The Biscuit Witch
Page 2
Mama had gone with that pie angel.
She whispered to me.
Gus and Gabby need you, baby. You’re the only one who can take care of them for me. Go on back now, you hear? And keep them safe. You’re the biscuit witch. Gabby’s the pickle queen, and Gus is the kitchen charmer.
I still can’t describe the wonder of that whisper. Even in the deepest grief, I knew I had a job to do. Somehow, I—the baby of the family—would become the quirky starch that held us together.
I promise. I will. But oh, Mama. Don’t go.
I have to, baby. But I’ll always be here when you cook for love.
Small children can hear the whispers of angels. The nature of unleavened childhood is so open to magic and so quiet. We are born inside our mothers, listening to their heartbeats, surrounded by their life. That memory never dies.
I heard. I believed.
Baked, Pickled and Stewed
FAMILY SCANDALS are like most “secret” family recipes—not very secret and not that special. Their mystique comes from the fact that, once upon a time, someone cared enough to hide them. Our grandmother, Emma Nettie, proved that a really good cook can dish up a scandal worthy of the name. Its secret ingredient? Our grandfather.
No one knew his identity. Not even Mama. Grandma Emma died in nineteen fifty-two when Mama was still a baby. Nettie’s relatives raised Mama. Had Grandma Emma been a shameful trollop or just a free spirit? A bootlegger’s babe or a minister’s girlfriend? Or both?
The known ingredients were these: she was a half-sister to Mary Eve Nettie, the Wild Woman of Wild Woman Ridge, high in the Ten Sister Mountains northwest of Asheville. Mary Eve was no shrinking violet either but managed to establish a more conventional brand of free-thinking womanhood than Emma. Both were great cooks.
Biscuit witches, Mama called them. She’d heard the term as a girl. She’d inherited that talent. My mother, Jane Eve Nettie MacBride, could cast spells on total strangers simply by setting a plate of her biscuits in front of them.
Mary Eve taught both Mama and her cousin, Delta Whittlespoon, to cook. Mama and Delta ran together as teens, working as short-order cooks and waitresses, smoking inventive substances, sipping homemade wine, chugging cheap beer, and sampling illegal corn whiskey (moonshine that’s been aged to mellow it). Mama was twenty-two when Mary Eve died. Delta was twenty.
Delta married Pike Whittlespoon, the future sheriff of Jefferson County, and Mama married our heroic Daddy, Stewart MacBride—farm boy, ex-army sarge, and Asheville police officer. She and Daddy scraped together the money for her to open Baked, Pickled and Stewed, the best hole-in-the-wall diner in Asheville, down the hill on Lexington Avenue, which was not the fine bohemian boulevard of hippies, slackers, art students, mimes, musicians, and tourist traffic it is today, but was then a place of forgotten storefronts and boarded-over vintage office buildings, where even the once glam Victorian gargoyles looked worried about the neighborhood.
Daddy built the diner’s tables out of rescued shipping pallets, and the chairs were salvaged from a tobacco warehouse that had been converted to a used furniture store out near Weaverville. Thus, the Baked, Pickled and Stewed Diner had everything from cane-backed chairs to sixties’ vinyl, seventies’ Naugahhyde, church pews, and a long hand-carved bench with toilet holes spaced along it. (Mama covered them with an upholstered plank.) Somewhere, a community outhouse was missing its sing-along room.)
Before long, the B, P and S became the must-go eatery for breakfast, lunch, and take-out dinners in the go-go years of the nineteen seventies. (Closing at seven p.m. every night so Mama could spend evenings with us and Daddy.) Mama believed in “farm-to-table” freshness decades before the marketing weasels coined that term. She offered herb-seasoned home cooking and from-scratch baking, plus sold her canned jellies, jams, relishes, and MacBride secret-recipe pickles. Daddy washed dishes and bussed tables, prepped vegetables, and kept the accounts.
Within the first two years, she and Daddy made enough money for a down payment on a house over in West Asheville—the bad side of town, putting it politely. Drive west out of the city, down Chicken Hill through the old cotton mill district, past the abandoned turn-of-the-century buildings of the river district, over the bridge at the French Broad, and up into a woodsy community of small clapboard homes and run-down shops built in the twenties and thirties. West Asheville had never quite recovered from the Depression forty years earlier.
