The Wedding Cake
I CAME TO COOKING EARLY on. I should better say I went fishing one Saturday, brought home a small batch of catfish, and held them up for my mother's applause. I stood on a chair by the kitchen counter, hands yellow-gloved in cornmeal. We fried them and sat down to the table and ate. Lastly she repeated her applause over the remains of crust crumbs and devastated fish bones, for my fish to my mother, like sin to the preacher, were often doubled in size.
Persia's librarian was Mrs. Nadine Thistle, a woman in her midor late sixties when I was a child. Her library held nearly a thousand books, and she claimed to have read every one. Fast-fingered, interested, she could mention a title and know its exact location on a shelf. The library was the old train depot, though the books themselves were housed in half the depot, Mrs. Thistle in the other. It was also one of the first places in Persia to be air-conditioned, in addition to the Persia Café. Mrs. Thistle went before the town board and argued that in a place where literacy was devoted to cattle and weather reports,Farmer's Home, and the sports page, the library was Persia's toehold on civilization, and that civilization should be preserved. Mrs. Thistle was a sureminded woman, somebody to be reckoned with, so the board granted her request. She drew up library cards with a single rose on them, covered in thistles, a comment, I suppose, on her name. At the bottom of each card in tiny print, in the right-hand comer, was the word AIR-COOLED.
I found several books on cooking in the library, including the Magnolia Club's local collection and a yellow-eared Confederate Receipt Book, published in 1863. But the books I really fell for came from Mrs. Thistle's private collection. A large green edition of Good Housekeeping Favorite Recipes filled with color photographs of chocolate éclairs, racks of lamb, flaming cakes topped with holly. Oranges scooped and made into little baskets, filled with orange sherbet and decorated with mint leaves, with perfect little orange handles. A duck made from pastry. A pie made from a duck. And M. F. K. Fisher'sServe It Forth, in which the author describes a sky raining potatoes and fifty million snails, Greek honey and the Hon-Zo, the social status of a vegetable, and folk in France who washed in wine, which they made in enormous lakes throughout the countryside.
I sat on Mrs. Thistle's couch, in the main reading room, many afternoons after school. I would open my three-ring notebook and copy recipes, occasionally brushing my hand over the porousness of paper, the crease at the comer of a page that someone had folded over as a mark. Now and then she would look at me over her glasses. Behind her desk was a framed certificate of library science, earned in 1915. One day as she was featherdusting books she paused and looked over my shoulder.
"Fisher," she said. "A follower of Brillat-Savarin."
"Who's that?"
"Another great food writer. ‘Only wise men know the art of eating,' he said. Yet he was very democratic. A lover of all foods."
"Did he love fried chicken?"
"Truth be told, I don't know. He never tried it in Persia."
She laughed, swished her duster along another shelf, then left me alone until I headed home, in time for supper.
My mother shared Mrs. Thistle's love of books, and so approved of my reading habits. She thought it would help with my schooling. I was not the most studious in my class, but I did stay in school. Mama was determined about that. She had never gone to college, "and you see where it gets you," she said. "Folding underdrawers for every Tom, Dick, and Harry who can spare the dime." Which she did. She took in laundry and sewing, and had done so ever since she left school to have me. But this part she did not mention, only saying my father was a closed subject and ancient history, and then she would steer the conversation to subjects she preferred. She had books by Dickens and Emily Dickinson, LPs of Mozart and Debussy's "Claire de Lune," and a little reproduction of Rodin's The Kiss embracing itself on the table by her Singer sewing machine. Mama was an example of someone who would scrape to beat hell and cultivate high taste but still not have much money. So, of course, she was all too glad when I took over the cooking. We had our share of biscuit and gravy meals, yes, but sometimes I would copy down a recipe from the library and repeat it at home. One day at Mama's suggestion I carried a banana cake to Mrs. Thistle. She thanked me and invited me back to her kitchen, pulled two plates and a knife from the cabinet. She cut two thick slices and as we sat at her table eating, she nodded her approval.
