He was barely able to wait till five when the rates went down.
“Little Sue?”
There was a pause at the other end of the line. “Is that you, Lew?”
“It’s me, all right.”
“You haven’t called me in ten years,” said Little Sue.
“Well,” said Lew, not knowing what else to say. Then he remembered why he hadn’t called. “I’ve been real busy with my gas station.”
“Bull. What d’you want?”
“Well…I was just thinkin’ about Granmaw Minnie.”
“Like I said, Lew, what d’you want?”
He hadn’t meant to blurt it out. “I want her chocolate cake recipe!”
“What in th’ dickens d’you want it for?”
“I want to enter a contest, they don’t take pickles!”
“Your brain is pickled, askin’ me for that recipe.”
“Little Sue, dadgummit, I’m family!!"
It was four o’clock at the nursing home on the hill above Mitford.
In Room Number One, Louella Baxter Marshall was tired of watching All My Children. She wanted to sing hymns or bake a pan of biscuits or cook a pot of greens, something constructive.
She didn’t want to read the Mitford Muse that a nurse just delivered to her room.
She didn’t want to put in her order for Pokey, either. That little speckled dog would jump in her lap and sleep so long, her bladder would get full and she couldn’t get up without dumping him on the floor.
She missed Miss Sadie, who had gone to heaven over two years ago. Except for the short, sweet time she’d been married to Moses Marshall, she had been Miss Sadie’s lifelong companion. And never once had Miss Sadie acted like she was boss and Louella was help. Fact is, Miss Sadie had given the money for this very building and everything in it, and had written in her will that the best room in the building was to be reserved for her “sister in the Lord, Louella B. Marshall.”
Louella closed her eyes and rocked in her chair, humming.
Just being around Miss Sadie had been fun. They used to sing to beat the band, all the hymns they’d been raised with at Lord’s Chapel, and then they might have a little game of dominoes or Chinese checkers or read to each other from the Bible. Louella had read to someone from the Bible only last night, someone so old and feeble, it hurt her terribly just to look at the frail figure in the wing chair.
She had taken Violet Larkin’s hand in hers, and noted how much it felt like Miss Sadie’s, so small and delicate, like a child’s hand.
“The Lord is my shepherd,” Louella read aloud, “I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, he leadeth me beside still waters, he restoreth my soul….”
Don’t give her any of that modern stuff that leaves out the leadeth and restoreth and the thee and thou, no sir, the language of the old King James was beautiful to her ears, like music.
Speaking of music, that’s how she’d read the rest of that psalm—she’d sung it. Something just came over her and she’d started singing the words.
“Surely goodness and mercy
Will follow me
All the days of my life
And I will dwell in the
House of the Lord
Forev——er-r-r-r!”
She’d really held on to that last note, and the word that contained all of eternity in it.
Miss Larkin had closed her eyes and repeated the last line in a warbly voice, her face beaming like an angel’s. Then she looked at the chocolate-colored woman who lived down the hall and was so good to her.
Without meaning to, Violet Larkin told Louella Baxter Marshall her heart’s desire—she wanted more than anything on earth to see her grandson again, but he lived so far away, somewhere in Canada, and it would cost nearly five hundred dollars to get him here.
Sitting alone in Room Number One at Hope House, Louella said aloud, “Miss Sadie, I got t’ do this thing, an’ you an’ Jesus got t’ help me.”
On the high hill above Mitford, Louella Baxter Marshall rang for a nurse to come to Room Number One.
“I want t’ go t’ th’ kitchen,” said Louella, easing her heavy frame into the wheelchair.
“The kitchen, Miss Louella?”
“That’s right, honey.”
“How’s your knee today, Miss Louella? Is it hurtin’ you bad?”
“Not too bad ’less I stand on it,” said Louella. When they arrived at the double doors behind the Hope House dining room, the nurse helped Louella out of the chair. “You go on, now,” she told the bewildered young woman, “and come back at ten o’clock.”
