“I trust these things to you, Margaret,” he said. “I always feel such matters are safest in your hands, despite the burden it places on you. How are your headaches these days, my dear?”
“Not so bad, Alfred, not so bad.”
My father crossed the room, and I saw him stoop and drop a kiss on my mother’s forehead. “I am glad to hear it. Can I bring you your tonic?”
“No, thank you, I’m fine.”
My father returned to his seat, rustled his newspaper, and that was that. My life sentence delivered.
I leaned against the wall and stood there, empty, for a long time. Empty of everything. I was only a practical vessel of helpful service, waiting to be filled up with recipes and knitting patterns.
Jim Bowie came padding down the stairs. Without speaking, he wrapped himself around me and gave me one of his long, sweet hugs.
“Thanks, J.B.,” I whispered, and we walked upstairs together hand-in-hand.
“Are you sick, Callie Vee?” he said.
“I reckon I am, J.B.”
“I can tell,” he said.
“It’s true. You can always tell.”
“Don’t feel bad. You’re my best sister, Callie.” We climbed onto my bed, and he curled up next to me.
He said, “You said you were going to play with me more.”
I said, “I’m sorry, J.B. I’ve been spending time with Granddaddy” But it’s all coming to an end soon enough, I thought.
“Does he know about Big Foot Wallace?”
“He does.”
“Do you think he’d tell me about Big Foot Wallace?”
“You should ask him. He might, but he’s kind of busy.” Busy without me, I moped.
“Maybe I’ll ask him,” said J.B. “But he scares me. I got to go. Good night, Callie. Don’t be sick.”
He gently closed the door. My last thought, before I fell into a restless sleep, was of the coyote. If only I could figure out how to gnaw my own leg off.
Chapter 18
COOKING LESSONS
Battle within battle must ever be recurring with varying success. . . .
MY TIME WITH GRANDDADDY slipped away as the domestic mill wheel gathered momentum, grinding its principal raw material—namely, me—into smaller and smaller scraps.
“Calpurnia,” Mother called up the stairs in that particular tone of voice I’d come to dread, “we’re waiting for you in the kitchen.”
I was in my room reading Granddaddy’s copy of A Tale of Two Cities. I put it down and didn’t answer.
“I know you’re up there,” said Mother, “and I know you can hear me. Come down here.” I sighed, slipped an old hair ribbon into the book to mark my place, and trudged downstairs. I was the condemned young aristocrat holding my head high in the tumbrel. It was a far, far better thing—
“There’s no need to look like that,” said Mother as I walked into the kitchen, where she and Viola sat waiting for me at the scrubbed pine table. “It’s only a cooking lesson.”
On the table was the marble slab, the sugar tin, a rolling pin, a large bowl of green apples, and one bright yellow lemon. And a book. I perked up until I got a closer look at it.
“Look here,” said Mother. “It’s my Fannie Farmer cookbook. You can borrow it until you get your own copy. It has everything in it that you need.”
I doubted that. She presented it to me in the same way that my grandfather had handed me his book—the other book—a few short months before. Mother smiled; Viola looked determinedly blank.
“We’re going to start with apple pie,” Mother said. “The secret is to add a splash of lemon juice and a handful of lemon zest to give it that nice tart flavor.” She smiled and nodded and spoke in that coaxing voice mothers use on reluctant children.
I tried my best to smile back. Lord knows what I looked like because Mother looked alarmed, and Viola cut her eyes to the corner.
“Won’t that be fun?” said Mother, wavering.
“I guess so.”
“Viola’s going to show you how to make the crust. It’s her specialty.”
“Get two scoops of flour out of that bin, Miz Callie,” Viola said. I blinked. She had never called me Miss before. “Dump ’em in this bowl. Okay.”
Mother thumbed through her cookbook and planned our Sunday dinner while Viola tried to lead me down the tricky path of pastry-dough making. I must have seen her make a million pies as I wandered through the kitchen, and it had always looked so easy. She never measured anything, instead cooking by eye, by instinct, and by touch, throwing in handfuls of flour and thumb-sized chunks of lard and drizzling in more or less cold water, depending. There was nothing to it. Any idiot could learn it in two minutes flat.
An hour later, I stood panting and thrashing around with my third bowl of dough, with Mother and Viola growing more incredulous by the minute. The first batch had been watery and lumpy; the second so dense I couldn’t roll it out with the pin; the last had turned out as sticky as wallpaper paste and with the same unappealing consistency. It was all over my hands and pinafore, smeared across the counter and the pump handle, and there were streaks of it stuck in my hair. I think there was even a glob on the fly paper hanging from the ceiling several feet above my head, but how it got there, I had no idea.
“Next time a kerchief, I think, Viola,” Mother said.
“Mm-hmm.”
“I tell you what,” said Mother. “Maybe we’ll let Viola finish the dough. You go ahead and peel and core the apples. Hold the apple like this, and draw the knife toward you. Be careful. It’s sharp.”
I held the knife and apple in imitation and, with the first paring motion, sliced my thumb open. Fortunately, I only bled on a couple of the apples. Viola plunged them in water, but they were still tinged pink. We all pretended not to notice. Mother went off to get me a sticking plaster. Viola and I sat at the table and looked at each other. We didn’t speak a word. I sighed and put my chin in my hand. I wanted to put my head down on the table, but that would have meant more dough in my hair. Idabelle, as if sensing my despair, climbed from her basket and came over to butt her wide forehead against my shins. I couldn’t even stroke her, I was so covered in goo. Viola got up and threw flour and water and lard together with seeming thoughtlessness and rolled out a nonsticky, nonrunny, perfect crust in no time. Then she skinned the lemon for me, whether to spare my wound its acid or to stop me from bleeding on any more fruit, I wasn’t sure.
After Mother returned and patched my cut, Viola said, “Miz Callie, you got to check the temperature of the stove.”
“How do I do that?”
“You stick your hand in there. If it’s too hot to hold it in there for more than a blink, you got a medium oven.”
“You’re joshing me.” I looked at her. “That’s what you do?”
“That’s what you do.”
“How do you tell when it’s a hot oven?” I said.
“Why, you can’t get your hand in that far. It’s too hot.”
“Isn’t there a thermometer or something?” I asked. They both laughed like this was the funniest thing they’d heard all week. Oh, funny, all right. I opened the stove and was met by a blast of hot air as if from a dragon’s cave.
“Go on, girl,” said Viola. “Go on.”
It hadn’t killed her yet, so I guessed it was safe. I took a deep breath and plunged my arm deep into the heat and pulled it out a split second later.
“Yep,” I said, fanning my hand in the air, “medium oven for sure. Maybe even hot.”
“Put those pieces of apple in the dishes. Get some sugar, like this much here,” she said, showing me sugar cupped in her palm, “and put it over the apple, you don’t need to stir it up. That’s right. Now we got to put the top crust on.”