The Cure for Death by Lightning (11 page)

T
HE MORNING
of Mrs. Bell’s visit, my mother baked as if her life depended on the fluffiness of her raspberry buns and the lightness of her daffodil cake. This was a woman’s pride, to have a recipe worth stealing. To this end, my mother hid her scrapbook, slipped it away between bags of flour in the wall behind her marriage bed, before Mrs. Bell arrived. But while she baked, the scrapbook sat on the kitchen table in the light patchwork of sun that came through the kitchen window. She paged through it, anointing each page with the flour and butter that covered her fingertips. She’d changed into a clean dress after chores, a blue housedress with a lace collar. Her hair was wound up in a bun, and she’d rubbed a little petroleum jelly into her eyelashes to darken them, to make herself look as wide-eyed as a girl. She’d been up since before first light, stoking the kitchen stove, building the fire up until it was good and hot before we went out for chores. That’s the secret to building a fire for baking: the trick is to build the fire up in the morning, get a good hot blaze burning, and then let it lick itself down and cool some. Once there’s a bed of bright coals there, keep adding wood, one stick at a time, and don’t add another until that stick is about burnt down; that way the heat stays constant, not too hot, not too cool, just right for baking. A moderate oven. Let the fire get too hot, and everything burns. Let the fire die down, and nothing bakes at all.

After chores that morning I got myself cleaned up in the washbowl
on the bench by the door, then stole a look, over my mother’s shoulder, at the scrapbook as I wiped off my hands. My mother had stopped on the page that contained the raspberry bun recipe. It was written on the back of a letter from her mother in thin black ink, and this page had a cartoon pasted onto it, of a man glaring at his watch as a woman hesitated by a shop window. The caption read “Time Is Money!” The page held many transparent spots where my mother had handled the paper with butter on her fingers; she added more spots this day.

“Think you can handle this one?” she said. “I thought I’d make a daffodil cake to use up some eggs. If you get started on this, I’ll get the eggs.”

She got up, and I sat in her place before the scrapbook. Raspberry buns weren’t buns at all. They were more like cookies and something like dumplings. The recipe called for:

Any jam would do, not just raspberry, though raspberry was the jam of choice. In our root cellar we had a few jars of huckleberry jam, strawberry jam from last year’s garden, and a few tiny precious jars of wild strawberry jam from the berries my brother and I had searched out and picked the year before. That wasn’t all we had stored in the root cellar, of course. There were rows and rows of bottled beef, canned in the cool of last fall; great haunches of beef that my mother and I cut into chunks, placed in sealed jars in pots of water, and boiled for four solid hours on a stove fueled by wood and our labor. On the floor close to the root cellar door, my mother and I placed gallon coal-oil cans, carefully washed and filled with a clear viscous liquid we called water glass, into which, each day, we placed the extra eggs brought on now by the increasing light and not used. The water glass would keep the surplus eggs fresh for use next winter when the pull of sunlight wasn’t strong enough to convince the chickens to lay.

The raspberry buns were a standard treat for my mother’s guests, and my mother knew the recipe so well she hardly needed reminding, so the instructions in the scrapbook were sketchy:
Roll out pastry into rounds. Put little jam in center. Roll little. Make cross on top.
This hardly described what I’d watched her doing. She’d roll out the raspberry bun dough and then cut the dough with a jar lid. Into each perfect circle of dough she’d place a dollop of jam and then roll the edges up, puckering them in the way you’d pucker up fabric to make a pouch, and pinch the dough together at the top. She’d cut a little cross on top, so the jam would ooze out as it cooked. When they were done, the raspberry buns looked like tiny precious pies and tasted of heaven. The smell of them coming out of the oven was more temptation than an appetite could bear. This is what I would do then, on the morning of Mrs. Bell’s visit, fill the kitchen with the warm, happy seduction of my mother’s little pies.

