On Grandma's Porch Read online

  Granny’s hands were caked with flour, so she pointed Arthur and me to search through some of her less-used kitchen junk drawers for the pliers. I was glad for the distraction. I rummaged through a couple and then came upon one drawer with a stubborn attitude. It refused to pull out. I tugged hard, leaning backward. I tugged once, tugged again.

  When the drawer finally gave way, it gave way with gusto. It flew open, tossing me onto my rump in the floor and something black and hairy into my lap. The beast scampered across my belly, ran up my arm, and around my tender shoulders before scurrying off in a mad dash to escape human wrath. Screaming at a pitch that would break Hobnail glass, I leaped into my brother’s arms. My fillings quivered.

  “Whoa, watch out there,” Arthur stuttered, but Granny didn’t even pause from dredging chicken parts.

  “What’s all this commotion about?” she asked calmly.

  “It’s a rat, or something, Granny,” Arthur said, struggling to hold on to me and not let my feet touch the ground. “He’s gone now, Julia. It’s okay, I won’t put you down.”

  Granny took her time milking and flouring the last breasts and thighs. She placed the pieces on the baking sheet and covered them with a dishtowel before even coming over to see if I had survived. Dusting her hands off on her yellow checkered apron, she leaned over the drawer, which now lay in the floor, as if investigating a crime scene. “Hum, what have we got here?” she said. “Looks like we got us some good eats for dinner.”

  Arthur moved a few steps closer, with me hanging around his neck like a talisman of bad luck. That remark had even piqued my interest. Had I heard her right? What on God’s green earth could be in a drawer that we’d want for dinner? I wriggled out of my brother’s arms, being careful where I stepped, and leaned tentatively over the drawer.

  There, eight tiny rat-lings lay nestled in with the canning tongs and Mason jar lids. Their eyes weren’t even open yet. They squirmed close to each other, searching their dishrag nest for the mother they knew had been there just moments ago.

  My hand caught the first droplets of vomit. No way was I eating baby rats. I ran out the back door toward the outhouse, and under the arbor of wisteria, but I only made it as far as the packinghouse stoop. When I returned, still green and queasy, I slumped into a vinyl kitchen chair. Granny was just lifting the first few chicken legs from the hot oil.

  “We’re not really eating those little critters for dinner, are we, Granny?”

  She didn’t answer. She just raised her eyes to me and smiled one of those smiles that are impossible to decipher. “Did any ants attack you on your way to the john?” she asked.

  I thought for a minute. “No, ma’am.”

  “Any other catastrophe besiege you? Wasps, hornets, yellow flies?”

  “No, Ma’am.”

  “A fern monster grab your leg while you upchucked?”

  I shook my head.

  “So I guess you’re gonna help me wash the fern fronds tomorrow and get them packed, iced and ready to ship off to florists all across these fine United States then?”

  The snakes my mother had mentioned that slither amongst the ferns and often visit the packinghouse came to mind. I had to pause before answering. Could I really do it? Could I handle being out there with danger lurking at my feet, just waiting to bite me, burn me, or jump into my lap? I wasn’t sure. “I’ll have to ask Mother,” I said.

  “Your momma is a wonderful woman, but I did her wrong raising her up. I coddled her to the point of making her wimpy. It’s my fault, not hers. I didn’t want my baby to suffer. I didn’t want her to have to deal with pain and strife. But it don’t have to be like that, you know. You’re a strong little dickens. Just look how you handled yourself with those pesky old ants. And I’ve never seen a child brave a sunburn like you’ve got as well as you did. This here is a prime opportunity to face those big bad monsters you’ve created for yourself. Them ants gotta bite and that sun gotta burn, but you, young’un’, gotta snub your nose at it all. You can either be a shrinking violet or stand tall like a hardy mum. It’s your pick.”

  Granny turned back to tend her chicken.

  I sat there for a long while. I traced the flower pattern on the vinyl tablecloth with my finger, not having the courage yet to answer or to join Granny at the stove. Finally I moved to stand beside her. I tugged on her apron. She stopped and looked down.

  “How do you keep those ants from biting you, Granny?” I asked.

