Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [7]
I laugh a little; she snorts a bit.
“I’m serious,” she says. “You do know this is kind of weird, right?”
In fact, I do. And I’m grateful that Eli (rhymes with “Kelly”) is just joking around, because right now I do want to go to Illinois and sit in a cold, bare field—in fact, I need to. So much of Twain’s life was spent looking back at his own youth; exploring those memories inspired his best work. The weekend after his wedding at the age of thirty-four, he found himself in a kind of trance, seeing old faces, hearing old voices. “The fountains of the deep have broken up,” he wrote to his longtime friend Will Bowen, who would later appear as Tom Sawyer’s companion Joe Harper. For a day and more, Twain watched and listened. It was as though settling into married life had primed a fuse that a letter from Bowen then lit, returning him to a childhood he was thrilled to rediscover. And the earliest of his many memories, the first with real heft, color, and presence, were of the wonderful feasts on his Uncle John Quarles’s prairie farm.
Every year the boy Sammy Clemens had spent several months on the farm, just four miles north of the hundred-person village of Florida, Missouri. Though Florida was a forest town, the farm abutted the prairie, “a level great prairie which was covered with wild strawberry plants, vividly starred with prairie pinks.” The farm’s five hundred acres were in a lucky country of grass, wood, and water, and all lent their bounty to the heavily laden table that Twain later remembered.
Ducks and geese, wild turkeys, venison, squirrel, rabbits, pheasants and partridge—when these wild things were served alongside garden-fresh corn, watermelons, cantaloupes, tomatoes, butter beans, and peas, and with the corn bread, fried chicken, and hot biscuits that Twain would later claim could never be properly cooked anywhere outside the South, the result was rooted food that would live forever in his memory. He’d remember its flavors, of course—but he’d remember, just as vividly, the way his uncle gathered and hunted and tended the foods, the way in which the meals sprang from a place he loved so dearly:
I can call back the prairie, and its loneliness and peace, and a vast hawk hanging motionless in the sky, with his wings spread wide and the blue of the vault showing through the fringe of their end feathers. . . . I can see the blue clusters of wild grapes hanging among the foliage of the saplings, and I remember the taste of them and the smell. I know how the wild blackberries looked, and how they tasted, and the same with the pawpaws, the hazelnuts, and the persimmons; and I can feel the thumping rain, upon my head, of hickory nuts and walnuts when we were out in the frosty dawn to scramble for them with the pigs. . . . I know the taste of maple sap, and when to gather it. . . . I know how a prize watermelon looks when it is sunning its fat rotundity among pumpkin vines and “simblins.” . . . I know the look of green apples and peaches and pears on the trees, and I know how entertaining they are when they are inside of a person. I know how ripe ones look when they are piled in pyramids under the trees, and how pretty they are and how vivid the colors. . . . I know the look of an apple that is roasting and sizzling on a hearth on a winter’s evening, and I know the comfort that comes of eating it hot, along with some sugar and a drench of cream.
I remember. I can remember. I know. I know. I know. Twain remembers; Twain chants. His memories bound together land and table, as surely as they joined Mark Twain with Sammy Clemens, the boy he once was.
Of all the incredible