Ridge Stories Page 17

  Those of us who lead lives of pie possess the certain knowledge that cake is intrinsically an inferior dessert. “Let them eat cake!” Marie Antoinette purportedly scoffed at the peasants. Note that she made no mention of pie, which she probably was saving for her own supper.

  For a pie is made with a potter’s hands and showcases the jewel-like wealth of a summer’s fruit. Loving hands cut the pie while it is still warm and set it before you, and everyone smiles.

  The secret to Ma’s pastry was lard. And none of the pastry scraps went to waste; the trimmings left after the pies were assembled were placed on a cookie sheet, sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar, and baked along with the pies. This pie-dough confection served as a warm appetizer in anticipation of the appearance of the pies for dessert.

  Pies generally made seasonal appearances in accordance with the fruit we picked on the farm during the summer and fall (apple, strawberry, raspberry, blackberry, rhubarb, cherry, blueberry, pumpkin); the winter and spring pies were often from grocery-store bananas, lemons, or raisins or from homemade mincemeat.

  If my mother took a pie to a pot-luck supper, I could recognize hers by the treatment of the crust. She turned over the pastry like the top of a bedsheet along the rim of the pie pan, and then pressed a uniform series of hash marks with the tines of a dinner fork. Her steam vents cut into the middle of the pastry were a distinctive flourish, something like a horizontal S.

  When I was a college student, leftover pies were auctioned at the end of a Pleasant Ridge Evangelical United Brethren Lord’s Acre Sale supper. When I entered the bidding, I could not believe my good luck as I bought pie after pie for the bargain price of only a quarter each! On the way home, I boasted of my good luck.

  After listening to me for a time, my father quietly told that no one would bid against me because I was a college student.

  My mother recovered from the health crisis resulting from the cumulative effects of old age that had sent her to the hospital, leaving her confused and disoriented, making her cry out in the night her desperation to make pie. Perhaps that episode had resulted in part from her subliminal realization that her health had deteriorated to the point that her pie-making days might be over. I felt the urge to reassure her that I would continue her pie-making tradition.

  After she had reached the age that pie-making was behind her, I would take my mother to a pick-your-own orchard to help me harvest cherries. Together we would sit by the kitchen window pitting the fruit. Under my supervision, she would add three-quarters of a cup of sugar for sweetening and a quarter cup of flour for thickening to the five cups of cherries, and I would mix up the pastry in a food processor.

  For a double-crust pie, we mixed two cups of flour, one-third cup of cold lard, four tablespoons cold water, one-quarter teaspoon of salt, and processed the mixture with a steel blade. We’d roll the pastry and assemble the pie. I’d brush the top crust with a little milk, sprinkle it with granulated sugar, and bake it at 375 degrees for about 55 minutes, until the crust was golden. After the pie had cooled, the filling would be firmer and easier to slice, but the taste was best when the pieces were warm and messy.

  “We made pie together,” my mother would proudly tell her friends afterward. “My son and I made a cherry pie.”

  This was the essence of a shared life of pie, a legacy passed from one generation to another, with love.

  Crazy Quilter

  Classic Victorian crazy quilts were elegant constructions of randomly sewn snips of satin, velvet, and silk, all in dark jewel colors, the seams covered with elaborate feathery embroidery stitches of silk floss, along with an occasional embroidered motif if the size of a patch warranted the embellishment.

  My mother’s neo-Victorian quilts, on the other hand, were pieced from poly-cotton scraps and occasional fragments of pure polyester double-knit, left over from the dresses she made for my sister and herself. She ripped threadbare sheets into twelve-inch squares to use as a base for each block and then, with the abandon of a 1960s pop artist, splashed bright, flashy print pieces of fabric across them, turning under and pinning any cut sides, and then afterward, top-stitching the pieces and removing the pins.

  Then she discovered that she could hide her seams by sewing on the reverse side and turning the piece over in readiness for the next fabric “shingle,” working until she had completed the block.

