The Best Cook in the World Page 5

  • • •

  1924

  The boy had always been thin, but now his bones threatened to cut right through his clothes. He had been just a child when the old man left them, steps ahead of the law. Now he sat astride a gray mule that was better fed than he was, as it picked its way up and down a narrow trail through the Georgia mountains, up toward the Tennessee line. He had left the tiny towns and family enclaves of the Piedmont far behind, riding through small fields of cotton and corn and along zigzag lines of split-rail fence, till the forest closed in around him altogether. He rode for hours with no sign of humankind except a rare, thin tendril of smoke rising through the trees. He always sang out as he rode near one of these, and was careful not to come too close. It was not smart to ride up on a man as he cooked his liquor, and some of these old bootleggers had not seen a strange face, one that was not their kin, in years. The boy, just seventeen years old, then, had never been so far back in the still mountains before; he had been born in the high places.

  He was not afraid, but there were noises in the night up here that made him wish he had stayed home: the owls screeched, like a woman’s awful, anguished cry, and the wind hissed at him from the trees. One morning, when he was half asleep in the saddle, his mule shied wildly as a great, feral hog, as big as a washing machine, rushed, snorting and squealing, down the trail, right at them. The mule bucked wildly, crazed, and the boy lost his seat and landed hard on the rocky ground. But when he scrambled to his feet, expecting to be cut to pieces by those long yellow tusks, the monster was gone, like it had all happened in his mind. He was not sorry; his rifle was a rusty single-shot .22, and it would make only a bee sting, like thumping it with a cherry pit, to go at a hog so big with such a puny firearm. He remounted, cussed his quest as a damn poor idea in the first place, cussed the mule for its foolishness, and pushed on.

  He had stopped at a shack here and there at the beginning of his search, asking where he might find the old man, and some people turned their backs to him and some told him just to go home, son, if he knew what was good for him, but he was on a quest and would not be scared away. Sometimes the trail vanished completely in the creeping vines and dark trees, and the briars all but clawed him from the saddle. Finally, after three days, he came to a small clearing in the green, and a one-room tumbledown shack.

  A bleak old man in ragged overalls sat against a tree at a small, cold campfire, sliding a rough whetstone in a slow arc around the cutting edge of a small limbing ax; it was what he did to ease his mind. He had the sharpest steel in the foothills, people said of him, and was nowhere close to easy in his mind yet.

  The old man did not acknowledge the boy at all as he rode in, did not even look at him, that he could tell, and when the boy drew closer he saw a double-barrel Belgium 12-gauge, which was the only thing of value not taken from him, leaning against a tree close to the old hermit’s hand. The old man hid his eyes beneath a slouch straw hat, and concealed much of the lower half of his face under a massive bushy red mustache. The bones of his face stood out around eyes that most people could not hold for long, even if they wanted to. He was in his sixties then, but he was old only in the way that iron, or good hickory, gets old.

  “You look starved, boy,” said the old man, who was mostly rags and bone himself.

  “I am,” the boy said.

  The old man scraped the stone against the blade.

  “I have little here,” he said.

  The young man noticed that the black mule was missing, and thought the worst.

  But he just shook his head; that was not why he was here.

  “I’ve come to fetch you, Daddy,” he said. “I need you.”

  The old man said nothing. His children had turned away from him after he fled. He had been a wrathful father, quick to use his strap, and worked his boy children like beasts, snaking logs down the mountainside with teams of mules. When he rode away, blood on his hands, he doubted he would see any of them again. While he was in hiding, his wife, Mattie, passed away, and then his youngest boy, Shulie, died from sickness. He had owned some land before the incident—not valuable land, but pretty mountain land—and he lost that, too, when he fled the state. He lived as a fugitive for three years or more, trapping, setting trotlines, hunting deer, turkey, pigs, squirrel, rabbit, possum, and raccoon, and gathering poke salad, muscadines, and persimmons on the mountain. He was as close to invisible as a man could be and still walk the firmament. His kin seemed content with that. They dug a deep, dark hole for him, and filled it in.

  He had not asked his son to get down from the mule.

