Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [32]
When townspeople do hunt, it’s usually for the newly plentiful deer; Frank Wolfe says it used to be an occasion to see as much as a track, whereas hunters will now sometimes take a doe just so they don’t have a tag left over at season’s end. Others guide out-of-towners hunting the ducks that stop to feed on waste rice along the Mississippi fly-way (some say the hunting was better when they harvested rice with binders, which left stalks to dry in easily raided sheaves instead of efficient modern combines). Raccoon hunting just isn’t as central to the town’s life anymore.
Still, they sell their thousand tickets, each and every year (this, I repeat, in a town of eight hundred). And it’s clear that if Gillett abandoned raccoon tomorrow, governor after governor wouldn’t keep driving into town to feast on baked chicken or ham. The supper is completely wrapped up in the place; it’s a natural successor to the Polk County Possum Club in the thirties, which a WPA writer called “Arkansas’ outstanding ceremonial feast” and “characteristically Arkansan in its background and color,” and which drew five hundred people from senators to backwoodsmen. Frank Wolfe and Heath Long and the rest of the farmers can poke fun at the supper, claiming to dislike the annual work and the raccoon meat itself. But there’s a certain inherent rightness to their collective decision to make the Coon Supper Gillett’s public face—the supper makes Gillett different, makes it stand out from other small, struggling, or even dying farm towns. The football team it supported is gone now, but lots of towns have football teams. A Coon Supper is something else.
In some ways the annual gathering may be getting more important as the town’s troubles grow. A few years back, Governor Mike Huckabee sponsored legislation saying that any high school with fewer than 350 people had to consolidate with other schools or close down. Gillett, of course, didn’t come close, and there was some hurried and intense debate over whether to absorb the closest school, a poor, mostly black one in the delta across the Arkansas River. The town took the second option, which was to become a satellite campus of De Witt (where Clinton’s plane crashed); part of the deal was losing the football team—until then a major focus of town life—to the northern school. Now there’s a lot of worry ahead of another upcoming school-consolidation vote, which could mean losing the high school altogether—losing one more thing that binds the young people to town, connects them with local traditions, and gives them a reason to build a life here.
Pretty much anyone who’s heard of Gillett has heard of it because of the supper. I hear it again and again: He knows where Gillett is. They say it about Clinton, and Dale Bumpers, and Mike Huckabee (a somewhat detested figure in Gillett now, given his role in the whole De Witt situation). It can be applied to a couple decades’ worth of Miss Arkansases, and any number of congressmen, judges, and attorneys general. It’s interspersed with talk about fuel prices, which the farmers can recite like baseball stats; it comes up as they talk about a neighbor’s new equipment, and a recent Alexander Hamilton biography, and the annoyance of having a girlfriend insisting on trying to text you when you’re out on the tractor. He knows where Gillett is.
STUFFING FOR A SUCKLING PIG AND ’POSSUM
Put two tablespoonfuls of finely chopped onions into a saucepan with one teaspoon of oil. Toss them over the fire for five or six minutes, add eight ounces of rice boil[ed] in stock, an equal quantity of sausage meat, four or five ounces of butter,