If he were asked six months before to portray those he knew in terms of mechanical contrivances, Jarom would have described Aunt Mary Tibbs as a steam engine. She seemed to him in all particulars the perfection of that vessel designed to boil water into an almost invisible vapor—steam—and force that vapor through an airtight cylinder in order to drive a piston and produce energy, the energy to be converted into mechanical force and motion. Work. As with any machine, the ultimate measures of her value were productivity, efficiency of operation, ease of maintenance, and durability.
Jarom imagined taking this engine and placing it in a kitchen. He imagined it housed in a human form of late middle years, the body as an upended boiler tapered inward slightly at the midline, quadrangular, neither bulky nor slight. If he were asked to re-create a model, he might have provided the following as specifications: Sheathe it in gingham, a modest print stippled like a guinea’s back, buttoned at the neck and dropping to the very toes. Roll the sleeves to the elbows at mealtimes and freckle the forearms. Blanch them with flour or slick them with shortening scooped from the vat. Pinch the features of the face and flush them crimson from the stove heat in whatever season. Draw the hair back in an uncompromising Calvinist bun but release a few intractable wisps about the temples and bead them with droplets of righteous sweat. Tie a white apron, stiff and spotless, about the middle. Shoe the feet under the long skirts with mannish shoes.
Set the engine in motion. Supply soup spoons, fry pans, cook pots, kettles, colanders, fruit jars, a stone-china measuring cup, a biscuit cutter, butter mold, a flat-handled skimmer, cake plates, breadboard, and spatterware. Furnish a basket of garden truck fresh from the dooryard each morning before sunlight tops the upper step of the porch. Brisk and bustle. See her bending over the new kitchen range that required six men to carry, one toweled hand opening the firebox, the other chucking kindling from the apple crate, kept constantly filled. A metal hod next to it for ashes, kept constantly emptied. These are her verbs: pluck, pare, peel, hull, dice, mince, chop, slice, roll, knead, strain, mash, grate, sift, mix, measure, stir, spoon, pour, bake, parboil, simmer, fry. Serve: mutton soup, dandycake, hoecakes, mustard greens, dill, quince preserves, watercress, kitchen ketchup, corn dodgers, cabbage pickle, shoat steaks, veal.
And after every meal he witnessed her performing the ritual of resetting the table for the next—teaspoon, butter knife, china fork, salt and pepper cellars, sugar bowl, a cruet of apple vinegar steepled in the center, the whole overlaid with a cloth of starched white linen, the tabletop with its snow-covered peaks and ridges resembling a miniature Alps. True Alps if the kitchen were not so seethingly hot. Those tropics through which passed generations of White Rocks and Wyandotte, white miles of biscuits, acres of steamed greens. Her life was composed of such lists.
Wherever she was, but in the kitchen especially, her word had the force of law, and as Jarom could testify, her words were many. She was the most forceful person he had ever known, though she limited her sphere of interest to things domestic, especially the preparation of food. She affirmed by some unspoken right or title that the kitchen was her domain. This meant no pets, no children underfoot, meals served with the imagined timeliness of well-regulated trains. In her cosmology the kitchen was a continent apart, a country whose capital was the cookstove. From the time he came to live with her after the death of his father, Jarom was under her sovereignty as though he had crossed the frontier of another country—keeping the woodbox filled, seeing that the cook-fire embers never languished to the point of extinction. Chores were performed in accordance with long-established schedules. Knives were whetted the first Saturday of each month, sausage rendered on such and such a day if weather permitted, radishes, potatoes, and other plants whose edible parts grew underground planted during the dark of the moon. Though she would not scruple to wring the neck of a fryer, meat she required to be delivered to her kitchen gutted and dressed. Leisure to her was another species of waste.
“Idleness,” she said so often it was a litany, “is the serpent’s second head and squalor’s midwife.”
