Sherrie Cooks (at Chuck Kinder’s House): Slaughtering the Squash

I’d been stalking the squash for weeks. Sure, vegetables move slow, but you never know when they’re going to deceive you out there, looking innocent in the garden.

Clips in hand, I went at it speedy-like in the early dawn with dew on the grass and the birds singing, squirrels scampering, and the pack of urban deer out on the neighbor’s lawn, looking like they’re on a smoke break before decimating the raspberries.

I don’t have ethical convictions one way or another about slaughtering butternuts. It had to be done. I had dinner to make. Greens to sauté. Clip. Clip. And it was over. Painless. I cradled the five-pounder in my arms, walked back inside, my little dog nipping at my heels.

This is how I came to make dinner for writer Chuck Kinder. I approached the idea of butternut stew, an estranged vegan third cousin to the road-kill stew Chuck has concocted for his students, friends, and enemies for years, because I wanted something orange and thick bubbling in the bowls on the table. A mix of Cannelini beans, kale, and butternut was just the thing. It glop-glopped on the back burner all afternoon.

I also looked into purchasing some pre-slaughtered acorn squash, white and green, at the local coop. They were good roasters and had led a happy, local life, I was told.

Thematically, I wanted my Kinder dinner holding itself together. Kinder understands, afterall, detail, plot, character, syntax. I wanted to tell a story with my food. The story was this: it is early fall, and we are happy.

Kale. Pear. Squash: my characters. Garlic, onion, cumin: the details.

The Menu:

Vegetable Terrine (by Diane Cecily from a crazy-hard Martha Stewart recipe); Cheese Tray (by Diane Cecily with a gorgeous hunk of aged Pecorino brought by Hilary Masters); Roasted Pear-Bleu Cheese-Pecan Salad with Cranberry Vinaigrette; Slaughtered Nut Stew; Stuffed Acorn Squash; Cornbread; Roasted Pear Chutney; Pear Cake; Bittersweet Chocolate Tart with a Brown Sugar Crust; Bourbon Brambles (Shaken by Rick Schweikert); Wine; Beer; Vodka; Champagne.

In Attendance:

Chuck Kinder, Diane Cecily, Rick Schweikert, Sherrie Flick, Hilary Masters, Kathleen George, Marc Nieson, Josh Barkan, Roger and Jeanne LePage.

Several people took on writing assignments beforehand. Rick tackled “Grace.”

Grace

By Rick Schweikert

To the simple fact of an empty bottle of beer,
To the complexity of stars,
To the solemnity of an unexpected pause,
(long pause)
We pray.

To the gravity of irony,
To the lowly worm,
To the tyranny of moderation,
To unfathomable birth,
And to the food that strengthens our bodies to the service of all that is good,
We pray.

Amen.

Kathy toasted with these lines from Taming of the Shrew:

And frame your mind to mirth and merriment,

Which bars a thousand harms and lengthens life.

Josh contributed a limerick—the first he’s ever written—that included possum, cornbread, and roadkill…There were two versions…

Limerick

by Josh Barkan

(Clean Version)

There once was a possum that was ugly,

a roadkill hit by my friend Dudley,

we stirred it with spices

picking off the lices

now with cornbread the possum is snuggly

Diane contributed an amazing anecdote…a childhood memory unearthed while renovating her study.

The Necklace

By Diane Cecily

If I were to describe my retirement years, I would say they are project driven.  The kitchen, the third floor,  the second floor bathroom, the red room, the blue room, and most recently my study. By far the most interesting on a personal level has been redoing my study. Not just the wall repair and paint jobs, but the heave hoe job as well. Over the years my study has become the place to store things that have no logical reason for hanging around other than that I just can’t bring myself to toss them out. Not just yet. And so the recent project has become a journey of sorts, sifting through old boxes of family albums, pictures, mysterious containers. In the course of this cleansing, as it were, I came across a small well-corn leather bound jewelry box. At the bottom was a small half-round clear plastic container. Inside I found a gift that had been given to me in the 6^th grade, one I had forgotten about over the years, though it continued to travel with me from one life to the next.

As I looked at it, I thought about the recent news coverage of a young boy who had killed himself, the victim of bullying. But let me go back to that time in grade school. I lived in Helena, the capitol of Montana, and that gold-rush town was enjoying a population boom. In fact, just that year the school board in emergency session had agreed to open four classrooms in the condemned old school house that sat on a hill behind the shiny new school just to accommodate the influx of fifth and sixth graders.

