Читать книгу I Will Not Leave You Comfortless - Jeremy Jackson - Страница 7

Food, Animals

The way it worked is that we would stop at Alvina’s house about once a week, either on the way home from Jefferson City or having come from school in Russellville. If you volunteered or were conscripted into service, you opened the car door and stepped onto the white pebbles of Alvina’s driveway. Unless it was winter, you left the car door open. If Alvina was near, you said hello or waved. She was nice.

You entered the shed and went through the dim first room, then stepped down one step that was never quite where you expected it to be. There on the left was the deep cooler, and you reached down and pulled out a gallon of fresh milk, which was cold and heavy. The huge glass jar was wet because the cooler was filled with water and you lifted the jar carefully and there was no easy way to hold it. No handles. If we were picking up two gallons, someone came with you. One of your parents. Or a sister. One person could carry only one jar. That was the equation.

You now stood, holding eight pounds of milk, in one of the dark places of the world. This, though, simplified your exit. All you had to do was aim for the light coming through the doorway that led outside. And once you got the milk back into the light of day, you saw it—the milk itself—for the first time. White. You climbed back into the car and put the jar on the floor, and held it upright by squeezing it between your shins and keeping one hand on the lid. The lid itself was the size of a saucer. As the driver pulled carefully back onto the blacktop, accelerating slowly, you realized the milk was moving in the jar. You were reminded that it was liquid.

From Alvina’s, you drove south to Mount Hope Road, then rolled along the gravel road—down four hills, up four hills, but not in that order—and then turned into the long driveway. The driveway traced the perimeter of a grassy hill. At a bend in the driveway you looked at the gravelly shoulder where turtles could be found surprisingly frequently—say, once a year. Tortoises. This was also the corner where long ago your sisters saw a rattlesnake and walked around it by cutting through the field. So the story went.

The car climbed the little hill—slowly—and then you saw the house, the barns. On your right was a valley of pastures and fields. There were lines of trees along the fencerows. One of the ponds was down there.

When the car got closer to the farmhouse, the terrier and the small black cat would issue forth from the front porch, and that—that moment—was one of the best parts of the day. Here was your universe, your sun and your moons. You carried the milk inside—and if anything it seemed colder now than when you’d first lifted it into your arms—you hefted it onto the counter, you unscrewed the tremendous lid, and you skimmed the cream from the top. With the cream, we would make butter or occasionally whipped cream or sometimes ice cream. As for the milk, we drank it and used it for baking and sometimes gave a splash of it to the cats. We mixed it with a dollop of yogurt and put it in a jar and put the jar in an insulated box and put the box down by the refrigerator’s warm exhaust and in the morning the milk would be yogurt. During the summer, we put the milk on our cereal, and during the school year when we weren’t allowed cold cereal, we drizzled a little milk on our oatmeal. Just a little. It helped cool the oatmeal. “Oatmeal, meet milk. Milk, meet oatmeal.” That’s the kind of thing we would say.

The milk was not pasteurized. It was not homogenized. It tasted like something. Something singular. Alvina’s cow wasn’t a Holstein or Jersey, or any other breed of cow that you would encounter at the state fair. There was nothing written in any textbook about this kind of cow. It was a milk cow of indeterminate origin. It was a small cow. Brown.

Those huge glass jars. We never broke a single one.

We. Us. Ours. We were five in number. We were a father, a mother, a sister, another sister, and a brother. Our father wore navy pinstriped suits and drove into Jefferson City each day, where he worked with legislators and the chief clerk and the speaker of the house and his own staff of researchers. The soles of men’s shoes clicked on the polished floors of the long corridors. The parking garage was a spiral. The capitol building sat on a bluff overlooking the muddy Missouri River.

Our father drove home at night and changed out of his suit and into khaki work pants and a blue shirt and then he did chores. He fed the cows and horses and cats. Closed the chicken coop. Other times he cut brush with the tractor, chainsawed, stacked hay bales in the hayloft, mended fences, helped a cow deliver her calf in the middle of the night. There was a row of boots on the back porch: rain boots, work boots, steel-toe boots, snow boots.

Our father who came from a farm not so far away, who had gone to the state university and married our mother there, then continued on to a university on the East Coast that was so famous that simply stating the fact of his enrollment there was essentially a form of bragging, and therefore the name was rarely spoken. Our father who was a doctor, but not that kind of doctor. The room in the house that we called the study—but which was also a bedroom—had three walls of bookshelves, floor to ceiling, the titles inscrutable. Greek and Latin. Plato and Augustine. He would sit in a chair after dark. Just a regular chair, not a soft one. And he would read and touch his mustache absentmindedly.