  She tussled my hair. “Meanness, for one thing, pure meanness. They know better than to mess with Queen Esther Ashcraft Gaston. I can be as mean as a snake, if need be, you know. But more than that, young’un’, I tread lightly. Yep, I tread lightly and I watch out where I place my feet.”

  Queen Esther dished up a fine dinner that night, double-coated fried chicken, scrubbed clean potatoes, mashed with homemade butter and fresh milk, lady peas, angel biscuits and tomato slices the size of pancakes. I didn’t try the casserole she prepared, though, even after she encouraged me that it was a fine way to snub my nose at my fear. It resembled her cornbread-dressing recipe, usually my favorite. But the eight grayish lumps just visible below its crusty surface reminded me too much of baby rats in a drawer.

  “What are those?” I asked, pointing to the mounds.

  Granny smiled another one of her unreadable smiles.

  Daddy scooped a huge helping onto his plate and announced, “Chicken livers, them are chicken livers and gizzards, too. Good ones, I might add. Give ’em a try.”

  I swallowed hard and hoped no one ever pulled one over on me like had just been pulled over on him. I wanted so badly to prove to Granny that I was brave, but her fried chicken had been so good, I wanted it to remain in my tummy where it was. Arthur, usually the garbage disposal of the family, didn’t indulge in the mystery casserole either.

  I guess I wasn’t the only fearful subject in Granny’s kingdom of scaredy cats.

  When Grandma and Grandpa Went Shopping In The 1950s

  Coke-a-Cola came in glass bottles and cost ten or fifteen cents.

  A gallon of gas cost fifty cents.

  A hamburger cost less than twenty cents.

  The average family of four lived on an annual income of about $5,000.

  A dozen eggs cost sixty cents.

  First-class postage was three cents.

  TV shows were in black and white.

  Favorite TV shows included westerns like Wyatt Earp and Gunsmoke, and variety shows such as The Milton Berle Show.

  Favorite singers included Pat Boone, Bobby Darin, Perry Como and Patti Page.

  Have A Coke and A Smile

  “As a teenager I worked in the drugstore of my small, south Georgia town. Old men would gather there every morning and order what they called ‘a glass of dope,’ with no ice and no ‘fizz.’ Then they’d sit on benches outside the drugstore and drink it. This was their tonic.

  “The ‘dope,’ of course, was Coke-a-Cola syrup. This was back when the soda jerk mixed a soft drink for you, squirting Coke syrup into a glass then adding carbonated water and ice. Even though everyone knew Coke had no ‘dope’ in it, the old men were convinced of its eye-opening powers.”

  —Sandra Chastain, The Green Bean Casserole

  A Presbyterian Cookbook

  by Bert Goolsby

  “Within the South itself, no other form of cultural expression, not even music, is as distinctively characteristic of the region as the spreading of a feast of native food and drink before a gathering of kin and friends.”

  —John Egerton, from “Southern Food, at Home, on the Road, in History”

  “I don’t want neither one of y’all to get me anything for Christmas,” Mamaw declared immediately after we finished our dinner in celebration of Thanksgiving 1944 and before anyone could leave the table. “Charlie—you and Davy. Y’all h
ear me?”

  Mr. Charlie and I looked at each other. I could tell her statement troubled him as much as it did me.

  “Does that mean I don’t get nothing either?” I asked, concerned that my Christmas might once more be a bleak one. The year before Santa Claus brought me only a New Testament, a pair of homemade socks, and an aviator cap—none of which I’d asked for.

  Ever since my parents died three years before in a railroad crossing collision, I had lived with my grandmother and her second husband Charlie Kranshaw, folks with plenty of love but not much money. Mr. Charlie worked as a produce clerk at the Jitney Jungle in town while Mamaw eked out a small income from some cows and chickens they owned.

  I had yet to get used to being what I considered “poor” and not getting the gifts I wanted when Christmas came around. My dad had been a salesman of industrial containers and had made a good living for his wife and only son; but being a man with little or no foresight, he’d left no insurance, either on himself or on my mother. Worse yet, a jury later ruled fault for the accident lay with him and not the railroad. He’d been drinking.

  Mr. Charlie drew a deep breath and shook his head. “And what iffen I done already got you somethin’ other, Treace?”

