The Glass Castle_ A Memoir - Jeannette Walls [79]
I listened to Dad’s plans and tried to encourage him, hoping that what he was saying was true but also pretty certain it wasn’t. Money would come in—and with it, food—on the rare occasion that Dad landed an odd job or Mom received a check from the oil company leasing the drilling rights on her land in Texas. Mom was always vague about how big the land was and where exactly it was, and she refused to consider selling it. All we knew was that every couple of months, this check would show up and we’d have plenty of food for days at a time.
When the electricity was on, we ate a lot of beans. A big bag of pinto beans cost under a dollar and would feed us for days. They tasted especially good if you added a spoonful of mayonnaise. We also ate a lot of rice mixed with jack mackerel, which Mom said was excellent brain food. Jack mackerel was not as good as tuna but was better than cat food, which we ate from time to time when things got really tight. Sometimes Mom popped up a big batch of popcorn for dinner. It had lots of fiber, she pointed out, and she had us salt it heavily because the iodine would keep us from getting goiters. “I don’t want my kids looking like pelicans,” she said.
Once, when an extra-big royalty check came in, Mom bought us a whole canned ham. We ate off it for days, cutting thick slices for sandwiches. Since we had no refrigerator, we left the ham on a kitchen shelf. After it had been there for about a week, I went to saw myself a slab at dinnertime and found it crawling with little white worms.
Mom was sitting on the sofa bed, eating the piece she’d cut. “Mom, that ham’s full of maggots,” I said.
“Don’t be so picky,” she told me. “Just slice off the maggoty parts. The inside’s fine.”
Brian and I became expert foragers. We picked crab apples and wild blackberries and pawpaws during the summer and fall, and we swiped ears of corn from Old Man Wilson’s farm. The corn was tough—Old Man Wilson grew it as feed for his cattle—but if you chewed it enough, you could get it down. Once we caught a wounded blackbird by throwing a blanket over it and figured we could make a blackbird pie, like in the nursery rhyme. But we couldn’t bring ourselves to kill the bird, and anyway, it looked too scrawny to eat.
We’d heard of a dish called poke salad, and since a big patch of pokeweed grew behind our house, Brian and I thought we’d give it a try. If it was any good, we’d have a whole new supply of food. We first tried eating the pokeweed raw, but it was awfully bitter, so we boiled it—singing. “Poke Salad Annie” in anticipation—but it still tasted sour and stringy, and our tongues itched for days afterward.
One day, hunting for food, we climbed through the window of an abandoned house. The rooms were tiny, and it had dirt floors, but in the kitchen we found shelves lined with rows of canned food.
“Bo-nanza!” Brian cried out.
“Feast time!” I said.
The cans were coated with dust and starting to rust, but we figured the food was still safe to eat, since the whole point of canning was to preserve. I passed a can of tomatoes to Brian, who took out his pocketknife. When he punctured the tin, the contents exploded in his face, covering us with a fizzy brown juice. We tried a few more, but they exploded, too, and we walked home without having eaten anything, our shirts and faces stained with rotten tomatoes.
When I started sixth grade, the other kids made fun of Brian and me because we were so skinny. They called me spider legs, skeleton girl, pipe cleaner, two-by-four, bony butt, stick woman, bean pole, and giraffe, and they said I could stay dry