Through the years Mrs. Thistle's approval, offered on one other visit, echoed in my head. "Just cook," she said. "God gave you that desire for a reason." Before she died, when I graduated from high school, she gave me her collection of cookbooks. Cooking was what I loved best. It had been from the beginning.
Besides Mama and Mrs. Thistle, I cooked for Will Leary, beginning when I was fourteen. Will was the same age as me, the same grade. He lived on the houseboat Elvira with his father, Amos, who owned a small construction business. The houseboat was named for Will's mother, who had died when he was born. Will had, I was told, some of her dark looks, which were Choctaw, and which directly contradicted his father's redheaded Scottish coloring. There were no Choctaws left in Persia after the year we were born, 1941. Not long before her death, the story goes, her name was painted down the side of the boat, in cursive green swirls. This appealed to my romantic side, and is what I count as my earliest memory: the river, crickets, the late evening diminishing and stillness, where all colors ran and melted, green dissolving into the lavender of shadows, and Will and his father, on the Elvira, Will riding on his father's shoulders; Mama carrying me past on the levee, saying, "Wave! Wave!" I must have been no more than two. Later I liked to fantasize a time when boatmen named their boats after names of lovers rather than themselves. A woman seen pulling water from a well, holding a tin cup. Some would-be poet's woman, whose bare throat makes him cover a boat with her name. The tin cup drizzles water down her chin, and old Amos sweeps a paintbrush over the wood.
This was the way it was for me, growing up, with cotton rows and slow open country and the town on the edge of the river. And seeing it, as I did, makes me remember how, years later, Will found me fishing on the levee. I had been sitting there for some time. I would sit at the water and listen to the hours, lapping and dissolving on the rocks, and smell the amber honeysuckle of a fine Saturday morning. The world was floating on a white haze of distance, and Will looked as though he might sleep. He was tan and handsome and fourteen. He didn't say anything. He just took a seat beside me. Then he picked up a rock. Rubbed its flat side curiously with his thumb. There was some sense of strength in his hands magnified by his holding a thing as slight as the rock. He threw it across the water. It skipped five times, then sank.
"You want some lemonade?"
He said sure. I handed him my thermos. He took a sip and said, "That's exactly right. Not too much sugar. Not sour either." He offered me the rest but I said I'd had plenty, and so he leaned back and drank it down. He finished it in one breath. Licked his lips. There was a speck of rind on the comer. He slid one of his hands over mine along the fishing pole and pulled it toward him and moved my hand to his stomach and pressed it there for a moment. Then he got up and walked toward town.
Well, after he left I put my lips on the thermos, where his had been. I could not later explain exactly what made that encounter the one, but I would remember the way the undissolved crystals of sugar had slid from the bottom of the thermos to the silver lip, glistening with that same luminance I felt on my tongue, the ghost of sweetness. So, for many Saturdays afterward, I squeezed lemons. I went back to the same spot, looking. I thought Will would put my hand on his stomach again, but he did not.
For several years in deer season he would take me hunting with him. There was a stretch of woods bordering the river just north of Persia not given over to farmland. I brought a feeling of nervous mystery to these hunts: What would Will try next? At five one morning we headed out, this time the dead of winter. It was bitter cold. A band of electric blue on the horizon, and a half moon made the path bright and clear. The woods so silent we didn't say a word, all the way to the deer stand. The air made clouds of our breaths. Even after we climbed into the stand Will said nothing, while I tried to think of things warm. I had on three layers of clothes; I was sipping black coffee from my thermos to keep my teeth from chattering. We were sitting like that for a while when the silence began to slow down so I could hear the smaller noises. I could hear Will's breathing. The shift of a branch. Dry leaves crackling as he whispered, "Take the gun, take it! Look through the sight, look!" That was just like Will, startling me in the quiet. His sudden shift reminding me of a passage I read once about the peculiarity of southern weather: For breeze is the soul of a storm testing itself in hollow places. A few years later, for instance, after I had begun to work in the café, we were sitting in this very spot when Will, out of the blue, set his gun down as if interrupting himself and whispered, "I saw y'all's help talking to the Jones girl—"
"Hunh?"