For Aunt Mary, life and the preparation of victuals followed two time-tested principles: utility and plenitude. Gastronomical refinement and delectation of taste were not matters she bothered herself about. Living plainly among plain people, she served plain fare. Eaters of normal girth who sat at her table looked to her puny—a minister of the Russellville Methodist church, visiting relations, the odd passerby. Once they entered her precincts, she made probing and persistent inquiries about their health, contending that their ailments were imagined, that what their constitutions lacked was nourishing food in generous portions.
Opposed to spirits in any form, she would not cook with wine and would not tolerate anything more fortified than buttermilk. Holidays and special occasions were no exception. She was also obsessed with tonics of one kind or another. She drank sassafras year-round and attributed her robust health to the pots of tea she consumed each day as well as to the eating of rhubarb, okra, and poke in season. She passed these preferences on to Jarom, insisting that he swallow what seemed like gallons of well-drawn water each day.
“Stand up straight,” she would say, “or you’ll go through life arched like a rainbow. Get ahold of yourself and rediscover your backbone.”
Upholding one end of a conversation was not among her social skills, and she reviled gossip that so often had taken root among those of her association, in church and out. “About” and “out” she pronounced in the Tidewater way as “aboot” and “oot.” A woman generous in bestowal of food, she was an inveterate borrower of wisdom, often relying on notations in the ladies’ journals and books on household husbandry that prescribed ways to redirect one’s moral compass. In response to an innocent observation about the weather, for example, Jarom heard her turn her response in such a way so as to drive her convictions home: “A cook in the kitchen is a shade tree in summer and a backlog in winter.”
Was this, Jarom asked himself, some kind of code or riddle?
Then and after, Jarom was never sure he understood such homilies, especially the notion of her kitchen as cool when in fact, summer or winter, it was a tropical zone elevated above the temperature outdoors with something always baking. The beads of righteous sweat on his forehead never comported with her references to shade trees. What he understood was that waste in her world of efficient consumption was unforgivable, that the abuse of plenty was the moral equivalent of the Antichrist. Many evenings he’d found himself marooned at the dinner table, condemned to sit until he’d eaten his broccoli or had the opportunity to secrete it in his pocket.
But there was a slacker side to her intercourse with the world, a quality of kindness that softened the frictions of the kitchen. During the summer months she would keep demijohns of buttermilk cooling in the springhouse. When hay was being cut and raked into manageable windrows, she would serve pitchers of lemonade in the side yard under a dark latticework of maples as the men came in from the fields, hay dust like a batter on their necks, their fingers melting chill-beads from the glasses. No other drinks were as cold or as restorative as that pale liquid afloat with squeezed yellow rinds and gravelly ice chipped from blocks of winter pond stored underground in sawdust, the lemonade accompanied by platters of sweetmeats to fortify the blood.
Jarom came to know her by helping in the kitchen, not always with complete willingness. A large bowl on the table between them, they snapped beans or cored apples or peeled potatoes. When the garden hit its peak of profusion and vegetables came in by the basketful, he watched her can tomatoes, squash, okra, and similar truck. The aqua jars into which they were converted formed neat rows along the tiered shelves of her pantry. While they worked, she would tell stories and recount the family saga of settlement, the struggle of her father to wrest a living from the earth. Often she peppered her talk with references to what she always referred to as the Word of God. Jarom came to savor the hours he spent with her, unconsciously fitting his life rhythm to hers, taking her teachings as a lens through which to interpret the world. Seldom laughing, alert to any failing, she seemed derived from one or all of the prophets of old. Despite the sternness of her behavior, Jarom discovered a vein of affection beneath the crusty exterior.
She did not so much dwell on Scripture as live it, though Jarom sensed that her spirit was always more comfortable in the Old Testament than the New. And she always retained a healthy portion of heathenish superstition, convinced as she was, for example, that the cure for itching fungus between the toes was to step in fresh cow dung. She moved with nervous feet, a kind of quickstep that some would describe as clumsiness as though her limbs, her body, were, like poor servants, to be tolerated but never trusted. She took snuff in small doses but did not permit tobacco to be smoked indoors. Though she was well up in years when Jarom came to live with her, the only sign of her aging was a turkey wattle under the chin. She carried all of her receipts in her head and from May until November never appeared outside the house without a bonnet.