  After she had the requisite number for the quilt size she had in mind, she’d stitch blocks into rows, and then the rows into the quilt top, and while she watched TV, she’d embroider decorative stitches of cotton floss along the seams. The finished quilt was layered with batting and backing, tied with yarn, the edges hemmed.

  My mother’s quilts were not as elegant as those of her Victorian foremothers, quilters who lived in huge houses on the better side of a city and, as some wags said, farted through silk. Ma was a farmwife who helped slop hogs and milk cows when she wasn’t consumed by her own domestic chores. Her life, like her quilts, was made of coarser stuff, and piecing quilts soothed her soul.

  And her nerves.

  My mother was a woman with a fragile psyche. I have boyhood memories involving my uncle, who sometimes worked with my father and joined us for the noon meal. The two brothers had grown up without sisters and sometimes teased my mother about her cooking, their humor springing from male sensibilities. Sometimes she’d bolt for the bedroom and throw herself on the bed in tears while my father and uncle chewed slowly, looking helplessly and unhappily at one another.

  When I was older, my younger sister and my mother would engage in furiously heated discussions, arguing until my mother predictably dissolved into tears, at which point I scolded my sister.

  As an observer of my mother’s precarious emotional state, I had learned to tread carefully regarding her feelings, avoiding confrontations by resorting to end-runs, generally getting my way.

  When 1970s-era physicians began writing Valium prescriptions, my mother got in line for hers. And her doctor told her to keep taking her pills and sewing (for her nerves) and she’d be just fine. And sew she did, making herself and my sister new dresses for special occasions. She was a child of the Depression and appreciated the cost savings of a homemade dress. And the proliferation of leftover scraps of fabric called out to become quilts. Some scraps she shared with her mother, who also was a crazy quilter.

  Others she took to Ladies Aid meetings at the Pleasant Ridge Evangelical United Brethren Church. When a farmhouse or barn burned, or a farm family member was taken to the hospital after an accident or with a serious illness, the Ladies Aid Society took action by making a consolation quilt. Sitting in a circle on folding chairs in the church basement, they would piece quilt blocks, gossiping as they basted scraps of fabric in place. At the end of the session, my mother would take the blocks home for top-stitching and assembly, and then bring the quilt to the next meeting, where it would be tacked to a frame and tied with yarn, ready for presentation to the family in need.

  When I was drafted, my mother made a crazy quilt for my young wife and me, one that she finished by the time that I had completed basic training and been assigned to Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas. As soon as I was granted permission to live off base, I rented an apartment and flew back to Wisconsin on leave to collect my wife and load our ’67 Chevy with as many of our possessions as it would hold in preparation for our drive to the Southwest. My mother presented me with the quilt, I stuffed it in the car, and off we drove.

  That evening at a motel, we took the quilt into our rented room and spread it on the bed, reveling under the comfort. In the excitement of being together again and in the anticipation of getting to El Paso as quickly as possible to set up housekeeping, we inadvertently left the quilt in the motel room, not realizing our forgetfulness until we were a hundred miles down the road.

  I phoned the motel, asked about the quilt, and was put on hold while housekeeping checked for it. “Sorry,” the desk clerk told me. “Housekeeping didn’t find any quilt.”

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nbsp; That one lost, I’m thankful for the ones I’ve managed to keep. In the 1930s, America had experienced a quilting revival. I have two traditional (non-crazy) quilts that my mother made during these years, one in a bow-tie pattern and a second in a squares-around-squares design, all in the funky prints of that era. I also have a wool quilt top pieced by Grandma Buckta with fabric salvaged from old suit jackets and coats. Moths had taken a toll by the time it came into my hands. And Granny Jones had pieced a Grandmother’s Flower Garden quilt top from tiny hexagons of fabric. Years later my mother paid an elderly quilter to hand stitch it for Granny. I have that quilt, too.

  In recent years, the quilts of Gee’s Bend have come into artistic prominence. African American women in this isolated Alabama town have a tradition of quilting, neither for recreation nor for decorative arts, but for necessity, for keeping their children warm in unheated shacks. They use scraps of worn-out clothes, assembled with imaginative improvisational simplicity, an effect reminiscent of some twentieth-century abstract painters.