"That colored boy. Who delivers milk to the café. The March boy."
"Earnest."
"Right. Well, I saw him yesterday afternoon, talking to Sheila Jones like he knew her."
"And where were you, to see this?"
"At the Piggly Wiggly."
"At the front of the store, or on an aisle?"
"At the front."
"Outside the counter, or in line?"
"In line."
"And—"
"And I was getting some Juicy Fruit. She had a couple of Cocolas and some stockings."
"They got stockings at the Piggly Wiggly?"
"Or leotards or something. Hell, I don't know. But he was talking to her like he knew her. He was bagging her groceries and talking."
"Well, that's his job. Maybe he was being courteous."
"Courteous ain't the word."
"Sounds to me like it is."
"Yeah but it's what he did then. What he did was, he handed her the bag. And she dropped it. So she stooped down to get it and he did too. A bottle rolled loose and he put it back in. Then, when he handed her the bag, before they stood back up—I was there at the counter, I saw this—he reached up and touched her hair. I swear. Right then and there. I saw." By the look of Will's eyes I was pretty sure he was pulling my leg, but I was taken with his story anyway. I was at the time. I looked at him, open-mouthed and fascinated.
"Naaw," I said. "Naaw!"
"Sshh," Will said. "It was just for a second. A wink of an eye. Then Clarice Lytle walked up behind the Jones girl and says, ‘Hey Sheila.' And you know what? That girl almost dropped the bag again. She says she best be going and then she shot out the store. Like a frightened deer." Will frowned. "Like the one we've already scared away."
"And Earnest?"
"Says, ‘Will that be all, sir?' He took my Juicy Fruit and bagged it, quick as a whistle. He was squinting down at the bag but I didn't say nothing."
"I don't know," I whispered, after a minute. "Something doesn't quite wash. Maybe, you know, you thought you saw him touch her hair. Or maybe he just slipped. Maybe there was a bug in her hair."
"Maybe."
"Or maybe you're flat-out wrong. Maybe we're gonna sit out here and rattle our teeth for nothing. Those deer long gone before we started talking. Why, they're back there laughing at those two frozen fools. Sitting out here half the morning and not see a thing."
"Maybe so." Will shrugged. "Wouldn't be the first time."



In my courting days with Will, I felt an answer looking for me. What? When? The green of the world was breathing out the questions. They followed me in waking moments and blanketed me in sleep. Then one evening, after my sixteenth birthday, Will took me for a walk. We walked for a while aimlessly, without saying anything. We walked down Levee Road on the edge of the bluff, overlooking the river, with the spires of the courthouse and First Baptist behind, and Hardin Hardware, Huit Drugstore, Piggly Wiggly, Ardor Department Store, the two-store buildings, brown brick, water dripping in an alley, and the Persia Café, which was then the only place that served food to white folk in town. The café's housed in an old white frame home, its downstairs converted, robbed of its juice in drought, warped by damp, swollen by rain, frozen and cracked by frost, so that its mildewed exterior had settled, slightly crooked, a fact demonstrated by a marble, which when placed on one end of the porch, would roll all the way to the other end.
As Will and I passed, the neon light of the café sign flickered on, for it was getting toward night: The outline of the café sign kept bursting into ruby light, and every time it went out the vertical letters saying PERSIA CAFÉ faded, but the letters could still be made out as a ghostly shadow teasing the eye before its next ruby wink.
"Where we going?" I said.
I looked down at his feet clomping out one-two, one-two. He was wearing brown leather boots, very heavy, very square, and the frayed fringe of his jeans flickered, one-two, one-two, hypnotically.
"Just walking," he said.
