Some Wildflower In My Heart (36 page)

Thanksgiving Day dawned sunny and mild for November. Thomas set about early in the day cleaning his outdoor grill—a brick affair that he had erected in the backyard shortly after our marriage but had put to use only rarely, due to the fact, I suppose, that I did not care to relinquish my control over the cooking of the meat, preferring instead to start supper before he returned home from the hardware store. After scrubbing and hosing the metal rack, he began laying charcoal and hickory chips in the lower part of the grill. I watched him for a while through my bedroom window, which faces the backyard.

I had washed and thawed the turkey, given to us, you recall, by Birdie's incurably talkative friend, Eldeen Rafferty, and it sat now in the refrigerator awaiting further attention. As I watched Thomas preparing the grill, I knew that I could choose one of two courses: I could obstruct his plans by hastily setting the turkey in the oven to bake, or I could allow him to grill the turkey uncontested.

I saw him check his watch and disappear into the storage shed. He emerged a few seconds later bearing a large sheet of metal that he placed over the top of the pit, turning it twice to determine the best fit. He had equipped the sheet with a wooden handle for lifting, for it was intended as a lid. This sheet of metal he then removed, sprayed with water, and wiped with paper towels. I saw that he had apparently taken a new roll of paper towels from the kitchen pantry and was using them quite profligately, as is usually the manner of men with disposable goods.

I reached my decision. I would leave the cooking of the turkey to Thomas. I dimly recalled a pheasant he had grilled some fourteen or fifteen years earlier, and I suddenly craved the taste of smoked fowl. In addition, I thought of the other dishes I planned to prepare for our dinner and realized that I could devote more of my time and oven space to those if I were not continually marking the progress of the turkey.

I spent the morning and early afternoon in the assembly of a yam casserole, shoepeg corn pudding, green bean bake, creamed broccoli, cranberry salad, yeast rolls, and a pecan pie. I am not given to cooking dishes in advance and freezing them. I prefer to eat my food on the same day that it is prepared. I had brewed tea the night before, however, and had set it in a sealed pitcher in the refrigerator.

We generally eat our Thanksgiving meal at two o'clock in the afternoon, but it was almost three o'clock when we finally sat down that day. Thomas had spoken very little during his comings and goings from yard to kitchen, but it was plain that he considered the grilling of the turkey to be not only a matter of great import but also an adventure he relished. When he finally brought the turkey into the kitchen on a platter, he carried it before him solemnly and set it upon the counter with the attitude of one presenting a sacrifice. We both studied it silently. It was fit to be pictured in a magazine.

“Ain't he a dandy?” Thomas said at length.

“I hope the meat is not dry,” I said. “Grilled meat often is.”

“Depends on the meat
and
on the one doin' the grillin',” Thomas said. “You must've forgot what a hand I always was at outdoor cookin'.”

“Well, we shall see,” I said. “It
looks
satisfactory.”

Thomas loosened up and laughed with his usual abandon. “Yep, like my pop always used to say ever' time we'd sit down at the table, ‘Looks good enough to eat!'”

Though I saw nothing humorous in the remark, I smiled slightly and turned again to the kitchen table, upon which I had laid a white tablecloth and our white dishes, our only set at the time. I had placed a neatly ironed green napkin beside the forks at each setting. Now I set a small dish of cranberry salad to the left of the forks at each place.

Thomas walked to the stove and lifted the lids of the casserole dishes one at a time. This is generally an act I greatly dislike. I had communicated to him early in our marriage that he could view the food when it was set upon the table and not before, for there is nothing more annoying when one is working in the kitchen than to have someone underfoot, especially a man who is only meddling and has no intention of volunteering his help. I let it go for the moment, however, with only a brief word. “Dinner will be on the table in five minutes. No doubt you will want to wash your hands.”

Thomas tested me further by turning on the faucet at the kitchen sink in order to wash his hands. I have told him repeatedly of my aversion to hand washing within splashing distance of food being prepared for consumption. The first time I told him this, some sixteen years ago, he grinned and said, “Prepared for consumption? Does that mean for
eatin
'? Now what else would you be preparin' food for, Rosie?” He understood my point, however, and only rarely failed to go to the bathroom sink.