The Hope House cook didn’t know who was blowing through his kitchen door on a walking cane; he never saw the residents, he only got wind of their complaints. It was true he sometimes heard praise, as well—usually when he gave them lasagna, but only if it wasn’t too spicy.
“I’m lookin’ for th’ boss,” Louella said, in a mezzo voice that bounced off the saucepans and made the large kitchen seem smaller.
“That’s me,” said the cook, who actually preferred to be called a chef. He had an odd compulsion to bow, though he had no idea why.
“I need to bake a pan of biscuits,” said Louella, looking him in the eye.
“You need to…what?”
“Bake a pan of biscuits,” she said as if speaking to the deaf. “I need flour, shortenin’, buttermilk, an’ the whole caboodle. You can set me up right over there, honey.” She waved her cane at a surface he’d just floured down to work croissants for lunch.
“She’s Room Number One,” whispered his sous chef. “Miz Louella Baxter Marshall.”
Room Number One! When he came to work here, he was told that Room Number One could have anything she wanted—at anytime, from anybody—and he wasn’t to forget it.
“Yes ma’am,” he said, stepping out of her way before she mowed him down.
Esther Bolick was not accustomed to having teenagers call her on the phone.
Her grandson used to call at Christmas and Easter, but stopped when he turned twelve and now communicated solely by letters written on his computer in a font called Spiderman.
“Miz Bolick? This is Dooley Barlowe.”
Dooley Barlowe was the red-headed mountain boy Father Kavanagh had taken to raise a few years ago; he worked summers at The Local, bagging groceries, and had come a mighty long way, in Esther’s opinion.
“Excuse me for calling, but I know…” She heard him gulp and swallow. “…I know you’re the best cake baker in town.”
Esther’s face flushed.
“Cynthia says so, and my dad does, too.”
“Mercy! Really?” She was touched.
“Plus a lot of people who’re enterin’ the contest talk about your cake when I’m baggin’ their groceries.”
Thieves, thought Esther.
“That’s why I’m callin’, because I’m workin’ to save money for a car, and my dad says he’ll match everything I make.”
“My, my,” she said, having forgotten entirely what it felt like to be a teenager.
“I also mow yards and clean out attics and basements, and…”
She heard him gulp again.
“…and I’ve been thinking—would you, I mean, could you tell me how to bake that cake you’re famous for? If I could enter that contest and win, that would really help a lot, I mean, if you could maybe give me a few tips on how to do it, I’d really appreciate it.”
She heard him breathing as if he’d run a race. She liked Dooley and thought he was made of the right stuff. But more than that, she cared about Father Kavanagh—hadn’t he pastored them for years, loving them like his own and never demanding anything back?
As for herself, she had no intention of entering that jackleg contest where half the town was using her recipe without permission.
“Let me think about it,” she said, not wanting to think about it at all. On the other hand, here was an innocent boy trying to make a dollar and willing to work for
it, unlike some people she knew.
She went in the den and told Gene about the odd request.
“I don’t want to enter that bloomin’ contest,” she said.
“You wouldn’t be enterin’ it, Dooley would.”
She patted her foot, frowning. Why couldn’t people let her alone about that cake?
Gene grinned. “I think you should do it.”
“You really think so, cross your heart?”
He crossed his heart. “Y’all could blow th’ competition out of th’ water.”
She went back to the kitchen and walked around the cooking island three times before she dialed the number at The Local, which she had memorized years ago.
When Dooley came to the phone, she said, “If you ever breathe to a soul that I helped you…”
“No, ma’am! I won’t.”
“I wish you’d asked me a couple of days ago, that cake’s better if it sets awhile before you eat it.”
“Oh,” Dooley said, sounding stricken.
“But no use to cry over spilled milk. What d’you want to do, two layers or three?”
“Umm,” said Dooley, who didn’t have a clue.
