Chapter 9 - The Salt in the Skillet
The kitchen had two inches of steam on the lower panes of the double-hung sash by the time the three of them came through the door.
Ashley came first.
She didn't have her three-ring binder. She had left it on the front seat of the German car, along with her grey cashmere wrap and her phone with the three camera lenses. She was wearing an old denim jacket of Linda’s that had hung on the back of the pantry door since nineteen-eighty-four—an old Big Mac with four brass buttons that had the green patina of the copper on the rivets, the sleeves rolled up four turns so her small, thin wrists didn't drown in the denim.
She didn't look at the floor. She didn't look at the milk circle on the butcher block.
She walked straight to the cast-iron stove, picked up the blue-speckled enamel coffee pot by its wire handle using a folded dish towel, and poured eight ounces of black chicory into an old mug that had VIRGINIA IS FOR LOVERS written across the side in cracked red paint.
"Linda," Ashley said.
Her voice had dropped that instructional, suburban lift. It was just flat, cold mountain air now, coming out through lips that were still blue from the ditch.
"The grease is smoking," Ashley said.
Linda didn't look up from the dough board.
Her hands were white to the wrists with White Lily flour, her thumbs working that slow, circular knead that doesn't waste two inches of motion. She had three wooden bowls lined up on the counter—one with the lard, one with the buttermilk that had the yellow butter-flecks floating on top like small clover blossoms, and one with the cold well water.
"Turn the damper," Linda said. "Two notches to the left. The draft’s coming off the ridge this morning, and if you don't keep the pipe cool, the flour will take the soot before the crust sets."
Ashley reached out her hand. Her fingers—the ones that had held the Stanley tape measure fourteen hours ago—caught the iron handle of the stove damper. It was black, greasy with twenty years of bacon lard, and it was hot enough to make the skin on her thumb turn white before she got the iron turned through the quadrant.
She didn't let go until the iron clicked into the third notch.
She didn't blow on her thumb. She wiped the grease off on the thigh of Linda’s old Big Mac jacket, picked up the iron spatula from the crock by the salt cellar, and turned the four slices of salt pork in the bottom of the Griswold skillet.
Ethan sat at the table.
He had taken off his suede shoes. He was sitting in his stocking feet on the same ladder-back chair his grandfather had sat in the morning the bank failed in Buena Vista back in thirty-one.
He had his hands flat on the pine.
Between his thumbs lay the lard tin from the Shenandoah Valley Packing Company. The red label was peeling at the bottom, curled into a dry tube by the heat from the stove, showing the bright, unrusted tinplate beneath.
"Dad," Ethan said.
I was sitting in the low rocker by the wood box, cleaning the dried mud off the welt of my left boot with an old piece of strap iron.
"Speak to your mother, Ethan," I said. "She’s the one who holds the paper."
Ethan looked at the woman by the stove.
She was seventy-three years old. Her hips had that hitch in them that made her tilt two inches to the left every time she shifted her weight from the flour board to the oven door, and the hair at the back of her neck was coming out of its tortoiseshell pins, hanging down in three thin, grey curls that smelled of woodsmoke and the lavender soap from the washstand.
"Mom," he said.
Linda stopped her rolling pin.
The wooden cylinder—turned out of a piece of sugar maple by her uncle in seventy-four—hung suspended two inches above the white circle of dough.
"I called Vance," Ethan whispered. "From the truck. Before we came through the gate."
"Did you?" she asked.
"I told him to withdraw the certificate of merger."
"He won't like that," Linda said. Her thumbs went back to work, pressing the edge of the biscuit cutter into the dough with that clean, sharp shuck-shuck that leaves twelve perfect rounds on the board in thirty seconds. "Vance’s boy had his heart set on that three point two million. He was going to buy that house over by the country club with the brick pillars and the swimming pool."
"I told him that if he filed another paper with my name on it in the county seat," Ethan said, his voice dropping until it was barely louder than the fat in the iron pan, "that Bobby Miller was going to meet him at the town line with the transport irons."
Linda picked up the first biscuit.
She didn't use a spatula; she picked it up with her two fingers, laid it into the black iron pan right between the four pieces of salt pork, and then reached down with her apron to wipe a smear of flour off Ethan’s collarbone.
"You always were a slow boy to learn, Ethan," she told him. "Just like your father. You have to carry the whole load up the mountain twice before you figure out that the wagon has an axle tree under it."
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She put the second biscuit in the pan.
"Eat your meat, Ethan," she said. "The church bell’s going to ring for eight in twenty minutes, and you’ve got two flat tires on that cultivator in the lower shed that need twelve patches each before the rain comes back on Wednesday."