While my mother took the wire egg basket out to collect eggs for her daffodil sponge cake, I paged quickly, impatiently, through the stiff pages of the scrapbook, looking for anything new, or something I might have missed, but avoiding the page near the front containing Sarah Kemp’s funeral notice and the warning of bear attacks. I flipped past the photographs of the king and queen and the various ghost stories my mother clipped from magazines, and went straight for my favorite page: the newspaper clipping of Ginger Rogers’s visit of the previous year, next to my mother’s recipe for quick Sally Lunn. There was plenty of room for additions on this page, but the only thing new was a sentence my mother had scrawled in sloppy blue ink that read, “Box of geraniums at open window keeps flies down.” It was a hint she must have picked up from some magazine. I touched the fuzzy photograph of Ginger Rogers, but lightly, so I wouldn’t smudge the newsprint. All that glamour so close to home. I hadn’t seen Ginger Rogers, of course. We hadn’t gone to town that day, but I wished with all my heart that we had. She was so beautiful, so foreign to anything I knew in the valley.

My mother’s footfall approached the house, and I quickly laid the scrapbook as it had been, open to the raspberry bun recipe. Her wire basket was filled with eggs, and she put them carefully into the washbowl and scrubbed them clean with a fingernail brush, placing them
one by one on the counter of the Hosier cupboard. Some cooks, to convince you of their miracle working, maintain that sponge cake is a difficult thing of chemistry, of eggs three days old and flour just so and the temperature and humidity just right, but making a sponge cake is the easiest thing in the world. A sponge cake is nothing but eggs, flour, sugar, and air; and if you’re new to the sponge cake, a little baking powder too, to ease its way against gravity. The secret is eggs, lots of eggs, and eggs we had no shortage of now that summer was almost on us. My mother used an even dozen in each daffodil cake, then two cups flour, and two cups sugar. But here she did experiment; some days felt like a little more flour or sugar, some days a little less.

After separating the yolks and the whites into bowls, my mother added the ingredient of air, whipping the yolks until frothy, then adding half the sugar and flour and perhaps a little lemon juice or flavoring. In another bowl, she beat the egg whites until they stiffened, but not so much that the air bubbles began to break. She then added the remaining sugar and flour and a touch of real vanilla. There it was then: two frothy bowls of air and egg, one yellow and one white.

There are two more secrets to the sponge cake: a knowledge of folding and a clean pan. A sponge cake is nothing without a clean baking pan. A spot of grease on the pan from some other recipe, and your sponge cake will come out flat. So wash your baking pan ever so carefully, and never, ever grease it. The folding was so important that my mother spelled it out under her recipe for daffodil cake:
Take spoon under batter and gently fold over.
The spoon is important: it should be large and flat. The gentleness is important: you want to keep those bubbles of air intact. One fold is usually enough to mix the two colors. My mother poured a layer of the egg white mixture into the pan first, covering the bottom, then added spoonfuls of yellow here and there, folding them in as she went; then another layer of white, and so on. To bake she used a moderate oven. To cool the cake, she tipped it upside down over a bottle on the kitchen table, so the tube in the middle of the cake pan suspended the cake. After a couple of hours, gravity would pull the cooling cake down, so removing it from the pan would be nothing at all. My mother would then decorate the cake with an icing of butter, icing sugar, a little hot water, and vanilla, and top it with a few spicy yellow nasturtiums.

I laid out our best damask white linen tablecloth and four white napkins that matched, and the best dishes we had — a set of white teacups, saucers, and cake plates with tiny gold cloverleafs close to the rims. After arranging the plate of raspberry buns and the cake on the cloth, I put the sugar bowl with the bird on its lid at the center of the table, next to my mother’s large brown teapot and milk jug and a glass pitcher I’d filled with lilacs and violets.

There was all our morning’s work laid out on the table, all wealth and good eating and joy. But I couldn’t enjoy any of it. During another visit, Mrs. Bell had shamed me, and my mother, by giving me a brisk lesson on sitting. She’d caught me on the bench near the kitchen door, sitting with my legs crossed, drinking a cup of tea. I thought I looked like the picture of Rita Hayworth in the magazine Mrs. Bell’s daughter, Lily, had brought me once, in the days when she still visited us with her mother.

“Don’t cross your legs like that,” Mrs. Bell had said. “That’s how the worldly women sit, the women who smoke. You sit like that and you’re asking for something.”

