Where We Are Now by Carolyn Osborn Read Free Book Online

white-headed and slight. Fluttery as a small nervous bird. Uncle Phillip is short, pink-cheeked, white-headed also. He likes the nostalgic tales but he insists, sensibly as usual, “You’re forgetting the bad years.”
    â€œYes,” Aunt Lucy sighed. “There were those. Papa would plant, we’d have a drought, and there would be nothing to reap. Mother hated those times. She’d have to rent the town house and she couldn’t go to Saratoga. Lord, she loved going to Saratoga Springs! So we’d just be stuck there on the farm gathering eggs and waiting for the weather to change. That’s when Papa took off. I never knew where he went exactly.” She drifted back to the kitchen to bring us some coffee.
    â€œHunting,” Fergus winked at me and his father. “He went off hunting I expect.”
    We were sitting in another room full of Grandmother’s dark Victorian furniture Aunt Lucy had inherited. Carved leaves, nuts, fruit protruded from the backs and arms; unyielding upholstery held us upright. The cut-glass shone on the sideboard and nearby shelves were full of fussy porcelain figurines; a milkmaid, a shepherd, a harlequin, and men and women covered with lace who appeared to be engaged in a court dance sometime in the 1700s somewhere in Europe. There wasn’t a single chicken, dog, pig, horse or mule, no figure from my grandparents’ daily lives. Naturally Grandmother wouldn’t have wanted a figurine of the hired man or the cook, and the idea of a porcelain pig or mule in her parlor would have offended her. Propriety and beauty were Made In Dresden. Meanwhile Grandpa slopped hogs, traded mules, tilled the soil, bought property in town, and every once in a while, broke loose.
    â€œI don’t see any reason to disturb Mother’s … um, view of the world. She’s happy with it. But I’ll tell you, Grandpa didn’t do much hunting. He had a shack out in the woods where he went to do his serious drinking. One time he took the sheriff with him.” Fergus laughed.
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œMarianne,” said Uncle Philip, “You remind me of your mother, always wanting to know why this and why that. Until you came along she asked more questions than anybody in the family. No one knows why exactly. He thought the sheriff was working too hard maybe. Mr. Moore and some fellow were having an altercation on the square. The sheriff’s office was right there. He stepped out to ask them to quiet down. Mr. Moore talked him into getting in the buggy with him. You wouldn’t remember his horses. He had a fine pair of matched bays. Before the sheriff knew it, your grandpa had taken him out of the county. They spent three or four days in the woods eating country ham, biscuits, and redeye gravyand drinking whisky. Country ham creates a powerful thirst. Probably they did a little dove hunting too. Finally the sheriff mentioned he had to get back to town.”
    I sat in that upright chair thinking for a few minutes about a three or four-day diet of country ham, redeye gravy, biscuits, and whisky. There is absolutely nothing anybody can do to vary the taste of Tennessee country ham. Smoke cured, with hickory usually, heavily salted, it’s first boiled for hours, baked, cooled, then cut into the thinnest possible slices which are eaten cold or fried in ham fat. After the first day maybe the whisky helped. Or maybe Grandpa and the sheriff stumbled to the nearest farm and bought some eggs. Oh, it’s not hard at all to search the country for groceries, not for me. I know that country, know what a hungry farmer and a sheriff might eat.

    â€œSog, I can’t eat eggs.”
    â€œCan’t?”
    â€œNever could look a fried egg in the eye.” “Scrambled?”
    â€œThem neither. My mama used to cook them with brains. With or without they still look suspicious to me.”
    The woman at the back door waited holding a bowl in her hands.