  Mamaw pushed back from the table, stood, and picked up the platter that held what little remained of the hen she had baked. “Then you can just march yourself on back down to the store and return it, that’s what you can do,” she said, ignoring my question in favor of Mr. Charlie’s.

  “But what iffen they won’t take it back, then what?” he asked, his head tilted sideways.

  “You just make sure they do, that’s what.”

  “But Treace—”

  “But Treace, my foot. You take that thing back, whatever it is, and I don’t mean maybe. You hear me?”

  Mr. Charlie frowned. “All right then. But come Christmas and I ain’t got you nothin’, don’t you forgit you done told me not to git you nothin’.”

  Mamaw whirled around and stomped off to the kitchen with the platter and one other serving dish in her hands.

  I never quite knew what to do in these situations. When Mamaw’s birthday approached, she would usually pull the same stunt. We never knew from year to year whether Mamaw really meant she didn’t want anything or she wanted something special but didn’t want to say what it was for fear of being disappointed if she didn’t get it.

  “Mr. Charlie,” I whispered, once the door between the dining room and the kitchen swung shut, “what’d you buy her?”

  He leaned toward me, a hand to his mouth. “I got her a cookbook. They was sellin’ them down there at First Presbyterian for only fifty cent a piece.”

  My mouth flew open. “A Presbyterian cookbook!” I exclaimed in a whisper, glancing at the swinging door and expecting Mamaw to return at any moment for the other dishes. “Golly Pete, Mr. Charlie, a Presbyterian cookbook ain’t something you’d give Mamaw at no time, much less for a Christmas present. I ain’t but eleven years old and I know that.”

  “How you know it ain’t?”

  Before I could answer him, the door banged open and Mamaw returned to the dining room. “What you two still sitting in here for? Eat so much you can’t move?”

  “No, huh-uh. Me and Davy, we was just sittin’ here talkin’, you know, ’bout Christmas and all and what he wants Santa Claus to bring him this year.”

  Mamaw scraped two plates and stacked them on top of the one Mr. Charlie had used. His didn’t need scraping. It never did. “I hope you realize, Davy, wanting and getting, they’re two different things, especially this day and time.”

  The best I could recall, I’d learned that lesson the first Christmas after my folks got killed. I’d wanted a Shetland pony, and I didn’t get it. Instead, I got a wagon. As Mamaw had explained it at the time, “You don’t have to feed a wagon or clean up after it.”

  “Can I tell you what I want anyway, Mamaw? Although I know I won’t get it,” I said.

  She stood just behind Mr. Charlie at the head of the table, the stacked plates in her hands. “Well, yeah. What?”

  I swallowed and began to talk fast while I still had her attention. “Uh, I want a Mark Tidd book. I like reading them. And I want a new basketball. That’s because a truck run over my old one yesterday when me and Earl were out playing with it. I meant to tell you about it, but I plumb forgot to. And, uh, I’d like a radio for my room so I can listen to my programs without bothering y’all. You know, like when ‘Gangbusters’ comes on, on Wednesday nights?”

  “A Mark Tidd book and a ball and a radio so you can listen to ‘Gangbusters,’” she repeated. “Have you read that New Testament I gave . . . I mean, Santa brought you last Christmas?”

  “Nome.”

  “And you let your old basketball get out into the road for a truck to run over, did you?”

  “Well, I didn’t exactly let it. It—”

  “And you brought home a report card last week that had a B, three C’s, and two D’s and you’re wanting to listen to the radio on a school night?”

  I could tell Mr. Charlie felt for me. He looked at me, gritted his teeth, and squinted as if to say “Ouch.” Thank goodness Mamaw didn’t see him do it. If she had, she probably would’ve bopped him with the plates, not caring that they were her good china.

  “I guess what you’re saying, Mamaw, is I’m not gonna get any of those things and so it ain’t no need for me to even ask for them, right?”

  “Right. Now y’all get on outta here so I can clean up. I swear. I’ve never seen anybody who could mess up a table worse than the two of you can. Can’t neither one of you eat a soda cracker without getting it all over you?”