“I’d do three-layer for a contest. Showier.”
“Great! Thank you, Miz Bolick. I appreciate it a whole lot. I’ll do somethin’ for you anytime you say, like clean out your basement or your attic, or I could do your yard…”
Esther walked around with the cordless, opening cabinets and looking in the refrigerator. “I’m a little low on ingredients. How soon can you get up here with six oranges, a pound of butter, and a dozen eggs?”
Since his wife passed four years ago, Lew Boyd had used nothing in his kitchen but a toaster oven and a stove-top percolator. He did not believe in microwaves, in case anybody came to see him who had a pacemaker.
For this reason, he didn’t have a clue what might be stored in his kitchen cabinets, and spent four hours on the eve of the contest trying to make sense of the clutter.
He called his sister Little Sue three times, and nearly had a stroke when he realized he forgot to grease the cake pans. He poured the batter back into the bowl and washed the pans and started over, speaking aloud to his departed Granmaw Minnie.
Why in the world he’d ever gotten into this mess was more than he could fathom. Little Sue had nearly laughed her head off about the whole thing and told him to get a life. He thought she said Get a wife, and replied that it was very hard to find one that didn’t drink and run around.
He freely admitted he was lonesome, how much time could a man spend at his gas station, anyway? He had to eventually come home to an empty house.
He had developed a ritual for evenings. He walked in the back door, passed through the kitchen where he heated his supper, watched TV in the den, and ended up in the bedroom, all on the back side of the house. In truth, he hadn’t seen his living room for months, it seemed as remote as Mesopotamia. And he had no idea what to do, if anything, about the dining room, which had become a year-round storage bin for Christmas ornaments, odd boxes, and a nonflammable tree.
Setting the oven to preheat at 325, he thought again about Earlene Dickson kissing him when he won the pickle contest years and years ago. That had been on his mind a lot lately.
He surveyed what he had done and felt pleased. He might be a pickle man, but he knew a creamy, velvety batter when he saw one.
He could hardly wait to get the brimming cake pans in the oven, so he could go sit in his recliner with the mixing spoon and batter bowl.
Louella felt the sharp, shooting pain in her knee as she rolled out the dough, but she had better things to think about than hurting.
She was thinking about healing, about sending the prize money to Canada so Miss Violet Larkin’s grandson could buy a plane ticket and come to Hope House where he would kneel down and kiss his granmaw’s hand. Louella didn’t know where she got such an image, but she thought it was a good one, Miss Violet being the only granmaw the boy had.
Louella’s head and heart seemed suddenly full of images, as if rolling out biscuit dough was returning something to her that was lost.
She closed her eyes and saw her husband-to-be walking into the kitchen of the Atlanta boarding house. She was fifteen years old, with her hair in corn rows, and the sense that something wonderful was about to happen.
Moses Marshall flashed a smile that nearly knocked her winding. She had never seen anybody who looked like this when she was growing up in Mitford, the only people of color they had in Mitford were old and white-headed.
“Who’s th’ one baked them good biscuits for supper?”
Louella could hardly speak. “What you want to know for?”
“Because th’ one baked them good biscuits, that’s th’ one I’m goin’ to marry.”
Louella looked at old Miss Sally Lou, who had to stand on tiptoe to peer into a pot on the stove. She was so little and dried up, some said she was a hundred, but Louella knew she was only eighty-two and still the boss cook of three meals a day at the boarding house.
Louella pointed at old Miss Sally Lou, afraid to say the plain truth that she, Louella Baxter, had baked the biscuits herself, three pans full and not one left begging.
Moses Marshall looked his bright, happy look at Miss Sally Lou and walked over and picked her up and swung her around twice before he set her down. “Fine biscuits, ma’am. Will you jump th’ broom with me?”
“Git out of my way ’fore I knock you in th’ head,” said Miss Sally Lou. “Marry that ’un yonder, she th’ one do biscuits.” The old woman threw back her head, looking imperious. “I does yeast rolls.”
