• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1336 0

chime said prong, and since it struck only on the second Tuesday of each month, it was not at all annoying—in fact, an occasion to be looked forward to. In time the brothers turned the occasion into ritual: on the second Tuesday of each month, at the moment the clock was scheduled to chime, they would drop whatever they were doing (or Jacob would; Noah would simply rise up from his bed) and stand beside the clock. Noah would salute as the moment approached; Jacob had his rifle loaded and ready. The clock would say prong and the brothers would let out with whoops and Jacob would fire off his rifle (through the door, the sole opening of the house, so as not to hit anything in the cabin) and the bitch Tige and all eight of her pups would start baying and yipping and chasing their tails and the heifer Jerse would bawl at the top of her lusty lungs, and the sun would stand still for a moment. This was the origin of the custom in our own time of the Lions, Rotarians and Kiwanians meeting for lunch on the second Tuesday of each month.

One noon in the early spring, the Ingledew brothers were having their dinner. Little has been said, up to this point, about their diet; here we might relate it to the architecture of their cabin by observing that, while looking plain and simple on the surface, it actually was quite variegated, and the reason the food looked plain and simple was the result of Jacob’s cooking; it would have been nearly impossible to tell from the appearance of the cooked food whether it was fish or fowl, pork or potato; but the fact was that in terms of variety, beef was the only meat that the brothers did not have.

“Meat” of course to the Ozarker meant only pork: bacon or ham or salt pork or sidemeat, and there was a superabundance of this available in the wild hogs—“razorbacks”—roaming the woods and feeding on acorn mast and providing in turn food for panthers, bobcats and bears as well as ingledews. Both Jacob and Noah seemed to prefer pork to other kinds of meat, although they were not all that particular, and had discovered that even panther meat, eschewed by most hunters, had a taste like delicate veal. Bear meat had a stronger taste.

In the beginning the brothers kept no domestic fowl since the woods were filled with pigeons and wild turkey, one of the easiest game animals to bag—Jacob wouldn’t even waste powder and shot on them because he could kill them just as easily by throwing rocks at them. Likewise he wouldn’t bother wasting bait to catch fish but used instead a gig, one of the few pieces of iron brought with them from Tennessee, and the stream of water that would be called Swains Creek or Little North Fork of the Little Buffalo River was teeming with bass and perch and bream and crappie and catfish, so that his fishing expeditions never lasted more than two and one-half minutes.

Jacob and Noah were also fond of “sallit,” what we would call greens, but wild, the tender leaves of mustard, lamb’s quarters, pepper-grass, pokeweed, dock, thistle and wild lettuce, which Jacob would mix together and boil for a long time in his kettle with a bit of bacon rind and then throw in some onions and pour hot bear’s oil over it and cook it and stir it until it was the same brown color as the main dish and indistinguishable from it on the plate…and palate.

Since there was no milk—yet—the brothers washed their food down with plain spring water, occasionally diluted with a jigger of whiskey, or else their coffee substitute made of roasted corn meal and molasses. For dessert, in season, there might be a watermelon or canteloupe chilled in the spring, or simply wild honey on a corn muffin, or Jacob might try his hand at cooking fried pies which were stuffed with wild berries and were the same brown color as all the other food consumed.

Where were we? Yes: one noon in the early spring, the Ingledew brothers were having their dinner (and it is understood that “dinner” always means the noon meal; the evening meal is always “supper”) when suddenly the population of Stay More took a dramatic leap from two to seventeen.