by Pat Conroy
The day after we buried Joop, Luke caught a twelve-pound Spanish mackerel off the dock before Sunday dinner. Mom stuffed it with shrimp, mussels, and scallops and baked it with wine, heavy cream, and a handful of herbs she selected at random. When we ate it, the white flesh fell lightly from the bones and the shellfish exploded with the perfectly married flavors of the vineyard, the dairy, and the sea. Two hours before we ate it, the mackerel had been feeding in the Colleton River. Luke had found a whole shrimp in its belly, eaten moments before the fish struck the bait on Luke’s hook. Luke cleaned the single shrimp and Mom added it to the stuffing for luck.
“This is it,” I Said. “This has got to be the one.”
“I don’t know,” my father said. “I like fried fish just fine.”
“You couldn’t get this good of a meal in a really fine restaurant,” Luke said.
“How would you know, Luke?” Savannah teased. “You’ve never been to a really fine restaurant, except one that served yellow grits.”
“It’s a little too much,” my mother said, chewing slowly. “Too heavy and too much. And a little too commonplace in some ways. I read today that simplicity is the key to elegance in anything. But I think a thing can be too simple.”
“Yeah, take Dad for instance,” Savannah said.
“Ha!” my father said brightly. “Simplicity, huh! That must mean I’m one of the most elegant sons of bitches in the lowcountry.”
“No,” my mother answered, “I’m sure that’s not what it means.”
“Did you find any more good recipes today, Mom?” I asked.
“I found one for a Neapolitan soup that includes parts of a pig’s lung, heart, and windpipe. I decided not to make it.”
“Good,” Dad said, with a mouthful of mackerel. “It makes me want to puke just to hear you describe it.”
“How repulsive,” Savannah said.
“I bet it’s good,” my mother replied. “It’s the idea of it that’s disgusting. I bet the first person ever to eat a snail felt a small twinge of revulsion.”
“I bet he puked,” Dad said.
At the beginning of August she announced in quiet triumph that she had finally discovered the perfect recipe. She had thawed eight wild ducks that Luke had killed the previous winter. The stock she made from the discarded duck bones and parts was dark as chocolate and its flavor was wild and sun-charged but slightly overpowering. She cut the wildness with a little red wine and a dash of cognac. She then sat down for an hour and thought about everything she knew about the flavor of wild duck. She cooked the ducks slowly with turnips and onions and tart apples and scuppernong grapes from the arbor. She considered the mysteries of balance and proportion in a perfect meal. When we sat down to dinner, we could sense her apprehension. She was worried about the grapes. She had consulted no cookbooks; she had cast off into the unknown without her copies of Gourmet to guide her. Using only what she found in her larder, she was on her own.
I was worried about the turnips but my mother assured me that wild duck was the only meat she knew of capable of holding its integrity against a turnip. That bothered me not at all; I simply hated turnips. But the fruit cut the bitterness of the turnips and the turnips played their role flawlessly by diminishing the cloying sweetness of the grapes. The meat was the color of wild roses and even my father ceased his nightly lament on the joys of fried food and ate with silent gusto. It was my mother’s own creation, it was marvelous, and we stood and gave her a standing ovation after the meal was finished. It was her seventh standing ovation of the summer.
Mom curtsied and blew us kisses and her eyes shone with a pleasure rare in our house. In an uncommon display of affection, she went around the table and kissed each of us. She even kissed my father, and the two of them began to waltz toward the living room as my mother giggled and hummed a melody remembered from the sweet days of their courtship in Atlanta. My mother looked comfortable and natural in my father’s arms and for the first time I noticed how handsome they were together. It was a summer of extravagant, almost elegiac, happiness for all of us. In the kitchen my mother performed like some inspired magus above the stove and my father was filling up the hold of his boat with shrimp. Our home began to feel like a home was supposed to feel, the anchorage I had been longing for my whole life. The summer was sun-darkened and glad. My parents were handsome and I ate like a king after I worked all day gathering shrimp from the sea.
After supper, she was smiling to herself as she addressed the envelope to the cookbook committee. The doors of the house were open and a cool wind from the river swept through the rooms. I watched my mother lick a stamp and place it in the corner of the envelope. Then I saw Savannah watching her sadly. Savannah looked up at me. Our eyes met briefly in that blinding prescience and telepathy sometimes granted to twins. We could feel our mother setting herself up as a victim once again and were helpless to do anything about it.
The answer came within a week. We knew there had been an answer because there were no smells coming from the kitchen when we drove up to the house that night. The house was empty and Luke and I went out into the back yard and found Savannah comforting our mother, who had gone to the grape arbor to weep alone when the letter had come. Savannah handed the letter to me and Luke.