Hope Winchester didn’t know if she believed in God. She was thinking this as she searched the James Beard bread book, making sure she had picked the right recipe.
She had thought all along that raisin bread would be perfect. Then, she had second thoughts and was convinced that salt-rising might cut through the clutter of entries and stand out more.
She sat at the table, feeling scared. She couldn’t keep going back and forth, she had to decide right now and start baking.
She knew that if she believed in God, she would pray about which recipe, even if God wouldn’t be interested in such petty, self-serving issues. The priest at Lord’s Chapel, Father Kavanagh, had once said God wanted people to pray about everything, he told her one of the saints had said “Pray all the time,” or maybe it was “Pray without ceasing.”
That was all right for saints who had nothing else to do, who did not work in retail and do inventory and try to keep everyone happy, even grouchy, mean-spirited, tight-fisted people who thought they should get a discount just for living.
She pulled two straws from the broom behind the refrigerator, then shut her eyes and switched the straws around and held them in her hand. The short straw would be raisin, the long would be salt.
It was raisin.
She didn’t understand why she burst into tears, as if a terrible weight had been lifted. Then she remembered, all at once and for the first time, that raisin was her mother’s favorite bread.
She turned the oven on preheat, which is what the book said to do, feeling a tingle of excitement as if she’d set the stove dial while standing in a tub of water.
Whether she won or lost, she would take the bread to her mother at the hospital and show it to her through the oxygen tent, she only hoped they would let her have her bread back from the contest.
She set a jar of grape jelly on the open cookbook, to hold her place, and hurriedly pulled the ingredients from the cabinets and the refrigerator, because more than anything on earth, she wanted to start baking the bread right now, this minute, so that her mother who was dying a little every day, would be able to see it and perhaps even smell it, and find it wonderful.
Uncle Billy Watson was quiet as a mouse as he stirred about the kitchen. He had hunkered under the covers, sleeping fitfully until three a.m., then crept out of the bedroom and closed the door behind him.
He didn’t know if he could do this, even with the Lord’s help. What he was trying to do was re-create the sweet potato pie his mother had made in their little cabin in the valley.
Oh, they’d been a poor and ragged lot, the Watsons, but hadn’t they had a fine time hunting in the woods and eating deer meat and wild turkey and even bear when they could get it?
He remembered grubbing in the sweet-smelling earth to pull those taters out, and rubbing them off on his britches and carrying them to the house by the peck and bushel.
He hadn’t been able to read or write a word in those days, but he could draw. By joe, he could spot a squirrel on a log and before it could dash away, he had drawed it with his pencil, log and all.
That’s when the sweet potato pies had started. Before, his mama had roasted the yams in the ashes, or sliced them up and fried them in bacon grease in a black skillet. But when he started drawing pictures of dogs and geese and partridges and all, she took to rewarding him with sweet potato pies. “Because you’re special, William,” she once said.
In all his seventy-eight years, or was it seventy-nine, he could not remember anything ever tasting so good. All good-tasting things had fallen short next to the faded memory of her pies.
Intoxicated by the smell of freshly ground cinnamon and cloves, he had eagerly observed how much butter she used, and the careful way she sprinkled sugar into the orange-brown mash. But mostly, he’d watched her making the pie dough and rolling it out, her fingers working like magic to hand the soft, perfect circle off the dough board and into the old pie pans.
Through the closed door at the end of the hall came the sound of his wife snoring. He was glad his hearing hadn’t gone; he could still hear a chigger in the leaves.
Everything was set out, now; he had everything he needed—everything but a recipe.
Uncle Billy closed his eyes and turned his heart back across the years to the sound of a fresh, crackling cook fire, and his mother’s bare feet whispering across the wooden floor.
“Lord,” he prayed in a low voice, “you’re a mighty God and I’m a speck tryin’ to do a foolish thing. Please help me.”