  “What do you want of me, boy?” he said.

  “You have to come with me,” the young man said, “ ’cause I’ve married a pretty and hardheaded woman who can’t cook a lick, and I do believe that I am a-starvin’ to death.”

  His beloved was barely sixteen when he stole her away from her family in Tidmore Bend, not more than two or three months before, but he was bamboozled, hoodwinked, sold a blind mare. He was lured by her wit and her raven hair and lithe form, and was not thinking right. She had sealed the deal at a barn dance with a box supper he paid a dear dollar for, only to learn that the delicious fried chicken, potato salad, and slab of pie had been prepared by her older sisters, to get her married off and out of the house. They were tired of her, for she could be a little peculiar, and was often ill-tempered.

  In the ensuing days, she cooked him greens that tasted like grass, and beans with the consistency and flavor of river rock. Her meat was scorched and smutty, or so rare it was damn near still matriculating, and her cornbread did not rise much higher than a Mexican tortilla; when he questioned this, she quoted the Bible, about unleavened bread and the body of Christ and such. He could not live like this, could not live hungry, not when there was steady work to be had and money for food, and a good garden growing chest-high just a few steps from the back door. His daddy just said no, he reckoned not, and went back to sharpening. The old man was not loquacious; he considered most conversation to be a form of weakness.

  “I need you to teach her how to cook, and I don’t know where else to go.” The boy’s new wife was contrary and would not listen to anyone, least of all her new husband.

  “I need to fight fire with fire,” the boy said.

  He pronounced it “far with far.”

  “I can’t come back,” the old man said. “They’ll ketch me if I do. They’ll send me off for certain.”

  The boy told him no, there were no posters out on him, no warrants, “no paper on him, a-tall.” The drifter, nameless to begin with, had just vanished from the earth as if he’d never been, and must have stumbled off to die elsewhere. He had not been missed, apparently, wherever he was from. The old man did not speak of it, then or ever, not with pity, regret, or relief. He nodded, but did not say he would go.

  He told the boy it was too dark to go back through the mountains, and the path was dangerous in the dark; there were deadfalls steep enough to kill man and mule. He told him he was welcome to share his supper, such as it was. He had knocked down a single quail with the Belgium, in a clearing down below.

  The boy sat quietly as the sun went down and watched the old man, working with just his hands and a wickedly sharp pocketknife, clean and pluck the bird. He rubbed the skin and the inside of the body cavity with salt from a tobacco pouch, which appeared to be his only seasoning, then ran a wire through the flesh and hung the bird from a thin, dangling limb over the fire. He had built the fire tight against the tree, so the branches would filter the smoke, spreading it into nothing but a vague gray that blew away on the wind. In a while, the quail began to smell good, and he would nudge it with a green twig now and again, to make it sway over that fire, back and forth, back and forth, to cook both sides. His daddy was good at stuff like that, the boy believed. The old man broke the quail in two with his hands, just ignoring the heat, and gave half to the boy.

  He had not spoken as he cooked. He was out of practice, the boy suppo
sed.

  The bird was excellent, with just the right char. There is not much meat on quail, usually hunted for here, my people maintain, as a good excuse for biscuits and gravy.

  The boy ate it in a grubby hideout, cooked by a fugitive whose kitchen was a tree limb and a bag of salt, and it was still the best thing he had eaten since he said “I do.”

  The old man rolled up in a wool blanket and was asleep immediately; whatever demons he lived with were afraid to follow him into sleep, or so it seemed. What he had lived, in one bitter lifetime, could not easily be described. He had been born in the ashes of the Civil War South. He had almost starved in a failed Reconstruction, and as a boy he swung an ax for both the hateful carpetbaggers and what was left of the hateful failed aristocracy, educated only in the law of the jungle, in brutal logging camps, and by bitter, beaten Confederates and the hidden-out Union sympathizers, each growing old inside their doomed ideals. He learned how to hunt and fish and fight and cut and curse with such color there was almost a beauty to it. He should have perished in the century before, in a time that at least made some sense, because he did not seem to belong in a time of mills, federal marshals, and great machines.