Dear Mrs. Wingo,
The committee and I wish to thank you from the bottom of our hearts for submitting your “old family recipe” for Canard Sauvage de Casa de Wingo. Unfortunately, all of us agree that we want our cookbook to represent the very best of regional cuisine and do not have the space to include the more exotic foreign offerings of our town’s finest cooks. Thank you so much for your thoughtfulness and time.
Sincerely,
Isabel Newbury
P.S. Lila, you simply must tell me what cookbook you copied that recipe out of. It sounds absolutely divine.
I exploded and said, “Tell her you copied it out of A Guide to Poisonous Mushrooms in America, and you’ll be glad to serve it at her next tea.”
“That does it,” Luke said. “I’m going to beat the shit out of her son.”
“Please, please,” my mother said through her tears. “There’s no need to be vulgar and her son has nothing to do with it. It’s nothing, really. I’m sure they only want certain names and certain families in the book. I’m just glad I had an opportunity to be considered. It was honor enough just to be able to send in a recipe. And I won’t let a little thing like this bother me. I have too much pride to let them see me hurt. Did y’all notice anything funny about the title of my dish? I worried that the title might be a little too-too.”
“I don’t even understand the title,” Luke said, still perusing the letter. “I thought you’d fixed duck.”
“I thought the French made it sound more elegant,” said Mom, drying her tears.
“It’s a perfect name for a wonderful dish,” Savannah said.
Mom said, “I think they’d adore it if they just gave it a chance, don’t you, dear?”
“It would be very hard for them to taste the meal where I was going to put it, Mama,” my sister said.
“She’s gonna stick it up their fat asses, Mama,” Luke explained cheerfully.
“Maybe they know my children are vulgar,” my mother said, rising from the bench where she sat. “Maybe they think if I can’t control my own children, I don’t deserve to be in the League.”
Luke went over and lifted her off her feet. He kissed her gently on the cheeks. She looked like a mannequin in a children’s store in his arms.
“Mama,” he said, holding her up, “I’m so sorry they hurt you. I can’t stand to see you crying. If they ever hurt you again, I’ll break into one of their meetings and kick all their asses. I’ll make them eat wild duck with turnips and grapes until they start flying south for the winter.”
“It’s just a club, Luke,” my mother said, straightening her dress as he set her gingerly on the grass. “I swear you children get more riled up about it than I do. I’m just trying to get a li
ttle bit ahead so you children have a few more advantages than I had. I was crying because I thought I’d messed up the name of my dish. Something isn’t quite right about it. I wasn’t sure until Isabel Newbury wrote the entire name of the recipe in her note. As if it were a big joke. As if she had gotten a big laugh over the name. Casa is the French word for house, isn’t it, children?”
“Yes,” we answered simultaneously, even though not one of us knew the French word for French.
That night we lay awake in the dark listening to the winds roaring out of the north and the waves crashing into the sea wall along the river. Beneath the tremendous sound of wind and water we could hear Mom crying in her room and the murmur of my father’s rough, ineffectual voice trying to comfort her. After dinner, she had discovered that the French word she should have used was chez. She could bear almost any humiliation except one that demonstrated the immense deficiencies of her education.
“Could anyone please tell me why Mom wants to get in the Colleton League so bad?” J asked.
“She doesn’t like who she is,” Savannah answered.
“Where did she get these ideas?” Luke asked. “That’s what I can’t figure out. Where did they come from?”
“She just picked them up along the way,” Savannah explained.
“Hell,” Luke said, “she’s going to be president of the Garden Club next year. You’d think that would make her happy.”
“Anyone can belong to the Garden Club,” said Savannah. “All you have to be is white and able to bury a seed. No, Mom has to have what she can’t get. That’s the only thing that’s ever meant anything to her.”
Then the bad season came upon my family, the deadly season when the river betrayed us and all the other Carolinians who made their living from the sea. It began in January, six months after the duck, and we could tell it was a cold like we had never known before. We awoke for the first time in our lives to snow, four inches of it, that covered the island and froze the black water pond in the center of the island. The marsh was white along the fringes and the rabbits and field mice, foraging for grain, were easy targets for the hawks. The sky was bitter and gray and the temperature hung around ten degrees Fahrenheit during the day for an entire week. The pipes froze, then burst, and the house went without water for two weeks. The power lines leading to the island were dropped by an icy limb, plunging us into darkness. We lived in the soft glow of kerosene lanterns. We built great fires and my mother melted snow from our shoes on the wood stove when we came in from gathering wood. There was a sense of gaiety and an atmosphere of some surprising and illicit festival in our house, and the schools were closed for five days. There was not a single snow-removing vehicle in the whole state, nor was there a sled in all of Colleton County. We had our first snowball fight in the front yard and built our first snowman.
