we cannot be free if our minds and voices are controlled by someone else. But we have neglected to understand that we cannot be free if our food and its sources are controlled by someone else. The condition of the passive consumer of food is not a democratic condition. One reason to eat responsibly is to live free.

But if there is a food politics, there are also a food esthetics and a food ethics, neither of which is dissociated from politics. Like industrial sex, industrial eating has become a degraded, poor, and paltry thing. Our kitchens and other eating places more and more resemble filling stations, as our homes more and more resemble motels. “Life is not very interesting,” we seem to have decided. “Let its satisfactions be minimal, perfunctory, and fast.” We hurry through our meals to go to work and hurry through our work in order to “recreate” ourselves in the evenings and on weekends and vacations. And then we hurry, with the greatest possible speed and noise and violence, through our recreation—for what? To eat
the billionth hamburger at some fast-food joint hellbent on increasing the “quality” of our life? And all this is carried out in a remarkable obliviousness to the causes and effects, the possibilities and the purposes, of the life of the body in this world.