We had left the block of stores and the café, and the faint sound of voices. We passed down the street where tall trees fronted houses, the fleshy leaves touching, a branch jostling as a cat climbed, eyes glowing, claws scratching wood. The windows were open on these houses, with here and there a crack of light, the faint clinking of forks. Against the sky the misty rooftops darkened. Somewhere off a dog barked, and a child laughed. A truck rumbled down the street, then idled, then turned off the motor. At once, a vast silence fell over the street and over the town. Then the sound of water could be heard.
We looked at the river below, visible as a wide dark motion, flecked with evening shimmers. A denser, still darkness, far beyond, blurred the beginning of the other bank. By looking fixedly, though, we could see in the distance the blackish outline of a barge barely visible against the darkening sky. There were the steps down to the pier and we stopped and leaned against the railing. We leaned for a while. Then Will glanced up and over his shoulder. "Daddy's at the café," he said. And let that sink in.
"It's Friday," he added. "He won't be back till late."
As he said that, I was suddenly aware of the emptiness out on the river, the boats floating before us, the dew that would dampen the ground still hovering in the warm air, intensifying the silence and immobility in the space all around. As I looked ahead there wasn't a sound from the town. Below there was the slap-slop of water against boats, now subsiding. Maybe just stand here. Just don't say a word. Finally I said, "You about to get me in trouble."
"You already in trouble."
Then we turned and walked down the steps to the pier. At the end, where the Elvira was tied off, he didn't even pause or look around. He pulled the rope that tied the boat to the pier-post and held the side of the boat flush to the pier. He reached for my hand and helped me in. Then he jumped in himself. He seemed unconsciously in love with his body, his physicalness, slipping foil from a stick of gum, his jaw working over it slowly, his eyes working over me slowly, when he thought I wasn't looking. He went to the door of the cabin and opened it. He stood to one side while I walked down. Then he closed the door. He took a few steps. Just stand here, Fannie, just don't say a word. When he came up behind me, I turned toward the little cabin window. I pretended to be watching something out there, but I was not. I don't think either of us was watching anything. We were standing in the middle of the shadowy room staring out across the water toward the darkening tops of trees that all at once began to stir with breeze coming up from the Gulf.
Then Will said, in a low tone, "Have a seat." I turned and looked to see if there was any place other than a bed he meant. He didn't. There were twin beds and a wall covered with nails to hang tools on, their shapes outlined in yellow paint apparently so each could be put back into place without anyone having to think about it. I looked at these as I took a seat on a bed. I leaned carefully against the pillow. Watching, Will moved around the bed in a way that was not at all like the easeful way he had jumped into the boat and took out his gum and dropped it in an ashtray. Then he stopped. He looked at me, eyes toward me in a straight line and our faces found each other and I was dropping into the quicksand of a kiss, and I didn't think about it or consider—this was going fast—I didn't think about anything, even waiting for the answer.
There is Mississippi light and Mississippi summer. It is deep as emerald but poor, a kind of thick mute clouded sky, with the river of silver-brown, which the land holds as a hand holds a satin ribbon, the humming of mosquitoes, crickets.
The last light was tingeing the window and for some reason I noticed this. The clothes damp and clinging that were hard to peel away and our breaths coming on top of us and the button torn from my dress that I heard, at a simultaneous pause in our breaths, fall to the floor with a tiny click. And again the window light sliding silver threads along our bodies. Will crouched over me. Silver thread along his cheek. I felt the bite and then the fall, his falling from me, like a dead man. I saw the light to the cabin slowly fade, hearing the drop of wind into windlessness and then the slap-slop of water as it rocked the boat. And all the delicate noises of the river.
"It's all right," Will said, afterwards. He might have been sleeping when he said this. I thought maybe I should say something, but the words were suspended in such a luxurious nonchalance that I just lay back my head. I thought of salt and green onion. Lapping grass, by a pond. That loosed-from-your-skin feeling, when the cats are turning into toms.



When I awoke it was to footsteps overhead. The knob on the cabin door began to rattle just as Will said, "Close your eyes." The door swung open. Then it closed quickly again.
"Hell's bells! Your daddy!"