An old arthritic black man, Clem Robinson, died of exposure not three miles from our house. Before the snow could melt for good, an ice storm covered the lowcountry and we learned the deeper treachery of ice. At night, we could hear the disconsolate sounds of trees breaking under the weight of their glistening unnatural burden. Limbs broke with a terrifying violence, like the snapping of healthy bones. We did not know that trees could die beneath a lens of chilling ice. We did not know they could die aloud in sharp, enfilading reports that made the forest resonate with the ghostly firepower of a season up in arms. In the Atlantic, the temperature of the water began to drop below forty-five degrees Fahrenheit and the shrimp my father had a rendezvous to catch the following spring began to die. They perished in countless billions and news of their decimation would go unreported until the shrimpers of Carolina all came up with empty nets in March. The shrimp did not return to the inlets and creeks in the innumerable, teeming shoals. They seemed to come singly or in pairs and the gravid females, flooding the marshes with their eggs, carried with them the awesome responsibility of the preservation of the species as they urged themselves toward the spawning creeks. It was the year that the bank repossessed seventeen shrimp boats and sold them at auction. In two weeks of relentless, backbreaking shrimping from daylight to darkness, my father’s boat pulled up only forty pounds of shrimp. The sea was barren. The fish and sea birds behaved strangely. There was insufficiency and famine in the tides. For the first time in modern memory, shrimp became a rare and prized delicacy on Colleton tables.
In May, my father missed the first payment on the shrimp boat and the next day he headed south toward Georgia waters. But there, too, the nets came up with catches so meager that he never caught enough shrimp to cover the expense of fuel. He continued south, talking to other shrimpers, listening to rumors of fabulous catches in the Florida Keys and the Gulf. In Saint Augustine, the authorities caught him sweeping a river channel that had been closed to shrimpers because of the freeze. It was both a gamble and an act of desperation and they impounded his shrimp boat and fined him five hundred dollars. He took a job as an auto mechanic in a transmission shop on Highway 17. It would take him six months to pay the fine and get his boat back to Carolina waters. He called my mother and said it was up to us to keep up the payments on the boat.
Luke, Savannah, and I began a ritual of rising at five in the morning and setting a string of crab pots in the river. We would empty the traps of blue crabs, spilling them into a large barrel centered in the boat and baiting the traps with fresh mullet and trash fish. We began with twenty traps and by summer’s end we were pulling out fifty along twenty miles of river and creek. Because we were new on the river, we had to respect the rights of the commercial crabbers and set out pots in remote channels far from Colleton proper. We ranged far and wide throughout the county, leaving the wire traps as the signature of our passing. Tying white floats to a rope, we would haul the baited traps into the advancing or withdrawing tides. You could follow us from float to float over the wildest, most desolate stretches of our county. At first we worked slowly and our movements were inexpert and wasteful. But we grew into our task, learned the rhythms of the work, and developed an expertise based on our initial mistakes. In the first month, it took us ten minutes to empty a trap of crabs and to bait it again for the next tide. But in the second month, the same operation took us less than two minutes per trap. It was a matter of perfecting the technique of crabbing. We refined our movements; we learned grace and the economy of precise gestures; we learned that crabbing, like everything else, had its own native beauty, its own properties of dance. We broke even the first month because all our profits went into buying new traps. In the second month, we paid the note on our father’s shrimp boat. The older crabbers watched our progress as we brought our catch to be weighed. In the beginning, we were the object of their derision and jokes. By August, we were initiates into their brotherhood. They would gather around to admire Savannah’s rough and calloused hands. They gave sound advice. They taught us the mysteries of their rugged craft. Then, after we had mastered the essentials, they praised us by their silence. We were born to the river and they expected us to be good at what we were born to do.
But no matter how we labored on the waters, we could not assuage our mother’s fears. There was not enough money to pay the bills. In September the electricity was turned off on the island. My mother’s face was vulnerable and worried beneath the soft light of kerosene. Then, she could not pay for the insurance on the shrimp boat. The phone was disconnected. I was teased at school for wearing pants far too short for my size. My mother tried to get a job in every store in Colleton, but there were no openings. Each night after school, I wandered into the creeks and threw the cast net for our dinner. We hunted deer out of season, killing even does and fawns to put meat on our table. We were made desperate by our mother’s silent but explicit terror. She would not let us tell anyone, not even our grandparents, of the seriousness of our dilemma. The frissons of her unalterable pride made her incapable of asking her neighbors for help. Her withdrawal from the town was aboriginal and primitive. She could not pay her bills at the grocery store
or the hardware store so she simply quit going to town. She turned inward. Her silences became prolonged and troublesome. She worked her garden with a compulsive rage. A tentativeness settled over our house. We waited for our luck to change. The shrimp returned to the river and the nets were swollen again with huge catches of white shrimp. But our father was still trying to earn enough money to ransom his dry-docked boat in Florida.