Mama and Daddy didn’t mind the shabby surroundings. They were proud owners of a three-bedroom bungalow with a porch, two acres of yard, a clearing just perfect for a garden, and lots of play space for kids.
When Gus was born, Daddy revealed what would, in today’s terms, be called his “metrosexual streak.” Our big, freckled, ass-kicking, deer-hunting, red-headed Daddy loved old Hollywood movies the way crows love cornfields and shiny cans. Thus, our brother was christened Groucho Marx MacBride. Four years later, when our sister was born, he wanted to name her “Harpo.” At which point Mama donned her pink Jellies (it was the nineteen eighties, after all) and put her foot down. So Daddy compromised, and my sister was christened Greta Garbo MacBride.
Two years after that, I came along. Daddy conceded again or else my name might be Chico.
Instead, I am Tallulah Bankhead MacBride.
The three of us roamed the empty lots and kudzu-tangled woods of our forgotten neighborhood like fearless explorers. Gus and Gabby cleared a trail from our backyard down to the French Broad River, where Gus built a cook pit from river rocks, Gabby dug up interesting roots to boil, and I tamed squirrels by offering them treats: my Little Miss Baking Oven cookies, which would have tasted better if the oven were powered by something hotter than a sixty-watt light bulb. I am living proof: raw cookie dough will not kill a determined junior chef.
Our childhoods were a sunny, buttery-good paradise until Daddy got killed rescuing a family from a backroads wreck. A tractor-trailer swung loose on the icy mountain road and sideswiped him. Mama broke into little pieces, though she put up a brave front for our sakes. The diner suffered, and the landlord—who owned big chunks of Asheville and wanted to tear down every building older than a well-aged brie—cancelled her lease.
She took a job on the factory line at a potato-chip company, collapsed in our kitchen one night two months later, and died before the ambulance came. The doctors called it an aneurysm, but the truth was this: Mama died of betrayal and a broken heart. She was only thirty-nine years old.
Gus was eleven. Gabby was nine, and I was six. Delta fought to adopt us, but the paperwork fell through because of a bungled file at the courthouse. We escaped from foster care with the help of an elderly neighbor who sent us to California to live with friends who operated several restaurants in Los Angeles. The Rodriquez’s were older and had only one child, a daughter who proved to be Gus’s undoing eventually. Plus they had a soft spot for illegal immigrants. That’s how our status felt. We laid low, grew up, and never forgot the pain of being outcasts.
Delta loved us from afar all that time, sending food and encouragement.
We had never forgotten that.
She was proof that family recipes, even the secret ones, are worth keeping. Even if they come to us on tattered paper with tears and stains and missing ingredients.
Biscuit wishes and unread mail
WE WERE RAISED to minister to the hungry, to nourish the sorrowful and bear witness to the fruitful joys of shared food, but somehow our lives had become a messy buffet of half-baked dreams, sour hopes, and bitter brews. Mama and Daddy trained us to stay true to our inner appetites, but we lost our whey. If life is a menu, our Daily Specials should be sent back to the kitchen for a second try. As mountain cooks say: If you can’t stand the heat, go lick a different pepper.
Find a wall, smack my head against it, and think about my life so far. That was my motto at the moment.
“Oy! You’ve got another card from that peculiar cousin of yours,” my Brooklyn landlord, Mirielle, reported. “The envelope smells like . . . like milk and sausage. Puh-tooey! Do you want me to open it?”
A birthday card from Delta. She never missed our birthdays.
“No, just save it with the rest of the mail, thank you.”
Talking to Mirielle Steinburg was the last conversation I risked before I wrapped my cell phone in foil inside a cookie tin so no one could track me using its GPS. I was driving out of New York when she called, with Eve napping in the back seat of my Bronco.
“You and Eve will return soon?” Mirielle asked.
“Yes, in four or five days.”
“I hope it’s worth it to drive all the way to Minnesota to buy an oven for the shop!”