  My mother’s crazy quilts were also pieced for solace and economy, an improvisation on endurance. I will always regret the lost quilt that she made for me, but I will never forget the night that I slept under it.

  When my mother died in 2006, I spoke at her funeral about the prayer that was sewn into those quilts, one in which she said without words that she wanted to keep us warm, to keep us safe, and to keep her love with us. She lived her life like that as well. In my eulogy, her quilts became a metaphor for the strong, complicated, comforting woman we had lost:

  One part was her garden that filled a bin in the basement with potatoes, a freezer with corn and beans, and shelves with jars of tomatoes and applesauce and pickles and jams. When I make a batch of strawberry preserves, when I can tomato juice, or when I dig potatoes, I hear that prayer.

  My mother was queen of the raspberry patch, and once you could have shared her bounty for fifty cents a quart. She knew pretty much all there was to know about raspberries, and when I mulch mine or pick the first ripe fruit of the season, I hear her prayer.

  I never liked her chickens, carrying water to the range house in the summer, or choosing the young rooster that she sold live for a dollar, a dollar and a quarter dressed. When I crack an egg or cut up a fryer, I hear a prayer from my mother.

  My mother sewed clothing not only for herself but for all of us. When I sew on a button or stitch a ripped seam, I hear a prayer from my mother.

  She taught generations of first graders to read and helped to open for them the magic of books. She helped me with my reading when I started first grade. I finally caught up, and when I discuss literature and writing with my students, I hear a prayer from my mother.

  Because my mother taught before 1937, she had needed only one year of county normal for a lifetime teaching certificate. She finished her bachelor’s degree when she was fifty-something after taking night and summer classes while teaching full time. It was a celebration to remember after she and her best friend Dorothy Johnson graduated! When I think of my degrees, they pale in comparison with my mother’s, and I hear a prayer from her.

  My mother cooked for threshers, for extended family, for anyone who was in need of a meal. We called her for advice: How long do you cook a pot roast? Can I have your recipe for sauerkraut cake? Now when I make yeast rolls, when I bake a pie, when I fix beets and Swiss chard from my garden, I hear a prayer from my mother.

  When I held my own children as babies, I heard a prayer from my mother.

  At the hospital, my wife told my dying mother that she would always take care of me. Those of us who are fathers and sons can never give the love a mother gives; we can only receive it.

  The memory of my mother’s life wraps around me like one of her crazy quilts (life can be a little crazy at times!), and now as I step back, her life comes more clearly into focus. That memory keeps me, and everyone who knew and loved her, warm and safe and tucked in with love.

  Searching for My Father

  After I had become an adult, my father and I took winter walks from the farmhouse on Pleasant Ridge along Si Breese Lane to and from his family’s long-abandoned house. While those two-mile hikes occurred at different times of the year, in my memory the season was always winter, the ground snow-covered, the air frosty, the leafless trees dark silhouettes, the evening sky alive with bright stars, and the moon a beacon. The landscape seemed to have taken its inspiration straight from The Night Before Christmas:

  The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow

  Gave a lustre of midday to objects below.

  I was a beer drinker in those days, and my father and I typically would do real damage to a twelve-pack before we set out on our trek, usually waiting until ten o’clock or so to depart. My wife and mother would shake their heads and smile indulgently, knowing that we’d be on foot, and should one of us walk into a tree, no serious harm would be done, to the tree nor to ourselves.

  When we returned, my mother would have prepared a bedtime lunch, which my father and I would eat while drinking a final beer, and then we’d all retire for “our long winter’s nap.”

  I felt like I finally found my father on such nights.

  My father had never abandoned our family, even for a day. He had not run off with another woman, had not been incarcerated for a crime, nor had he lost himself to drugs and alcohol. But of three siblings, I was the only one who felt I had to search for him. An analogy might explain what I mean.