Will nodded.
"What we gonna tell him?"
"We gonna tell him nothing."
"Nothing?"
"He's a big boy. He can take it." Will pulled back the sheet. "We're gonna tell your mama first."
"My mama."
"Yeap."
"And pray tell you got anything in mind?"
There were freckles of blood on the mattress and I nudged the sheet back over them.
"How about just walking up to her doorstep? Holding hands. She'll get the idea."
"She'll get it, all right. I'll get it too."
Will practically never smiled but he almost did now. "Well," he said, "just get dressed now. You go on up. Just act like it's no big deal."
So I did. Fortunately Amos was busy tying off rope and he said, without looking at me, "Morning."
"Morning."
"You know, young lady," he said, without missing a beat. "Will's come a long way since he was a boy. And he's better on the woodwork than I am. Than I was at his age anyway. An eye for cabinetry, for line. To see the form before it's done. Just thought you'd like to know that. Bet you didn't know that?"
"Nosir," I said.




From the summers of 1955 through 1959 I worked at the Persia Café, full-time. Not cooking, not at first, but waiting tables, washing dishes, cleaning bathrooms. My great-aunt Eugenia was the owner then, but her real name was Mrs. Eugenia Dare Mary Claire Boatwright, a name that fit, for she went on and on. She could talk the hind legs off a donkey. And she gave me as much work as I could handle. Seven to five on weekdays, later on Fridays and Saturdays, when I was not out with Will. Eugenia would work the cash register and turn a lunch crowd into a prolonged visit, though the true cook and influence on my work was Mattie Boyd, the one always in the kitchen, and from the start I thought the three of us worked well together, considering our differences: Mattie black, skinny as a matchstick and twice as hot-headed; Eugenia, widowed aunt of my mother's and the color of faded teabags, a patient intelligence; me a young white long-boned girl, stumbling along, eager to get somewhere.
Mattie saw beyond the present, got quick flashes of coming events like radio waves briefly connected. She had been born with pneumonia; at three, witnessed a tornado uproot a giant oak; dreamed of cherry tomatoes the night before her brother got the measles. She believed in Jesus our Lord. She could make a perfect biscuit. Luna moths stopped on the back screen door to watch her on their annual flight.
The café, as I have mentioned, was air-cooled; the lettering on the door shows the word capped with aqua and white glaciers melting down like cream. Inside, the cold air smelled first of deodorant powder and warm coffee. There was a string of Christmas bells on the doorknob, left year-round, to announce your entry, a cigarette machine, a jukebox that didn't work, a dozen tables, the counter with ten stools, and a dozen skin-colored Naugahyde booths covered in plastic, like loosely nyloned feet. The tables were topped each with salt and pepper shakers, a canister of sugar, a cruet of pale green finger-sized peppers pickled in vinegar. As you entered there was always the seemingly faraway echo of clinking silver and popping grease. There was the sense, particularly behind the counter—with its pictures of high school football heroes and basketball teams, beauty queens, wedding pictures, and pictures of Eugenia's old dog, Earl, long dead, well missed—of a public place trying for an hour or so to be a place to call your own, matched only in my memory by the picture show, before it closed.
Or so I liked to think.
Though work tinged my view. I learned of late deliveries; icebox breakdowns; the battles with roaches, ants, mice; folk who can't hit the toilet; folk who stop up the toilet; folk who forget to leave a tip. To forget all this I would daydream of my future, of one day going to Paris, to chef's school at the Cordon Bleu, Saturday mornings sitting at a sidewalk café wearing a Marilyn Monroe dress and drinking café au lait. And there always seemed to be accordian music as well. More, mademoiselle? Oui. To the tables I hauled more fried chicken. More baked ham. Delicate corn pudding. Fresh greens flavored salt-sweet, bacon-rich that slid from your tongue to your blood, singing. Blackberry cobbler. Caramel cake. And Mattie's biscuits, so airy and transcendent that each time I hauled them out to customers they made me want to give up cooking. More, they made me want to try. Anyway, by the second summer Eugenia let me into Mattie's kitchen and I began to watch. Her secret? Baking powder. Single-acting baking powder lends more delicacy to a biscuit than store-bought double-acting, so make your own.