Our father had a mustache. Always had.

Food. Animals. You lay in bed and thought. Now that it was summer, your bed was pushed up against the window, and your head was by the window, and the window was open and you could hear the bullfrogs at the west pond talking and the bullfrogs at the east pond talking and from everywhere else you heard crickets. You could hear a car on the gravel road a long way away, moving, making a whooshing noise on the gravel, growing louder, cresting a hill, then fading. Who was that, out driving in the night? Maybe it was Elizabeth, who was out with her boyfriend, Wayne Elwood. Maybe not. Light bloomed up through the open stairwell and shone against one wall of your room. Dad was still awake, but it was quiet down there, down in the living room. You listened and you waited and then you heard him turn a page.

You rolled over and you looked at the dark, open doorway to your sisters’ room. Then you heard something. A faint jingling. A rhythmic jingling. Outside. You rolled onto your stomach and looked out the window, but it was dark, very dark out there. But the noise, you knew what it was. It was the terrier, Teddy. His vaccination tag—the little aluminum vaccination tag—jingling against his collar as he trotted across the yard. Maybe he was about to bark at something. Maybe he sensed raccoons in the vicinity.

The jingling stopped.

“Teddy?” you called out the window.

No jingling. You knew he was standing motionless in the dark, his ears pricked up because he had heard you. He was listening.

“Teddy,” you said, “go to bed.”

In the other room, Susan laughed. You smiled because you had made her laugh. She was lying in her own bed, going to sleep, just like you.

You put your chin down onto the pillow, still looking out the window. You sank into the pillow up to your nose, and you could smell the pillow and the pillow blocked your nose and made breathing pleasantly difficult.

The terrier was on the move again and then the sound faded away.

From the other room, after awhile, Susan said, “Where’d he go?” She had heard him, too. She was lying by her window, too.

You said, “Around the house, I think.” You wondered. You said, “Maybe he’s thirsty.”

You thought about that, and about the pan of water behind the cellar house where he drank. The cats drank there, too. You thought about the doghouse on the front porch, which was painted the same color as the real house. Sometimes the terrier slept in there and sometimes he didn’t. It was anybody’s guess. Then you thought about how if you pointed to something extremely directly—in other words, touched it—and said the terrier’s name with a certain urgency, he would eat whatever you were pointing at. Or attempt to eat it. He was four years old and you’d owned him since your sixth birthday and he was a cairn terrier approximately the color of old straw. His eyes hid behind a veil of hair but he didn’t seem to have any trouble seeing and sometimes for fun you would pull back his bangs and reveal his eyes and they were black.

If you were working in the garden, the terrier would join you because any kind of garden work involved edible things for him. True, if you were there, it might mean you would trick him into trying to eat a piece of wood or a grasshopper. But your mother would never trick him and if she was doing any kind of digging or weeding it meant that in all likelihood the terrier’s favorite delicacy would be unearthed. Grubs. White grubs. Fat white grubs. Why did he like those so much? They were somewhat see-through.

He also liked peas. Last year when the peas were ripe you would sometimes wander into the rows of peas in the afternoon and pick a few and shell them and eat them right there and usually the terrier would be right at your heels and he would eat the hulls you dropped but also he was hoping you would give him a whole pod—peas and all—because he liked that even better than the hulls. And who wouldn’t? You and Susan would give him a few whole pods, but not many. He also ate some kinds of cattle feed and occasionally poop, but that was hard to understand. Also, when the farrier came to trim the horses’ hooves, he would leave the trimmed bits of hoof in the barnyard and the terrier found these to be extremely enjoyable to chew on, especially after they had dried for a few days. When they dried, they shrank and curled. He didn’t eat them, he just chewed on them, but if you came too close to him when he was chewing on a horse hoof he would growl. Stay back, bucko. This is my horse hoof. So no monkey business.

He meant it. And who cared? You didn’t want the horse hooves.

“Hey,” you said. You had rolled onto your back and your eyes were closed.

“What?” Susan said from her bed. You could tell from her voice that she was close to sleep. Downstairs, the lights in the living room were off, but you could hear Dad in the kitchen.

“Do you remember,” you said, “how Teddy ate peas last summer?”

You waited awhile. “Yeah,” she said.

The peas would be ready again soon. In the garden.

“Do you think he’ll eat them this year?” you asked.

“Yeah . . .”

“I bet so,” you said. You opened your eyes and then you closed them again and then you thought of something and you opened them.

