and the solace of the cows. The storm had carried the red dust of Blood Road to our farm and rained it down — on the windows of the truck and the poplar growing through it, the lumber and the pile of rocks — covering everything with the blood of turtles, the blood of our recklessness. The blood of a war a thousand miles away rained down on us.
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 washbowlon 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:
half a pound of flour
a teaspoon of baking powder
a quarter pound of lard or butter
a quarter pound of sugar
an egg
a teaspoon or two of milk
and jam to fill
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
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 washbowlon 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:
half a pound of flour
a teaspoon of baking powder
a quarter pound of lard or butter
a quarter pound of sugar
an egg
a teaspoon or two of milk
and jam to fill
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
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