There was a new girl in our class that year. Her Name was Norma Jean. She was a tiny, pinch-faced girl with over-permed red hair and a blotchy complexion. She pretty much kept to herself, head down, never volunteering in class. We all gave her covert looks, but kept our distance. Then Jeff, a smart-ass whose father owned the downtown shoe store discovered she had a peculiar doll in her desk. He waited in the hallway until she left the room for recess, then motioned for us “in the know” to follow him back into the room where he lifted up the desktop.  Sure enough.  Right inside was a miniature Va-Va-Voom with a short tight skirt, fishnet stockings and a tight strapless top. Best of all, as Jeff quickly demonstrated, one only need squeeze this rubber blonde bombshell in the middle and her top fell down revealing boobies I would have killed for. Well that was it for Norma Jean’s anonymity. She was called the Booby Girl, and boys asked if they could squeeze her middle. She left school in tears that day. Next day she didn’t show. And the day after that. Then on the third day the school got a call that she was sick. The teacher asked who would volunteer to bring her homework to her house. No hands. By this time I was feeling a bit crummy about what had happened and I reluctantly raised my hand.

After school, armed with her address, I walked the few blocks to her home. It turned out to be an apartment up a narrow flight of steep stairs. I knocked and she let me in to a shabby little room with dirty brown carpeting and torn lace curtains in the two windows. Off to one corner was a small stroller with a baby inside. I looked closer. The baby was real. It stared back at me with wide brown eyes. “My sister’s,” she explained. I didn’t intend to stay long. Just talk about her assignments. But she seemed genuinely glad to have a visitor and fixed me a glass of water as she explained how she was babysitting while her sister worked. My birthday was coming up, and before I knew it, I was asking her to join us this Friday – it would be all the girls in our class, no boys. She said she would see.

To make a long story short, she did come, and she brought me a present. It was what I found all these years later in that worn jewelry box  — a rhinestone necklace with a broken clasp. She had tied two black velvet cords to each end so I could tie it around my neck. I was profoundly touched.

She never came back to school. Many times I thought about stopping by her apartment to visit her again, but I never did. And while I never wore the necklace, I kept it as a reminder of who we were and who we might have been.

Mr. Chuck himself wrote his story of the Roadkill Stew’s origins. He feared getting too sentimental and so Diane donned his cap and read it aloud to us.

THE KINDER ROAD KILL CAFÉ

By Chuck Kinder

My paternal grandmother had been the matriarch of our family. Daisy Dangerfield was her maiden name, but everybody simply called her Mimee, and Mimee pretty much ruled our extended family with a will of iron, a wicked humor, and a soft heart, which was essentially the way she also cooked, meaning that wherever it was Sunday Supper stew or meatloaf, or moonshine, Mimee would stir relentlessly while cackling at her own jokes or sometimes weeping whenever she made her sentimental soup.  I returned to the Mayo Clinic for the third time in my life (out of four visits), when I was twelve and in the seventh grade. There was to be no surgery on that particular trip, only a general checkup of my condition. Since my old man had been in the midst of another of his many business break-downs at the time, and my mother was being forced to work midnight shifts again as an emergency room nurse during the course of that particular family downfall, which was not as bad as it could have been, meaning this time there would be no sheriff banging on the door at dawn waving bad checks like little arrest me flags in the air nor any escapes from town under the cover of darkness. None-the-less, Mimee announced that she would drive me herself across that seemingly endless Midwestern vastness from West Virginia to Rochester, Minnesota, in order that her beloved, if somewhat gimped grandson could be made as good as gold with the help of modern medical science. I was the oldest grandchild and the proverbial apple of Mimee’s eye, but we really bonded for the first time as potentially adult friends on that flat boring three-day trip west (and then our return east), when we had discovered with an intensity of understanding and a new immediacy of sympathy that one of our mutual fascinations and sort of hobby was road-kills.

Mimee was an expert when it came to road-kills, and she had seen them all, including a black bear hit by a coal truck, and a Southern Baptist preacher run over by his long-suffering wife. And then there was Aunt Shorty, who had been backed over in her own driveway by Mimee herself as they were heading for church. One Sunday morning, on account of the fact that Aunt Shorty was the family’s only midget, and Mimee simply had not seen Aunt Shorty in the rearview mirror when Mimee was backing her car up. Well, Mimee was real sorry she had run Aunt Shorty over but anybody that short should have had the good sense not to walk behind a moving vehicle was Mimee’s basic attitude, and Mimee had honked the horn afterall, and they had given Aunt Shorty a real nice funeral and proper burying, but it was still a real pity that Aunt Shorty’s life had been cut so short, so to speak, was Mimee’s basic attitude. Mimee was nearly psychic in the department of predicting the number of dead dogs we would pass per mile, depending upon the condition of the road, speed-limit, traffic, and weather. And Mimee knew enough road-kill recipes to fill a cookbook with old canine cuisine family favorites such as Slab of Lab, Round of Hound, German Shepherd Pie, Pit Bull Pot Pie, Cocker Cutlets, Poodles ’n Noodles. (“You’ll eat like a hog,” Mimee would cackle, “when you taste my dog.”) And then there was that old favorite pancake substitute, Flat Cat (served as a single, or in a stack), and Chunk of Skunk, Smidgen of Pigeon, Swirl of Squirrel, Snake Shake ’n Bake, Smear of Deer, and what she claimed had once been her real Sunday supper speciality, Center-line Bovine, with all the trimmings, such as Critter Fritters, and Road Toad A La Mode.

