get hellishly hot.
Daddy’s wielding of an often finicky chain saw and his choice of the next tree destined for the stove and heater were more art than science. A dying post oak on one hillside or a blown-down poplar from the bottom meant that no stand of timber was ever depleted. He never cut pines for the woodstove because the pitch created a dangerous residue in the flues that could ignite and burn the house down. But the fat lightwood we got from old pine stumps was a coveted commodity and we used it sparingly to start fires. The sap-soaked heartwood smelled like kerosene and burned like a torch.
In addition to the firewood gathered for Mamatha, the forest freely sacrificed sturdy posts and rails of hickory for corrals and fences. Big sweetgum and elm trees were left standing because they were almost impossible to split with an axe or maul. Daddy apparently didn’t think much of sycamore as wood or building material either because I can’t remember him ever cutting one. Maybe he just thought they were too pretty to put a saw blade into.
The hardwoods and pines that thrived in the hopscotching maneuvers of Daddy’s forestry weren’t all that random. The sylvan cycle of felling, cutting, loading, splitting, and burning was a year-round thing. The industry was hard work and the genesis of my understanding that in order to have something for later, you’d best make what you have now last. Daddy’s selection of trees to cut was an illustration of a land ethic being practiced. Certain hardwoods were most valuable. Red oaks, cut up, split, and dried, made the best firewood. Inhaling the pleasantly rank odor that came from a section of scarlet oak freshly laid open with a sledgehammer and maul was like sniffing smelling salts in the chill fall air. In the wood heater or laid across the fireplace andirons (we called them fire dogs), cured red oak popped and burned hot enough to quickly take the cold edge off a room. White oaks, especially young, straight, tall-growing ones, were reserved for construction. A twelve-foot log split in half lengthwise made sturdy railings for the feedlot corral. Hickories burned well, too, but were much harder to split and so they were cut sparingly. Sometimes Daddy made tool handles out of small ones because they were tough and lasted a long time. He’d save the dried hickory shavings and use them to smoke meat on the grill. Though Daddy cut trees for the services they could render, I’d like to think that he also found some soul-satisfying recognition of their beauty and usefulness as living beings.
If Mamatha’s house was the heart of the Home Place, Daddy’s hard labor was the breath that made its blood bright. Once the trees were down and chopped up, Jock and I moved in to split and load. Much of what we cut was bound for Mamatha’s old cast-iron cookstove. An antiquity even back then, it had probably been state of the art sometime in the early 1880s and stood on four stumpy legs like a black-and-white cow. The tiny kitchen where the stove stood was an orderly mess of culinary clutter. Cast iron skillets sat beside modern aluminum pots and pans. Plastic canisters and bowls covered the counters. Cabinets and a rolltop pantry overflowed with canned goods and bags of dried peas and beans. Enough food had been hoarded to feed us until Jesus came back for his next last supper.
There was other stuff in that kitchen that had probably been around for almost a hundred years. A boatlike wooden basin that had belonged to my great-grandmother Big Mama was frequently the focus of Mamatha’s kitchen attentions. Like her mother before her, she’d pour flour, buttermilk, and some shortening into it—Big Mama had probably used lard—and work it back and forth with her knotty fingers until a mound of clayey white dough emerged. The dough rolled flat, perforated with the mouth of a jelly glass, and fed into the belly of the stove became hot buttermilk biscuits. Buttered up and slathered in sticky, sweet molasses, there was nothing better. And accompanied by a plate of grits and maybe some fried calf’s liver and onions with gravy, the biscuits gave me just cause to spend most Saturday mornings at the Ramshackle before making my way to the Ranch. When I stayed for lunch, there might be fried-bologna sandwiches and potato salad.
Breakfast and lunch were always good. Dinner, though, was on a separate level of delightful gluttony. Mamatha often started cooking it right after breakfast, to take advantage of the already hot stove and to let the flavors meld and marinate for hours. Garden-grown string beans and red-skinned white potatoes, fresh tomato and creamed corn soup, fried crookneck squash and green spring onions, baked macaroni and cheese pie, roast beef, and cornbread might all make up a single glorious meal. Top that off with a crusty peach cobbler, molasses bread, lemony tea cakes, creamy sweet potato pie, or some ancient but delicious butter-drenched pound cake dug from the lower-room freezer: my waistline quickly expanded into a Sears “Husky” size.
Cooking the way Mamatha did took time and she never rushed food to the table. Convenience and impatience were not excuses for eating poorly. We always ate at the table. Even though Daddy eventually bought my grandmother an electric stove, it sat unused because she didn’t trust it to cook the “right” way. To her fast food meant the meal would be ready in an hour—or two. I’m not sure Mamatha ever touched a hamburger or fry that didn’t come from a Home Place cow or homegrown potato. If she did I’ll bet she thought that it was somehow the devil’s doing.
Mamatha never would’ve cooked so much food for herself alone. The never-ending buffet was her way of keeping me around. It was a simple formula: she cooked, I ate. The bribery mostly worked. The food was fuel for adventures to come. From the kitchen table the woods and fields beckoned.
A chilly October morning is an undeniable temptation to any wild-loving seeker. But a Saturday with ice-frosted fields and storms of colorful leaves swirling about makes the undeniable irresistible. Unchained from school obligations, there were only my chores to struggle through. I tried to fly through the bed making, wood chopping, floor sweeping, and whatever else Mamatha dreamed up, to get outside as quickly as possible. Like cooking and eating, though, housework was not a place for rushing. I can still hear her mantra: “When a job is once begun, never leave it ’til it’s done. Be the labor great or small, do it well or not at all.”
When the chores were finally done, however, I could break free of the house and enter a fantasy world of earth and sky. The path to those places wound past a big pecan tree, where roving gangs of noisy blue jays conducted morning raids to gather a share of nuts. Pecans were a coveted Home Place commodity, since they yielded sweet holiday pies. The bold jay mobs disrupted that flow and Mamatha took it personally, frequently blasting away at the birds with her .410 shotgun. A few paid for the robberies with their lives but the raids never ended and the pies kept coming, too. There seemed to be enough pecans to go around. Just beyond the pecan tree there was a mucky, smelly feedlot where Daddy fattened up steers for slaughter. Luckily for me, a boy who had more than enough work to keep him occupied, we were spared the squeezing and squirting that milk cows demanded.
Much of the Home Place was fenced. Walking the cow path through the pasture and the creek bottom was a quick way to check the fence line for breaks without interrupting the day’s exploration. If I couldn’t somehow splice a repair or prop up a leaning post I’d report the broken place to Daddy when I finally got to the Ranch. Before I got too deep into the woods, I might take a few minutes to lie in the pasture lane, enticing the “buzzards” to investigate. I lay as still as I could and did my best imitation of something stinking and dead. Once or twice the ruse worked and I could almost count the feathers in the broad black wings and see the bare red heads twisting to investigate before my nerve shriveled. I miraculously revived to run away before the vultures could peck my eyes out, like Mamatha had warned me they’d do. I felt closer to flight by bringing the birds nearer to my earthbound existence. Watching those scavengers tracing circles in the sky was hypnotic. I often wished we could trade places, that I could sail as effortlessly on the wind as they did.
Teasing vultures and imagining flight, I strolled along pasture paths and through forests and fields. The days seemed endlessly long and way too short at the same time. I’d walk for hours before showing up at the Ranch and no one would ask me where I’d been. Days, weeks, months, seasons, and years on the Home Place passed and every moment offered new lessons. It was a time of freedom and discovery.
On the Home Place there