I set trivets upon the table and transferred the casserole dishes from the stove, then placed the turkey in the center of the table. After putting ice in the glasses, I poured the tea, checked on the rolls in the oven, and announced to Thomas that everything was ready. A few minutes later we sat down to our Thanksgiving dinner.

The evening we had eaten at the Field Pea Restaurant, Virgil Dunlop had asked if he might “bless the food,” as he termed it. We had acquiesced, of course, not caring to argue the matter publicly, and he had prayed quite without inhibition, only barely lowering the volume at which he spoke. It was a custom that I had been familiar with as a girl; both my mother and my grandparents had said grace before meals. I had ceased private prayers some years before fleeing from my grandparents' home, having seen the inefficacy of prayer in general and of my prayers in particular, and I had not heard a prayer uttered at mealtime since the age of seventeen. Thomas had never given any indication to me of having prayed in his lifetime.

You may imagine my astonishment, then, when upon sitting down for our Thanksgiving dinner, Thomas cleared his throat, inhaled deeply, and said to me, “Rosie, it's such a pretty table you've gone and fixed up that I think it deserves somethin' special. Is it all right with you if I…well, I thought I might…you know, just say a little somethin' before we eat.”

“What do you propose to say?” I asked as if confused, though in truth I suspected his meaning.

He did not answer but instead bowed his head and recited the following: “For this food we give thanks and ask…and ask to be fed and filled with…with plenty.” He paused a moment, seeming unsure of the next step, and then said, “Amen.” Neither of us looked at the other while we unfolded our napkins and placed them upon our laps. Thomas took a noisy drink from his glass of iced tea and said, “Now I'll cut the turkey,” and he picked up the carving knife and proceeded to do so rather expertly. I had all but forgotten that during the months before we were married and for some time thereafter, he had demonstrated his meat-carving skill quite regularly. I cannot say why he had ceased the practice over the years, but most likely it was again my own impatience to get a job done that led me to take over not only the preparing of the meat but the slicing as well.

Thomas has large and powerful hands. As he carved the turkey, the thought came to me that they were also capable. I believe that one's character in many ways is imprinted upon his hands. Though I often avoid looking into a person's eyes, I most often study his hands closely. I have a vast mental catalog of them. I remember my mother's hands as if they were my own. As I grew to adulthood, in fact, one small pleasure to me amid the abundance of pain was the recognition as I looked upon my own hands that they were becoming very like what I remembered my mother's to have been. If I have “set a store,” as Thomas would say it, upon any of my physical attributes, it would, I suppose, be my hands. This is one way that Birdie had first wedged a crack in the door of my heart, for you may recall that she had more than once spoken of them in favorable terms.

“That is certainly more than enough turkey for the present,” I said, realizing that Thomas had now sliced a sixth piece. He laid the carving knife alongside the platter and reached for my plate, upon which he placed a slice of breast meat. I rose at the sound of the oven timer and removed the rolls from the baking sheet to a serving basket. Excluding Thomas's repeated murmurs of “Mmm-mmm,” we spoke very little as we served our plates from the casserole dishes, buttered our rolls, and so forth.

Something must have sparked within Thomas an urge to reminisce, however, for once his plate was full, he began talking of Thanksgivings past. In most families I believe it is the wife whose words weave colorful, unbroken monologues of repeating patterns; if not the woman, then certainly the children. Thomas, residing in a home with a silent wife and without children, had, I suppose, taken to talking in order to fill the emptiness, at times conversing more or less to himself, although I was almost always listening even when it may have appeared otherwise.