I had no idea where we were going. The Minnesota story was a cover. “It’s a good deal I can’t pass up. Bye, and thanks again for collecting my mail. I’ll read Delta’s card when I get back!”
I stuffed the phone inside a wad of tin foil and then into the small cookie tin. I’d researched this on the web. Mark’s hired snoops couldn’t track my phone signals.
Plan. I needed a plan. California, with Gabby, was too far away. Where else . . .
Delta.
That’s it! I’d take Eve to North Carolina and ask Delta to hide us. Delta would give us sanctuary. The Cousinhood of the Biscuit Witches is a powerful bond.
I’d go home.
Home?
North Carolina? We hadn’t been back in over twenty years. My home was a tiny two-room walk-up in Brooklyn, above my cupcake bakery. I saw the cake pan as half-full, never half-empty. Everyone thought I was too soft in the middle, too sweet around the edges, and I needed a thicker crust. Gus was stout-hearted. Gabby was salty, and I kneaded to be needed.
What did home mean to me, Gus, and Gabby now? After fifteen years in the army, four tours of the Middle East, and a chest full of medals, Captain Gus MacBride still volunteered for duty in the most dangerous parts of Afghanistan. He had an open-ended offer to return stateside as a training instructor at Fort Merrill, the ranger camp down in Georgia, but he kept stalling. We begged him to see that he’d done what he promised to do when Daddy died—be the man of the family, take care of Mama and us. We knew he’d used up all his luck with too many close calls. Gabby and I were terrified that he’d come home in a coffin.
Out in Los Angeles, Gabby, thirty-one, was about to lose everything she thought she’d ever wanted: her Porsche, her expensive townhouse in a suburb of Long Beach, and her restaurant, in a court battle with her high-maintenance movie-star partner, John Michael Michael.
Obviously, she and I shared an affinity for men with odd names.
What would I find in the mountains? Maybe just a reason to leave again. Julia Child said this about cooking, but it applies to life, too: “You’ve got to have a ‘what-the-hell’ attitude.”
It’s not just what you remember that leads you back home. It’s what you don’t want to forget.
One day later . . .
How Tagger caught a cupcake
“MOMMY, ARE we driving through a zoo?” Eve asked from the back seat of our ancient SUV. I’d pulled off on the roadside to study a map again. The old-fashioned, fold-out, paper kind.
Our meandering route was named the Asheville Trace—an aged, graying two-lane with a faded center line and crumbling edges. Winter trees crowded close on one side. On the other, rivulets of ice marked the paths of water trickling down a craggy wall of rock. At a distant curve, the alley of rock and trees opened to reveal a soaring view of rounded mountaintops sinking into an ocean of silver clouds. Somewhere in the vast view of forest, mountain peaks, and the occasional small river was the Crossroads Cove. We’d left Asheville two hours ago, but still, no sign of the Cove. The bright blue post-Thanksgiving November sky had gone cloudy with the last survivors of brilliant red and gold leaves whisking across the windshield. The weather report at our Asheville motel had promised freezing temps by nightfall.
“No, sweetie, we’re not in a zoo or a wild animal park or anything,” I told Eve. “Why do you think so?” I tugged off a wide, knitted headband—deep purple with multi-colored pom poms, because Eve picked it out for my birthday at a Brooklyn thrift shop, and the dancing bobbles on my head made her laugh. Warm air gushed from the SUV’s untrustworthy heater, which had two settings: Shiver and Sweat. I dabbed my forehead with the headband. I hadn’t slept well in weeks. Shanks of long, tangled red hair fell on either side of my face. I had no peripheral vision, or I would have shrieked.
“A bear is licking my window,” Eve said calmly.
I pivoted in the driver’s seat. Sure enough, a huge black bear was placidly licking the passenger-side back window, inches from my red-haired princesses’ curious face. She touched the spot where its long pink tongue hit the glass. “Hello, Mr. Bear! Would you like a Monkey Poop cupcake?” She unbuckled her seatbelt and turned to fetch a cupcake from a container next to her. On the drive down from New York I’d distracted her by baking her favorite—a banana-flavored cake mix topped with banana-flavored yellow frosting. Thus, the name, Monkey Poop. A desk clerk let me use the kitchen of the motel’s complimentary breakfast alcove.