As we rolled endlessly across that great doze called Ohio, that wonderfully nutty old woman and I decided that someday, her road-kill casseroles would make us rich. Someday, we decided, as we laughed and hooted around, and did not think of doctors and hospitals and nasty nurses with needles the approximate size of harpoons, we would open The Home-Cooking Road-Kill Café and make us a mint with gourmet hits like our daily takeout lunch sandwich special: Bag ’n Gag, meaning anything around handy dead between bread.

Old-timers down in the hills of West Virginia will tell you that often critters once thought extinct sometimes wander out of the mountains at night, critters that look like they are half-this and half-that and they attempt to drink at the pavement of roads as though it is the fresh water of a mountain creek that moves so slowly you can hardly see it passing, and being creatures from a forgotten time and place and sacrificial in their innocence, they look up unafraid and hopeful into headlights hurtling toward them out of the dark, and the next thing they knew they were in somebody’s soup.

Guess That Mess, would have been another of the daily specials at the Kinder Road-Kill Café, meaning if the customer could guess the nature of that menu-item critter so ancient and rare that it was almost imaginary, that customer ate for free.

Mimee and I were not ten miles from home after our return trip from the Mayo Clinic when we came upon a road-kill critter beside the road that once could have been a huge cat with the face of a bat. Mimee pulled the car over as was her wont. And we got a road-kill critter coffin out of the trunk, which was simply one of the cardboard boxes Mimee always carried just in case. While I stumbled around beside the road trying not to barf, Mimee scraped up the critter’s dripping remains and gently deposited them in the box. Now one of two things would happen. If the road-kill critter looked as though it might have been somebody’s pet, say with tags around its neck, or if it was a critter so bizarre in appearance that Mimee had no idea what the nearly extinct thing might have been, well, that critter was named and taken to the family cemetery to be buried with some ceremony in order to become Aunt Shorty’s personal pet in the next world. Otherwise the critter was carried home to become the family’s supper. I could never predict which way Mimee would decide. If it was a supper decision, Mimee would personally skin and prepare the critter for the pot. Mimee would begin by marinating the critter in moonshine for at least an hour, whereupon she would sprinkle the prepared critter with paprika, salt, and pepper. Then melt ¼ cup of butter in an iron skillet and brown the critter quickly over high heat. Then remove the critter and set aside in a warm place. Melt another ¼ cup butter in the skillet and add a mess of ramps in season and cook until brown. Add Blair mountaintop mushrooms and saute until all liquid has evaporated. Add two tablespoons of flour and mix well. Gradually add cup of moonshine and ½ cup beef stock. Bring mixture to a boil, stirring relentlessly. Then simmer for 30 minutes. Remove sauce from heat and fold in ½ cup sour cream. Add critter to the sauce. Heat to just below boiling and serve the Critter Stroganoff pronto. While she was cooking her critters up, Mimee would mumble words of reverence and respect “for things about to disappear” and often she would weep for critters so ancient and lonely as to be almost imaginary in nature, not totally unlike her own poor old lonely and road-kilt Aunt Shorty. Mimee’s tears added an extra taste of salt and moonshine to her dishes I learned to relish.

Mimee had gone quickly downhill ever since some teenage oaf not watching where he was going had bumped into her at the cashier’s counter of a Long John Silvers, where my old man had taken her for her eighty-fifth birthday dinner, so she wouldn’t have to cook as usual, and she had tumbled, broken her hip, and then gone into heart failure. Mimee had lingered long enough for us to talk on the phone when I called her from San Francisco, when she told me that while she was not exactly road-kill, She was aisle-kill, and not unlike Aunt Shorty, who had been too short for her own good and in the way, Mimee said that she had been too old and slow and in the way, which was why that idiot teenage oaf had bowled her over.