His memories this day spanned many decades, mingling stories from his boyhood with those of recent years, including even the Thanksgiving dinner of a year ago, when I had baked a huckleberry pie from berries that I had frozen during the summer and Thomas himself had made vanilla ice cream in our wooden churn to serve with the warm pie. I recalled my threefold irritation over the homemade ice cream: first, that he had set the churn in the bathtub without a protective cloth beneath it to prevent scratches, of which several resulted; second, that the expenditure of time and ingredients was completely unnecessary, considering the fact that I had bought a half-gallon of Sealtest vanilla ice cream two days before for the express purpose of complementing the huckleberry pie; and third, the season seemed inappropriate for homemade ice cream. I am sure that there are those, however, who would say the same about grilling a turkey outdoors on Thanksgiving Day.

We continued in this manner—Thomas talking and I listening—until he stopped abruptly and asked, “What do you remember about your Thanksgivings, Rosie?” Glancing at me innocently, he took a sizable bite from his roll and then, chewing, shifted his gaze to the soft inside of the roll, cocking his head as if looking upon a strange and wonderful thing. I could not remember the last time he had attempted to probe into my past, and I bristled at once at his question. I felt a sudden corrugation in what had been a smooth and peaceful day.

“For the past fifteen years I have eaten Thanksgiving dinner at the very table at which we are now seated,” I said. “I am sure that your memories of those occasions are as clear as mine.”

This last utterance had slipped out. I did not for a moment believe it. Over the years I had often noted with amazement the considerable mutation that took place between an actual event and Thomas's subsequent recollection of it. I am speaking not only of a man's tendency to exaggerate in reporting matters such as his height, the length of a fish that he caught, or the number of attendees at a rally, but also of the total transformation of simple facts. In the retelling of a story, Thomas often altered it to an astonishing extent, although the original story was itself sufficiently unbelievable. I had never been able to determine whether his modifications were intentional—for the purpose of embellishment—or whether he simply extemporized as his memory failed him.

“But what about all the years before those?” Thomas asked me now, holding his roll as one would hold a small sponge; he pushed it about at the edges of his serving of corn pudding as if tidying it up. Looking up, he smiled at me. “Don't you remember any Thanksgivin's from when you were little, Rosie? Did your mother fix a turkey? Did you go to a parade?”

I could, of course, have written a book about the Thanksgivings of my girlhood. The day was always a grand occasion for my mother, and therefore for me, too. My mother was a splendid cook, and though our fare was generally limited in quantity, it was sumptuously prepared and served. I always helped in the kitchen, learning many of the culinary skills I employ yet today—for instance, the making of perfect giblet gravy, pie crust, and corn bread. The day was filled with laughter, I recall, and the two of us took walks, listened to music, and read. Often my mother recited lines of plays that she had memorized and entire poems, such as “The White Cliffs of Dover” and “Fern Hill,” and selections from Masters'
Spoon River Anthology
.

I did not care to lay out such details for Thomas, however, for I feared that once I began I would not be able to stop. Remembering my mother's love of poetry, I had wondered since my recent discovery of Archibald Rutledge whether she had known of him. I believe she had studied poetry at some point in her life, either during her years of college before leaving her parents' home or during subsequent correspondence courses and independent reading. Since she had lived and studied in New York and the Midwest, however, her poetry courses most likely would not have included a Carolina poet whose name is not even listed in Merriam Webster's
Encyclopedia of Literature
.

“Here, I'll tell you what—let me prime the pump,” Thomas said, filling his fork with yam casserole and lifting it toward his mouth, studying it with a brief, ceremonial seriousness. “I'll tell you about something that happened the Thanksgiving I was thirteen, then you can see if you can remember that same Thanksgiving.” I felt as if a lead weight had suddenly plummeted to the pit of my stomach.

Thomas opened his mouth wide and inserted the forkful of yam casserole. After chewing a moment, he said, “'Course, that won't work, will it? I don't mean that
same
Thanksgiving 'cause you wouldn't've even been alive yet, but maybe you can try to think of how you spent the Thanksgiving you was thirteen.” He did not know what he was asking!

He launched into a twisted tale of the Thanksgiving of 1938, when he had lived in Kilgore Cave, North Carolina, and his father's four brothers had come with their families a day early so that the men could go hunting, the purpose being to provide a variety of meat for the Thanksgiving table.