“No!” I hit the automatic door locks. “No, sweetie, we can’t open the window and feed Mr. Bear. He might accidentally nibble us. Just sit tight. We’re leaving.”
“But he looks hungry, Mommy. And cold.” Her green eyes, like mine—and Gabby’s, and Gus’s. We inherited them from Daddy—were shadowed and tired. No matter how many times I told her we were on a vacation trip to meet our North Carolina relatives, she sensed that all was not well. For one thing, I’d never pulled her out of kindergarten in mid-week before. School was very important. She planned to be an astronaut, a doctor, or a toll booth collector. “Mr. Bear looks sad and worried,” she said in a small voice. “He’s like me. He needs a Monkey Poop to cheer him up.”
I caved. “All right, I’ll drive up the road a little ways then stop and throw a cupcake out. Wave bye-bye to the bear. We’ll sit in the car and watch him eat.”
She brightened. “Okay.”
I turned the ignition key. Clatter, clang, rattle rattle, brrrrrr. Then silence. I groaned. Two dead batteries in three years. Three, counting this one. “Aw, dammit!”
“Aw, dammit,” Eve repeated solemnly.
The bear acted as if he understood the situation. Now, we were at his mercy. He thrust his snout against a wide patch of duct tape I’d plastered over the top third of the passenger window. The window sometimes refused to roll all the way down, or, conversely, to roll all the way back up. I was still a southerner at heart. Give us some duct tape and baling wire, and we can fix anything.
The duct tape surged inward, tented by Mr. Bear’s large nose. I unbuckled, climbed over the center console, and slapped the imprint it made. He snorted, shook his huge head, and poked the tape again. I rapped the bulge with my knuckles. “Go! Get back! Beat it!”
He sneezed then shoved harder. The patch started ripping away from the door frame. I grabbed my faux-leather tote off the floor, pulled out a hairbrush, and repeatedly whacked the bulge that continued to get bigger and protrude further inside the car.
“Here, Mommy, he just wants a cupcake.” Eve leaned between the seats and held one toward the bulge.
“Sweetie,
sit down!”
I pushed her backwards and grabbed the cupcake from her. The Bronco rocked as the bear plowed his big chest and shoulders into its side. The window patch ripped away.
Suddenly I was nose-to-nose with his nose and his lapping tongue. Both of his round, black ears were adorned with several metal tags. Not a good sign. He had a criminal record. A repeat offender. I glimpsed white fangs big enough to punch holes in steel siding. A whoosh of cold air rushed inside along with the greasy stink of unwashed ursine funk. The bear wrapped his tongue around my hand and the cupcake. I let go, and the cupcake disappeared into his toothy maw. Chomp, chomp, swallow.
I jerked my slobber-covered hand away and scrambled between the seats into the back. My knees sank into something gushy. The open plastic container full of Monkey Poop cupcakes.
He shoved again. The window buckled. A sound like popcorn popping filled my ears as the safety glass cracked. “Cover your face and get down!” I yelled to Eve. The window collapsed. I pushed her to the floor. Pebbles of glass bounced merrily. The bear shoved his entire head and neck into the Bronco, sniffing avidly. The Bronco was full of bear. He was practically sitting in the passenger seat.
Eve, my amazing child, was giggling like crazy. I turned myself into a human shield, sitting in the center of the back seat and shielding her body by jamming my knees into the opening between the front seats. I glared at the bear. I became Sigourney Weaver facing the giant bug-like creature in Alien.
Get away from her, you bastard.
But unlike Sigourney, the front of my legs was covered in banana-flavored cake mix and yellow icing.
The bear sniffed hard at me and uttered a soft, hungry noise. “Mawr.”
“He wants more,” Eve translated.
Slurp. Who knew bears have such long, stretchable tongues? His snout hovered over the center console. My cupcake-smeared knees were easily reached. He began licking me.
“Eve, sweetie, I want you to crawl over the seat into the cargo section, okay?”