Drink for the Thirst to Come by Lawrence Santoro Read Free Book Online Page B

scars, not like when she looked in a peering glass. No. Could see how one eye was a little sagged, could see her funny crookback nose, could see…
    “Oh fuss!” she said. What’s the point? His season’s over. He is gone and done with and good riddance to him. He who’d given her that eye, that nose, that curly lip.
    She stirred the water again, chased the face away. Her minnies scattered. She laughed.
    Walking, Cordelia gathered the wooly hunting jacket around herself. Real cold coming . Time, indeed, for her root soup, her winter soup. She looked forward to the good smells as filled her cabin, winters. She wanted to run and do it quick, hug the comfort, the wonder of the forever pot, the pot going down with eating, the pot filled up again with bits added, an essence from the stock pot, more chopped roots and other pieces from the cellar. The forever pot of root soup, God’s good winter warmth.
    Another year and no one found her morel patch, where it lay sprouting. The season’s ’shrooms had been fine and plentiful, big headed, tender and clean-grown through the rot. And all hers for taking. A time gone, someone had felled a stand of tree where the morels sprouted now. Someone building, maybe. Someone who give up and moved on, she figured. Maybe a long time gone. New growth had sprouted since and filled around the wasted logs.
    Good. This season hundreds more morels had spread across the moldering stumps, between old cut-and-fallen logs. A thousand more had spread onto the damp forest floor where decay made a wet and fragrant bed.
    She’d shown that hunter, but none had found the place on their own, not a one. None would.
    The season was over. Cold come, picking done, she thought. Even these last smelled good as she added them to her sack. Long things, they were, thick-brained and heavy with wet.
    The roadway parsnips she’d cultivated another place back in the deep woods. They, too, had a good season. Each fat root had burrowed way down. Rich they were within the earth, their long finger-ends reached deep; deep hairy roots spread wide, held place in the ground. They didn’t want to come up and out, but up and out they’d come and she’d stocked her cellar.
    Cordelia loved the burlap’s prickle on her shoulder, like a game bag swinging with her walk, heavy with her potatoes, onions, her carrots and ’snips. Near home, now, with the last of the season’s sweet things heavy in her bag, Cordelia couldn’t wait to make a start. The chopping was first, a long part of it, but the heart of winter soup. Scrubbing, making it clean for the stock. The careful scraping, paring and cutting, the pieces shaped just right for the pot, the broth, the savor of the thing, each thickness, just right to release its flavor.
    God loved good soup and Cordelia made a good, good winter soup.
    At home, now, she stoked the stove with seasoned logs, last year’s cut. She built sweet, laid the bed for slow, steady heat. She watched as the old logs, the large ones that had lain in porchway shade through summer and early fall, caught flame by their ends and barks. Daddy-leggers scampered into the fire’s winking hell, spiders twitched and ran, old cocoons opened wiggling. Not nice, maybe, but all those little lives, she figured, added to the savor, gave favor to the scent, the earthy scent of God’s good soup.
    She chopped into the dark of night; she scraped and parboiled, shaved, halved and quartered. The scrapings, the bits, heads and tails, thin parsnip fingers, she added to the stock pot. She crushed the herbs to free the essence and added them to the mix. Then one more thing.
     
    The black iron shears hung heavy on her apron tie. She held her lantern ahead. The picnic basket swung free, crooked in her other arm, the busted-withered one. A bottle of whiskey sloshed, safely nested in a mess of torn rag and sphagnum. Fall leaves hushed in the dark; the shush, shush, shush of her footsweeps spread among the trees. Night critters went