“Hey,” you said, “do you remember when Teddy ate that balloon once?”

“Yeah . . .”

You thought about it. “Me too,” you said.

And it was the last thing you said, because you were falling asleep.

Mulberries were a June thing. They went from white to pink to red to black, and then they were ready. They weren’t that good to eat and if you had more than a few your stomach got quarrelsome. You had to spit out the stems because they were unchewable and tasted like clover leaves. There were little bugs on the mulberries anyway. Bugs about the size of dust, but you could see them moving if you looked close. Mainly you thought about mulberries at the end of the night when you washed your feet. You went barefoot all summer and when you were running around the yard barefoot in June sometimes you weren’t really thinking about what you were doing, because apparently you ran under the mulberry tree a few times and crushed a lot of fallen mulberries with your feet without even realizing it. You saw the blotches when you washed your feet at night. You didn’t mind the blotches. They were kind of like a suntan; it was just something that happened in the course of the summer. You could still see the stains the next day. They didn’t wash off. You’d see them at breakfast as you sat cross-legged. They were a reminder. A reminder of themselves. You’d look at your feet and think to yourself, oh, mulberries. They’re no good to eat. You never even realized you’d been running under the mulberry tree until later. Oh, you’d think, mulberries.

Summertime breakfast. Certain regions of your hair were sticking up.

The day after school ended in late May, your shoes and socks came off. But your feet were tender. Walking in the grass felt like being tickled. If you stepped on a june bug it would buzz and you would shriek because of how it felt. The sidewalk was rough. And you couldn’t walk on the gravel of the driveway at all because it was just too much to take. The situation of having tender feet had no immediate remedy, but you were reminded by Mom that it wouldn’t last; your feet would get tougher, and in a couple of weeks you’d be running in the driveway, riding bikes, walking on the prickly hay in the barn, and so forth, without even realizing you didn’t have shoes on. You would start to lose track of your shoes. Shoes? Where are my shoes? I haven’t seen my shoes in days.

You stood in the garden with Susan, clasping each other by the shoulders, and dug your feet down into the loose soil until they disappeared and you were people without feet. You were ankle people.

The soil, for its part, was warm.

We. Us. Ours. We were five in number.

Our mother. She would cut our hair in the kitchen. We would sit with an old sheet pinned around our necks and she would snip away.

“How old were you when you married Dad?” we would prompt.

“I was nineteen. A teenage bride,” she’d tell us again. We’d laugh. “We were so poor we ate a lot of pancakes for dinner.”

Pancakes for dinner did not sound like deprivation.

Our mother. Whereas our father came from the plains of western Missouri, from tall people who worked the soil and didn’t have much to say about that, our mother came from the Ozarks of southern Missouri, from people who hunted the woods and hollows and had stories that led to more stories that led to even more stories. The time the schoolteacher was sprayed by a skunk. The time the buggy tipped over. The time the roof caught on fire. The rattlesnake story, the snowstorm story, the first radio story. These stories trickled from our grandmother’s generation to our mother and then to us.

Our mother who was a social worker who helped children, but whose other job was us. She did magical things: feeding us, growing food for us, sewing for us, baking bread for us, taking us to dance lessons and piano lessons and softball games. We’d walk in the door after coming home from school and smell gingerbread.

Our mother who stood by her husband in all his years of graduate school, in a time when the wives of the students joked that while their husbands got PhDs, the wives got PHTs, which stood for “Putting Hubby Through.” She’d been a faculty wife. She’d had a baby in Connecticut, a baby in North Carolina, a baby in Ohio. Tenure was an elusive thing, so our mother and father decided to return to Missouri to raise their family.

There were the horses. There were the cows. There were the ducks and there were the chickens. The baby chicks hatched in June. You would wait and wait and all the hens were sitting on their eggs, and you knew exactly how many eggs they each had and you knew when they were supposed to hatch, and usually when they were supposed to hatch, they did. You could hear them in there—inside the egg!—peeping, just before they hatched. You would wait for all the eggs to hatch, and most of the time one or two eggs per batch didn’t hatch and the mother hen would leave the nest with her new family, and we would take the abandoned eggs inside, and Mom would wrap them in a little towel and put them in a metal bowl on top of the stove’s pilot light and sometimes—just sometimes—one of these eggs would hatch. Then you had probably saved its life. You and Susan and Mom. Plus the pilot light.