My wife, Diane, and I flew in for Mimee’s funeral and burying. Diane had first met Mimee the first morning we had arrived in West Virginia as a dubious couple back in 1972. I had not yet quite divorced my first wife, and Diane, who was traveling across country to fetch me for that foolish reason called true love was clearly a fallen woman-type. Diane was scared to death to meet Mimee in the first place. I will withhold a story here, but suffice it to say that we arrived at Mimee’s door that morning under a cloud. Both of my eyes were black, and my knuckles bloody and raw from a silly fracas I had foolishly been drawn into in Bloomington, Indiana, due to comments from a big jock thug I considered disrespectful to my future bride, in a tavern where we had stopped for a beer and bite  This made Mimee mad as a sore-tail cat, and she declared she intended to whup me with a belt like she used to do for fighting again. But Mimee just herded Diane and I back to the kitchen hugging our arms, and she forced us to sit down for some breakfast. At one point, while Mimee was scrambling a mess of eggs and squirrel brains relentlessly with one spoon and stirring a pot of possum gravy with the other, she gazed over at Diane with unbridled, intuitive affection, and announced to Diane that where the family had gone wrong with me from the day I was born was when they had made the big mistake of throwing away the baby and raising the afterbirth. At one point Mimee had simply hugged Diane and said: “Well, honey, I figure though that if he lives that long, Chuckie will make for a pretty good old man to sink into your dotage with. He’ll make you laugh anyhow.” “Well,” said Diane. “Then there’s that to look forward to.”

As Diane and I were driving out to the old family cemetery for Mimee’s burying, we passed a single remaining wing of enormous golden feathers plastered to the pavement, whose tips looked like tiny closed fists that fluttered gently up out of bloody pulp in the soft wind of our passing like a vague wave of hello and adios.

Throngs of folks were at the graveside services, and family members and friends and complete strangers to me were falling apart on account of the death of that old woman, whom folks always declared I was a male dead-ringer for. I loved that old woman, but you didn’t catch me wailing and crying around like all those country cousins. I was busy making mental notes on all the bizarre amusing things about the proceedings that would have cracked Mimee up if she hadn’t been the guest of honor, or maybe not, besides Diane was doing enough blubbering for the both of us. When they started lowering that old woman’s coffin into the ground, folk tossed a ton of flowers onto it, and I tossed in my own fistful of golden feathers, and said my own goodbyes. “What are you mumbling about over there? Are your dentures loose or something?” Diane asked. “For things about to disappear,” I said more clearly.

I knew that folks would be swarming by the house after the services, and although the tables were already groaning back in the dining room with church-lady casseroles and cakes and pies and platters of fried chicken, I knew what my own contribution to the funeral feast was going to be. And I knew the recipe, like I knew all the other recipes purely by heart that Diane and I would be using to put Long John Silvers out of business.

“Come on, old man, you have some cooking to get to. And stay out of that moonshine too,” Diane said, and we walked down the hill to the critter hearse.

##

And then dessert: pear cake and bittersweet chocolate tart…with raspberries and champagne for all.

Chuck Kinder directed the Writing Program at University of Pittsburgh for eight glorious years and is the author of the novels, SNAKEHUNTER (Alfred A. Knopf), THE SILVER GHOST (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich) and HONEYMOONERS: A CAUTIONARY TALE (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a 2001 New York Times Notable Book, which has been reprinted in Italy (where it became a best-seller), France, Spain, and most recently Israel. HONEYMOONERS was reprinted as a Plume Paperback in 2002, and in June 2009 it was re-issued by the Carnegie Mellon University Press as a part of its Classic Contemporary Series. Kinder’s most recent book is a redneck noir, pulp romance meta-memoir titled LAST MOUNTAIN DANCER: HARD EARNED LESSONS IN LOVE, LOSS, AND HONKY-TONK OUTLAW LIFE, which was published in 2004 and reissued in quality-paperback by Carroll & Graf in 2005. It will be reprinted in 2010 by Fazi Editore in Italy. Before Chuck Kinder became a full-fledged fictioneer, whose work reflects his personal philosophy that everything one writes should be as literally true as the Bible, he worked variously as a coal miner, moonshiner, bartender, bouncer, bandit, prize-fighter, circus performer, tango teacher, white-water river guide, professional cook, cowboy, and itinerant college professor. Along the way he received both a BA and MA in English and Creative Writing from West Virginia University, and then entertained two years of graduate study at Stanford University as an Edith Mirrilee’s Writing Fellow, whereupon he was appointed to a three-year position as a Jones Lecturer in Fiction at Stanford. He has been a Writer-in-Residence at the University of California at Davis and the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. He has lectured at Casa delle Letterature and the Universita La Sopienze in Rome, and the Scuola Holden In Turino, Italy. Kinder’s awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Grant in Fiction, a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Award in Fiction, a Dorothy & Granville Hicks Residence in Literature from the Yaddo Foundation, an Appalachian Heritage Dennis C. Plattner First Place Award for Nonfiction, a W.V.U. 2008 Eberly College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Alumni Recognition Award, a 2009 University of Pittsburgh Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award, and a Most Improved Prisoner of the Month Commendation from the WV Fayette County Christian Jailers Association.