Mrs. Bell’s wire-rimmed glasses and her hair, worn rolled back, made her face appear much rounder and larger than it needed to. Nevertheless, her resemblance to my mother’s family was so uncanny that she could have been my grandmother come back from the dead. When she visited, she habitually sat with her back to the buffet, and I spent those visits looking from her to my grandmother’s grim face in that photograph, trying to figure what it was that made them look so much alike. Maybe it wasn’t her looks, exactly, maybe it was the way she held herself, or rather, the way her righteousness held her. The day she caught me posing like Rita Hayworth, she had taken me by the hand and had led me into one of the parlor chairs that pinched my thighs closed.

“Don’t sit with your legs apart,” she had told me. “Whores sit like that. Don’t slouch. That’s for the stupid and lazy. Don’t hug your stomach like that.”

I sat now at the parlor table as she had instructed, with my legs tucked together, feet firmly on the floor, arms on the arms of the chair. Of course there was no other way to sit on the parlor chairs. We all sat that way around the parlor table in those pinched chairs, my father at
the head of the table with his back to the kitchen, my mother beside him and I beside her, and Mrs. Bell at the end of the table with her back to the buffet. Billy and Dennis were out seeding barley; hired hands never ate in the parlor when there were guests. My brother was out in the fields with them to keep him from spoiling my mother’s time, to keep him from fighting with my father. Even so my mother and I waited for my father to come up with something, because he would come up with something, he always did when company came.

Mrs. Bell was complaining about headaches this morning. She was prone to small, undefined, and apparently untreatable illnesses: backaches and leg aches and stomach complaints that made her flatulent. My mother counseled her not to eat onions or fats, to get more rest, to put cold compresses on the back of her neck for headaches or bouts of panic, and to entertain a few lady friends.

“I wouldn’t tell this to anyone but you,” said Mrs. Bell to my mother, as if my father and I weren’t sitting there listening. “Sometimes the pain is so great that I see lights, my eyes grow sensitive, and I must lay down because I fear I might fall.”

My mother patted her hand, and Mrs. Bell grabbed on to my mother’s wrist.

“You’re such a comfort,” she said. “Such a comfort. There’s no one else I can turn to.”

My mother smiled and pulled herself away under the pretense of pouring more tea.

Mrs. Bell helped herself to a heaping teaspoon of sugar from the little bowl with the bird on its lid and clanged the spoon against the teacup, knowing full well that it sent my father to hell and back again. My father rubbed his temple where the scar began but said nothing. He took another slice of cake.

“You have some appetite there, John,” said Mrs. Bell. When he didn’t answer, she said, “I see Johansson next door is taking down that old mess of a fence and putting up something practical, finally.”

“No, that’s me,” said my father. “That Swede doesn’t know where his property ends. I intend to let him know. Once and for all.”

Mrs. Bell laughed a little, nervously. “What does Johansson think of all this?”

My father grunted. There was a long silence that my mother spent
pouring tea, Mrs. Bell spent looking both horrified and pleased, and I spent staring into my plate. A shadow passed the window. It was Coyote Jack skulking towards the door in the hillside that was our root cellar. He looked up at the window and then he was gone. Just gone. For no reason at all, a panic came over me. The chair began to fold in on me, forcing down my arms, constricting my breathing. I couldn’t catch my breath, my heart pounded. I stood up.

Mrs. Bell, my mother, and my father looked up at me.

“What’s the matter, dear?” said my mother.

I leaned into the table, trying to catch my breath.

“Sit down, dear,” she said. “More tea, anyone?”

I pushed the chair away from me. “I’ll make tea.”

“She’s so helpful,” murmured Mrs. Bell. She took my mother’s hand again.

I opened the screen door to refill the kettle at the pump outside, and as I did, flocks of birds flew up and settled on the trees, on our house, and on the clothesline. Past the birds there was something else, the sound of women’s voices singing, the sound of bells.

“Christ, that squaw again,” my father said, but he stayed in his chair and helped himself to more of my mother’s daffodil cake. Bertha Moses and her daughters and her daughters’ daughters rounded the curve of our driveway and marched into the yard. Their jewelry shot sunlight in all directions, and the purple swallows zoomed around them. Bertha came to the kitchen door, but the daughters and granddaughters stood by the flower bed and didn’t come any closer. The girl with the bell necklace stepped out from behind her sisters and aunts and looked at the house until she saw my face in the kitchen door. She smiled at me and touched the necklace.