After breakfast, the first thing you did was go gather the eggs. Not the eggs with babies in them, but the new eggs. Eggs for eating. You carried a wicker basket and you went through the gate, brushing past the honeysuckle, and walked down the path to the chicken house. You let the chickens out—they were bunched at the door, waiting—and they fanned out across the yard and the mother hens were followed by the associations of puffs that were their babies. You went inside the chicken house and reached into the nesting boxes to get the new eggs. They were often warm from having been sat on. Sometimes you had to shoo an old hen off her nest so you could have her eggs. And sometimes you reached into a nest that was too high for you to see into and you felt an egg that was big and smooth and it wasn’t really an egg at all and you jumped backward because what you’d just touched was a snake, which was having a nap after a snack of eggs.

To get to the blackberry patch, at the back of the farm, sometimes we drove the pickup out there. Driving in the fields was a holiday of its own. The grass would brush the underside of the pickup. Or, if we didn’t drive, we walked out there. Talk about tall grass. To walk out there, you had to go through the big pasture by the north pond. That pasture had tall fescue grass you had to wade through. If you sat down, the horizon vanished, the trees on the edge of the field vanished. You could see just a few feet into the grass and you could see sky. That was all. You could flatten down the grass to make a little sitting area. You could make a path to another sitting area and have two sitting areas and a path. Of course, once the grass was cut for hay, there’d be no more of that kind of thing.

They were wild blackberries. Picking them was fun for about the first twelve berries, then it was work, but you were allowed to eat as many as you wanted. Fresh blackberries meant you got a cobbler for dinner. You could also put them on your cereal with honey. The second day, maybe we would crumble hot biscuits in bowls, then sprinkle them with berries, then add milk or cream, then add honey. It was almost the best thing a person could eat. There was no name for it, so when you wanted it you had to say the whole thing: “Biscuits with berries on them and then milk and honey in a bowl.” It was a breakfast or a dessert for lunch or dinner or a snack for night. That’s what it was. It was all of that.

Many of the blackberries were frozen in the freezer on the back porch. That way, in the middle of winter you might suddenly find a blackberry cobbler cooling on the counter and you would go instantly wiggly because of how lucky you were. The berries had traveled all the way from summer just to be something warm for you to eat on a cold, dark night. And who knew: you might have picked that berry right there. That exact berry . . .

The brambles would scratch you when you were picking berries. Like how a kitten scratches your arms, even though it doesn’t mean to. Also, there were ticks, chiggers, and poison ivy. The hazards of the blackberry patch. You never saw any snakes out there, but for some reason you were always told that there might be snakes. A watchful eye was required.

It felt like a long way from the house, even though you could look across the pastures and see the house on the hill, residing in the elm shade. Still, it felt like you were really out somewhere. You knew the creek was not too far away. You couldn’t hear any roads from there. If you looked up, maybe there was a jet making a line in the sky. Not that you could see the actual jet, just the line.

Black-eyed Susans. Daisies. Queen Anne’s lace.

Summer sun. Summer heat.

Berries and more berries.

July 5: five cups. July 7: eight cups. July 9: a gallon. On the 12th: seven quarts. On the 15th: seven gallons. July 18: another five and a half gallons. The last berries were on the 21st: three and a quarter gallons.

Fresh blackberries, frozen blackberries, home-canned blackberries. Jam, jelly, juice.

Before blackberry month, there were trips to pick strawberries at strawberry farms. For about three days you ate as many strawberries as humanly possible. The rest had to be cleaned, sliced, sugared, and frozen. Then there were trips to go pick blueberries. And then you ate as many of them as humanly possible. The rest had to be cleaned and frozen. Or canned. Canning happened at night because it was too hot to do during the day, and it helped a lot if Dad was home to pitch in. If everyone pitched in, it helped a lot.

The shadows slanted across the yard. The shadows slanted across the garden. A horsefly droned past, on his way to somewhere else. The barn swallows swooped and banked above the horse pasture. They spiraled, dove. Their forked tails.

One flew right between the legs of a horse. You saw it.

July also meant sweet corn. And sweet corn meant an electric fence, which you turned on at sunset and it made a clicking noise like a metronome. You could touch the wire between the clicks, but not during the click. The click was the electricity, which reminded you of the story of your uncle and how when he was a boy he had peed on a long stalk of grass and the grass leaned over under the weight of the pee and it touched the electric fence and then the electricity went down the grass, then up the pee, and then . . .

Not a mistake made twice.

So, let’s have corn for dinner. July. You go with Mom and cut fifteen ears. That’s three apiece. The ears are medium-smallish, but that means they’re at their best—the kernels like translucent bubbles. You husk the ears, then boil them, and then eat them with butter and salt and hamburgers. The mess of it. The butter rolling down your forearms and pooling around your elbows propped on the oilcloth.