  The next morning, without announcing his intentions, the old man stuffed his few belongs into a burlap sack and stood waiting as the boy saddled the mule. He climbed up behind his son, and my grandfather and great-grandfather headed down the mountain together. And, in this way, we were saved.

  “Does this girl have a name?” the old man asked.

  “Trouble,” the boy said.

  * * *

  • • •

  The boy had tried everything else. He and his bride had even moved in, soon after their marriage, with his uncle Tobe and aunt Riller, who was said to be an excellent cook. But Riller was also somewhat of a harpy, and she and the girl clashed, it seemed, every day. The older woman could not believe the sixteen-year-old girl could not cook so much as a cathead biscuit or a pan of grits. She derided her, mocked her helplessness, and the girl had the ill manners to talk back to her. When Riller caught the newlyweds dancing to the radio in the middle of the day, in front of God and everybody, she forgot her Scripture and called the girl some bad names. The boy took up for his bride, at which point his uncle Tobe, who at more than six feet and three hundred pounds would have made two and a half of the skinny boy, balled up one big fist and knocked him ass over teakettle across the room. He was lumbering toward the boy to do even more harm when his visiting brother-in-law, Henry Wilder, broke a cane-back chair across Tobe’s oxlike shoulders, then went against his head with a chair leg, just to make sure. “Go, children,” said Uncle Henry, “afore this great fool gets up an’ I have to smite him agin.”

  “I always loved my uncle Henry,” my mother said as she told it to me.

  The young couple moved out of Tobe and Riller’s house and into their own little rented place in East Gadsden, which the boy paid for by hammering down shingles, swinging a pick, digging wells, working as a hired hand for cotton and cattle farmers, and packing illegal whiskey out of the mountains on muleback; there was always a dollar in moving whiskey for a man unwilling to risk prison in Atlanta to peddle it himself. As he worked, other would-be tutors—great-aunts, aunts, second and third cousins, others—came and went over the next few weeks, trying to teach the girl something, anything, about cooking, with no positive results. They left defeated, and angry. The child was willful, they said.

  The boy could cook a little himself; he had learned a bit from his father, which only made the bad food he had been choking down, for the sake of his marriage, even more awful, because he knew the difference. He told her he could teach her, and she told him to go to hell. Then he told her not to worry, that he could cook for them himself, when he was not working late or on second shift or chasing work on the freight trains or leading a mule down the mountain loaded with liquor. This caused her to weep piteously, her sobs building to a crescendo of awful shrieking. The boy had to choose between starvation, it appeared, or hysteria. He had decided a man could live a long time hungry before he fell to clattering bones, but his head would explode in a day, listening to shrieking like that. He would have ridden around the whole world, oceans and all, and drowned a hundred mules doing it, to find a solution to this terrible state.

  His daddy was his last hope, the boy truly believed, or they would soon find his remains propped in a cane-back chair at the kitchen table, his teeth empty, a knife and fork in his skeletal hands, poised over a plate of food that even the hounds would only stare at, in dejection and dismay. And a hound will eat rocks and pine bark and pig iron if you rub some grease on it.

  His bride was waiting on the porch as they rode into the yard. She was spooky that way. She just knew. The boy slid off the mule and introduced his daddy as the man who would, finally, teach her to cook.

  “Daddy’s a fine cook, and he can learn you easy,” the boy said, not unkindly. They had married for love, against all common sense, but the girl still scared him a good bit.

  She did not pitch a fit—you never knew what the girl might do—she just stood there and looked the old man up and down. He seemed in sorry shape, for a legend.

  Ava Hamilton Bundrum was already prone to fits of anger and the occasional descent into deep melancholy, another thing her kinfolks had neglected to tell the boy. She was a great reader of Holiness Scripture, newspapers, and literature, and might have made a fine teacher, perhaps even a woman preacher. She had her own mind, and had since she was a child. And this ragamuffin would teach her?

  “I don’t see how,” she said, finally. The grimy, dusty old man looked like he had walked, flapping and rustling, from a cornfield, where he had been propped and wired on a stake to scare off the blackbirds.