  Mamaw pushed her rear against the kitchen door to open it. “Oh, durn it all. I nearly ’bout forgot. I’ve gotta go to the hospital and see Cola Wells when I get done here. She’s laid up with appendicitis.”

  Cola Wells belonged to Mamaw’s missionary society. I never quite knew whom they “missionaried” to. Mostly, I think they just sat around, sipped coffee, ate pound cake, and gossiped about people.

  The way I heard it, Mrs. Wells and Mamaw once almost had a falling out when Mamaw married Mr. Charlie just a few months after Damon Enfinger, Mamaw’s first husband and my real grandpa, died of a heart attack a little less than a year before my parents got killed. Mrs. Wells thought that Mamaw wasn’t showing proper respect for her dead husband in marrying so soon after his death and that Mamaw hadn’t known Mr. Charlie long enough to marry him anyway. Mamaw met Mr. Charlie at an all-night sing or, as she often told the story, “Between the second and third stanzas of ‘Love Lifted Me’ when he come sat down by me there in the pew. I took it as a sign.”

  Mr. Charlie and I left the dining room and strolled out onto the front piazza where we picked up our conversation about the cookbook. “Now tell me now how you know the cookbook ain’t a good Christmas present for your grandma, Davy?”

  Before answering him, I made sure the front door was shut all the way. Even then, I talked in a low tone—a real, real low one. “Well, it might be good to get her a cookbook for Christmas, but, like I tried to tell you in yonder, I wouldn’t give her no Presbyterian one. Mamaw feels like—and I thought you knew this, Mr. Charlie—if it’s Presbyterian, she doesn’t want anything to do with it. Why, for you to give her a Presbyterian cookbook, it’d be like giving her a slap in the face.”

  “Huh! I ain’t thought about that,” he said, making a face. “That’s one thing I ain’t never understood—why come she don’t like Presbyterians. Them’s Christians too, I always thought. They just don’t shout and carry on. Not the ones I seen, don’t.”

  “Oh, I think it’s because of Granddaddy Damon. Wasn’t he a Presbyterian?”

  “I don’t know what he was. I ain’t never asked.”

  “Mamaw, she didn’t like nothing about
him, mama always said. Whatever he was for, she was dead set against. If he liked jelly, she liked jam. They argued all the time, mama said.”

  “I ain’t surprised none. She’s a strong woman, your grandma is. Iffen she don’t git her way or somethin’ other she wants, Lordy mercy, look out.”

  “Mama said Mamaw used to say, ‘The only things Damon Enfinger ever gave me were a beautiful daughter and a hard time.’ But Mama, she kinda thought it was the other way around, Mama did. It was her that gave my grandpa a hard time.”

  Mr. Charlie sat quietly for a moment or two. “Wonder, then, how I could go ’bout findin’ out what she does want so I can go git it for her?”

  An idea hit me. “Why don’t we call somebody over at the hospital and see if we can’t get them to have Mrs. Wells ask Mamaw when she gets there in kinda a round-about way what she’d like to have for Christmas and then, if Mamaw tells her, she could tell them what she says and they could tell us. Know anybody there?”

  Mr. Charlie slapped his knee. “Dad burn it, Davy, that’s a good idea. Yes, sir. A real good’un.”

  He walked to the edge of the piazza and peeked around the corner. “Tell you what. Let’s me and you watch and see iffen Treace goes to the outhouse and, iffen she goes, I’ll call over to the hospital. I know somebody there, sure ’nuff. She’s a nurse what works the second shift and I bet she’d ask Mrs. Wells to do it for us, iffen I asked her to. Her name’s Miss Gloria Deery. I see her near ’bout ever’ afternoon when she comes to the store ’fore she goes on her shift there at the hospital. She buys them seedless grapes we sell. Says she eats them for snacks since all the candy we git nowadays got worms in it, seems like.”

  We moved from the front porch to the side yard where we had a clear view of the privy. As we waited for Mamaw to finish up inside and perhaps answer a call of nature before she left for the hospital, Mr. Charlie and I threw a football back and forth. After about twenty minutes or so and as we hoped she’d do, Mamaw came out through the back door and hurried to the privy. Once she shut the door, Mr. Charlie took off for the house.