Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [133]
Twain was already failing; he died at Stormfield, in April. Overhead, Halley’s comet burned as it had the night of his birth, half a continent away, in what was then a very different country. Now, as the comet sailed silently through the darkness, it shared a sky with the sugar moon.
EPILOGUE
A BIG BOWL OF HOMEMADE FRIED CHICKEN, waiting in the middle of a table, is one of life’s great satisfactions. It’s also among the best meals to share with family and friends; you sit around talking, and drinking lemonade or beer, as the bowl gradually empties and the afternoon goes slowly dim and mellow. Besides, as long as you leave yourself enough time, frying chicken is easy, while still seeming complicated enough to impress.
Twain, of course, would have said that I’m being grossly superstitious when I claim that I, a Connecticut Yankee in California, can fry chicken; I may as well season the bird with salt tossed over my shoulder or use a horseshoe to hook each piece from the pan.
Well, I can’t make myself Southern. But I can brine the chicken for twelve hours. I can soak it in buttermilk and hot sauce overnight. To make the frying fat, I can clarify butter, and melt the butter into lard, and season the butter and lard with a heavy slice of good country ham (not faux-smoked Safeway hock, but a real, salty-enough-to-roll-your-eyes-back, Gwaltney country shoulder, simmered until the fat tastes softly smoky). I can start cooking at nine in the morning, giving myself enough time to pan-fry the chicken in small batches. And I can invite right-thinking friends, who will get why all this has to be done.
The chicken may still end up a mockery, but it won’t be for lack of care.
For Twain, life without variety, life without change, was literally not worth living. He once wrote that he’d happily die to escape the torture of a monotonous song (the singer, appropriately, later disappeared into the “white oblivion” of a snowstorm). He believed that “no land with an unvarying climate can be very beautiful” and that “change is the handmaiden Nature requires to do her miracles with.” He spent much of his life searching out the “certain something” that made things worth tasting, and returning to, and remembering.
He was a lucky man: his own life was full of change, of exploration and discovery. As a child he woke early on a cold prairie morning and heard, even through the cabin walls, that the prairie chickens were booming; he knew that spring had come. He hunted raccoon and turkey and possum in forests full of sumac and hickory and oak; he climbed from the deserts of Washoe and, with alkali dust still on his boots, fished for trout longer than his arm. He navigated the shoals of a river full of catfish and black bass, tasted the terrapin championed by three different cities, and ate the oysters beloved in a hundred more.
All of it seemed so natural, so rooted, that most Americans imagined it couldn’t ever be lost. The prairies were as vast and daunting as oceans—oceans of big bluestem and purple coneflower, where herds of bison took the place of pods of whales. The Mississippi seemed untamable, its muddy currents building the birthplace of a carnival of seafood. The water nearest Washington had reefs of oysters that could stop ships. Passenger pigeons could turn afternoon to midnight; at the Quarles farm, the birds were so numerous that they were hunted only with clubs, their millions enough to “cover the trees and by their weight break down the branches.” Few people had the foresight of the terrapin trader who feared the loss of ducks, and game, and so many of “the other things that are worth living for.” Few thought that the pigeons could vanish from the sky, that the oyster reefs could be mined out, that the