  She cared not one whit about the craft of cooking, anyway; she had only half listened to her own momma’s tutelage, and ignored her recipes altogether. Why would she listen to this old felon?

  The old man stood without a word, too, but took off his wide-brimmed floppy hat, out of courtesy. She could see his face now, for the first time. She met his steel-gray eyes and held them, waiting, but the old man just walked right past her and stepped inside, uninvited, to peruse the kitchen. He needed to see if there was coffee in the can, for morning. If there was coffee in the house, there was hope for the future. There was a little.

  “I’ll make us a pot,” he announced, without turning around.

  The girl stood on her porch, frozen.

  Whatever theatrics she had planned were taken from her.

  How do you stomp mad into your own house to have a cup of coffee?

  He moved in that day to the small house just outside the industrial heart of Gadsden, still in the country, but close enough so that they could see the blast furnaces of the steel plants glow beyond the trees. Her cooking lessons began almost immediately, but it would be a fat lie to claim that her tutelage began with anything remotely akin to enthusiasm on her part. And it would be that way for quite some time.

  She had married a poor boy, enthusiastically, but might not have thought it through. Her people had been what the boy’s people called the better-offs—not wealthy, but gentle, civilized, and churchgoing, with their own legacy of fine Southern cooking, of Mississippi mud cake, ambrosia, and sausage balls. Most of the fine cooks she had known in East Gadsden lived with flour on their clothes and their plump cheeks, and smelled warmly of baking bread and peach cobbler and pecan shortbread, the acidic tang of home-canned tomatoes, and the scent of frying bacon and pot roasts. They waved big rolling pins in the air as they talked, which was mostly of Jesus and money and the socialist Democrats or the money-grubbing Republicans, an affiliation that seemed to change from breakfast to dinner and, by supper, back again.

  This old man smelled of wood smoke, Brown’s Mule chewing tobacco, the barnyard, and, sometimes, corn liquor or hard cider, and had no use for a rolling pin whatsoever, though he had told her, in as few words as was possible, he once had to knoc
k a bull to its knees with a mattock handle when it tried to run him down. He had no use at all for preachy Democrats and would have fed a fat Republican to his dogs, had no use for their religion, either, not the gentle, watered-down kind, which he called “Escapalians,” nor the real God-botherers, the shoutin’ and tongue-talkin’ people of the mountain Pentecostals. He was a straight-up sinner and blessedly free of hypocrisy, because that would have required him to give a damn what people thought of him. He was stubborn, and he was mean, but when he took on a job, a contract, he would by God see it through.

  Still, he had knocked the tops off mountains that were easier, it seemed, than this. He would discover that his son had not exaggerated. She could not cook any of it, her people’s food or his, and did not even eat, or so it appeared. She ate like a baby bird. The foolish boy should have noticed that right off.

  “Next time,” he told the boy, “go get yourself a big woman. You ever see a big woman can’t cook?”

  That first evening, he let the girl cook supper without comment. She made a pan of cornbread devoid of all flavor—even, he would later swear, corn, which was by God a trick. As the cornbread sat on the counter, growing colder and sadder, she cooked a woeful half-gallon of vegetable soup by emptying cans of beans, tomatoes, and corn into a pot. In the years before refrigerators, cooking from a can was no sin, but there was no seasoning in it, either, no stock, no base, nothing to give it taste. She did shake in a dash of black pepper—that much, at least, she remembered from her mother—and then, making sure the old man was watching, she shook a saltshaker over it. She did not, however, check to see if any actually came out. The old man took a brave spoonful; it would do if a man was starving, but he had tasted better simmered in a work-camp cookhouse by murderers, arsonists, and dope fiends, dragging shackles across the floor.

  The old man forced down a spoon or two more, trying not to make a face like an urchin staring down a dose of castor oil, then choked back a couple bites of the flat, tasteless cornbread. Before she could ask him if he wanted more, which might have been more than even he could bear, he got up and washed the bowls. There was a good quart or so of the awful stuff left in the pot, since no one wanted seconds.