  From down the Dicks Hill at the head of the upper Buck Creek valley, we could hear the eerie cries of Eithel’s peacocks, exotic birds that roamed the lawn of her family’s small dairy farm as if it were a private garden in Hyde Park rather than Rockbridge Township.

  Peacocks, of course, were not native to Richland County, but Eithel found a mail-order source for fertilized peacock eggs and enlisted the surrogate service of a setting hen. I can imagine the thoughts of a Rhode Island Red watching as peacock chicks emerged from her nest. “What a night I must have had!” she’d mutter, scratching her forehead with a claw. “I don’t remember that rooster at all!”

  And how confused that hen might have been as her chick grew up into nothing resembling herself.

  As a boy, I lacked the splendor of a peacock, but I was no less exotic in the eyes of my father. Although he was a dairy farmer by default, we all knew he had wanted to be an auto mechanic. My mother laughed that if she had been born with a motor, my father would have loved her even more.

  Paw always drove the best automobile he could afford and at various times owned snowmobiles and a motorboat. His favorite spectator sport was stock car racing, and automotive mechanical malfunctions—stories of engine problems and the repairs ultimately made—were a favorite topic of conversation. Such stories often involved one-upmanship of some sort: a lowly garage man cleverer than his supervisor, an amateur mechanic who gave sound advice to a professional, and sometimes, tales of his own troubleshooting triumphs.

  I, on the other hand, couldn’t have cared less about the inner workings of an engine, and I was a silent sports guy. I did not consider driving a snowmobile, a motorboat, or a motorcycle a sport; I was a runner, a swimmer, a cyclist, a cross-country skier, all sports.

  One summer during a visit of city relatives to our farm, my little brother and I were relegated to the three-quarter-sized bed in my mother’s sewing room. Ma’s brother Virgil and his wife had our bed, the two girl cousins crowded in with my sister, the boy cousin too young for his own bed.

  On the occasions my uncle visited us on the farm, beer flowed freely, and while my brother slumbered beside me, I was kept awake by loud voices and laughter in the living room and the smell of cigarette smoke wafting under the sewing room door.

  And then suddenly the door opened, casting a beacon of light across the bed, and I froze, feigning sleep. My father and uncle stepped into the room, unsteady on their feet, each clutching a bottle of Blatz. “Ain’t he something,” my father stage-whispered.
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br />   “Jim, Jim,” my mother hissed at him from the living room. “Don’t wake those boys up!”

  My father ignored her, and I closed my eyes even tighter, wishing that I could shut my ears as well, because I knew that I was not the son who was “something.”

  “He’s going to be a real baseball player someday,” my father continued. “You should watch him bat gravel in the driveway! Each one would be a home run!”

  When I played 4-H softball, I was lucky when I managed to hit a single.

  “And he could be a race car driver,” my father added. “He doesn’t walk, he runs. And when he does, he’s always making a motor sound.” My father imitated the sound that was my brother’s imitation of a motor.

  I made three attempts before I finally passed my driver’s test, and the instructor cautioned me about driving in a big city.

  My mother appeared, a third figure in the doorway, and scolded the two men. “You guys get out of there now and let those boys sleep!”

  Those differences translated into farmwork as well. My father lived for farm machinery. He preferred internal combustion horsepower to literal horsepower, having once as a young man lost patience with a horse and punched the animal, breaking his hand in the process. Because of the marginality of the farm, as a young farmer he could afford only used machinery, but fortunately, he had taken a class in welding. My father, it seemed, spent half of his time using the hay-baler or the corn-picker or the chopper, and the other half hooking up his welder to fix it.

  I remember my mother and I returning from a trip to Richland Center when we approached the farm and saw a hammer flying across the road, much like a boomerang. Obviously, the repair was not going well.

  By contrast, I was happiest working in vegetable or flower gardens and tending animals. Milking cows could at times be tedious, but not compared to endlessly riding a tractor cultivating corn. The cows had names and personalities, and the routine of milking them was relatively contemplative, the thudding of the vacuum pump powering the milking machines like a mantra. I memorized dialogue for roles I had been given in plays and scripts that I was reciting for forensics.