A pitcher of iced tea in the middle of the table. One pickle in an enameled bowl.

Then the nights of the corn harvest. Picking all the ripe ears. Big buckets and bushels and tubs overflowing. The lawn chairs placed in a circle. Piles of husks and silks, dumped onto the compost. It overflows. The stories about our pet hen named June who used to love corn shucking. You would shuck the corn and then hold the bare ear out to her and she would pluck off the little bugs and grubs quicker than quick, then she’d hurry on to the next person’s corn. She was fast, fast, fast. And never once did her sharp beak break a single kernel of corn. That was June the hen, she who was born over the warmth of the pilot light. True, you had given her a bath when you were three, and she had been so sodden with water she couldn’t stand up. “June wet, Momma. June wet.” Mom blow-dried her.

After the husking, we moved inside, as the dark gathered on the lawn. Clean, cook, cut, package, label, and freeze. Corn for a year. Corn and more corn.

A steamy kitchen on a humid night.

Size-wise, the garden was like the house times four. To run a lap around the garden was a taxing event not to be undertaken lightly. It stretched from the horse arena, past the mulberry tree, and down to the fence around the chicken house. A gentle slope. There was the corn, of course, the peas, the tomatoes. Green beans, potatoes, sweet potatoes, beets. Sunflowers, radishes. Broccoli and cauliflower. Lettuce, carrots, and onions. Spinach. Marigolds at the row ends. Gladioli and zinnias. The asparagus bed. Rhubarb. Strawberries, raspberries, blueberries. Cucumbers. Lima beans and squash. Cantaloupes. Other stuff. Experiments. This summer, for example, there were watermelons, and we watched their vines spread out, and the melons started out like marbles lodged inside the blooms but got bigger and darker, and they were thriving and you would walk across the yard after dinner and kneel by the melons and when you picked one up it was still hot from the day. They were small, like cantaloupes, which was somehow disappointing, but when you cut into one it made a crackling, splitting noise and inside it was dark pink and warm and it had a better taste than any normal- or huge-sized watermelon you’d ever eaten, and you asked your parents, why didn’t we grow these before? And the answer was, we don’t know.

You could eat half of one of those melons by yourself and when you were done you had a shell like a cereal bowl and wished that you could actually use it as a cereal bowl or something, but that wouldn’t work. It would shrivel by morning. Which was too bad.

Also, it was too small for a hat.

August. Already?

We gave the terrier a bath that summer. One bath. We filled a big galvanized tub with water, back behind the cellar house. The water was surprisingly cold. And then we found the terrier and picked him up. This in itself was a clear sign that something he didn’t care for was about to happen. We put him in the tub of water and he jumped out. We put him in again and he jumped again. So we held his collar so he couldn’t jump out, and we poured water over him and as his hair got wet he shrank dramatically in size until he looked like a burly rat. He was defeated and shivering and his eyes stared dully ahead and he didn’t try to escape anymore. We soaped him up. Medicated soap, for the ticks. We tried to wash his face without hurting his eyes, and then we rinsed him and rinsed him. When it was done, we released him and ran away. We observed from a distance. In his state of defeat, it took him several moments before he realized he was free, and another few moments to figure out what to do with his freedom. Finally, he put his front paws up onto the edge of the tub, then hopped out and shook. Which was why we had run away.

The horses got multiple baths that summer, because Elizabeth rode them in a lot of horse shows. The horses stood still when she washed them. She hosed them down and then scrubbed and then hosed them again. That was the procedure. Elizabeth did the work—the horses were hers—but it was fun to watch. Or help a little. During the baths, the horses’ bottom lips would go loose and floppy and they would get a dopey look in their eyes, which meant they really enjoyed getting washed. You could smell it in the air whenever one of the horses was getting a bath. It wasn’t a bad smell. Also, there was a certain sound the water made when it was sprayed onto a horse. It almost sounded as if the horses were hollow. Or mostly hollow.

The horse trailer matched the pickup. It was a smart outfit. It was a nice trailer, but it didn’t have any human living quarters in it. Our neighbors who moved away two years ago had a trailer that was half for horses, half for people, but ours just had space for two horses and some equipment. Still, you and Susan figured that the little compartment up front where you could store the tack would make a decent little sleeping compartment for a person. It could really make a pretty darn decent little cubbyhole for a sleeping bag, that’s for sure. Especially for a kid-sized person. We sat in there. We would close the door, but not latch it, and sit in the dark. It was cozy, we thought, and would be a pretty good place to sleep. That’s what we thought.