Other secrets: Store milk in glass. Freeze fresh berries, but never meats. Put home-rendered lard in your piecrust.
Mattie's instructions were quick and elliptical. They kept to subjects such as flavor, temperature, when to taste. She taught me about instinctively denying certain seasoning the chance—as she put it—to dominate rather than feature a dish. "If it wasn't already dead," she said, when I dropped too much cayenne on catfish, "you'd burn the life out of it." She had hot, juggling hands that were difficult to follow, and I tried to tell her this. "Well, catch on, Missy," she had a habit of answering. "I ain't gonna slow down on your account."
"Missy" was how Mattie mocked me whenever she thought I was getting too big for my britches, and though black folk were supposed to be on this kind of formal name basis with whites, her tone was already something I took for granted. But all her reproofs were like that, a matter of rush and implication, so that much later I would realize this added up to unique instruction: her harmony with the seasons; her refusal to be bound by the imperative of smother or fry; her demonstration that food can be respected as much as desired. The fresh vegetable, for instance, which wants to be left alone. "Don't cook cabbage till it farts," she said. "Don't boil green beans till they shred to tweed."
"Flavor," she said, "is everything. Add one right ingredient to a recipe and it's yours." I put rosemary in the fried chicken. Garlic in the mashed potatoes. "Mmm-hmmph," she said, tasting, skin of her cheeks caving, tilting her head to the side as though listening. Her praise I could go on for days and days. I would try a recipe, and try again. Learning, I felt I was guessing piece by piece.
And one day Mrs. Viola telephoned Eugenia at the café with an odd request: a blue cake. It was her grandson's fourth birthday. He wanted blue.
"Blue," Eugenia said, the skin around her mouth gathering. She might have been asking me a question. By this time, I think, she knew that in her presence I was butter of easy-spreading consistency.
My own eyes roved over to Mattie. She was standing by the kitchen door. She said, "Well, come on."
I made a cake, seven-minute icing; dyed each with two drops of blue food coloring; went over to Hardin Hardware and bought some tiny toy sailboats and tilted them on the blue frosting waves.
Well, Mrs. Viola thanked me with such a brimful voice we started a little sideline. Other folk had birthdays. Others heard. Eugenia even bought me a cake-decorating book and as orders continued my cakes gradually took on more sophisticated designs. A cake that looked like a fish. A basket of candied flowers. A fiftieth-anniversary cake soaked in bourbon and shaped into a Wild Turkey bottle, complete with label. I charged two to four dollars for those cakes, in addition to hourly wage and tips. By the summer before my senior year I was making enough to pay half Mama's rent and save besides. I was squirreling away money to flee. I would spin the globe at the Thistle library and imagine cooking in France, Italy, Australia, anyplace really. Mama talked of college but I already considered cooking my profession. In June 1959, one month after I graduated from high school, I went to work at the café full-time. And though I was stuck in Persia for the time being, I considered the café the next step in my education.
Anyway, I had been earning money from cooking and was proud of it.
In 1959, I still had a steady hand and did not have to put aside personal torment for an entire day of cooking. I could concentrate on the finest cake, attend to customers, and had not yet fallen into the habit of eating a quarter-pound of chocolate a day. That happened soon after I discovered Earnest March's body and holds true to this day. I never had much of a taste for hard liquor, though I did drink it with Will. Which he did, often enough. On the other hand, chocolate is another cheap magic, its own amnesia, a float in a warm river. Skin on the back of a wooden spoon, and memory twitches, a bowl and a spoon to lick, an opening oven door. What does God smell like, you wonder. God smells like a freshly baked chocolate-chip cookie.
Perhaps it's true that we all need our diversions, but there I go. So much to tell. Though I, for one, have been cooking for much of my life, I have never gotten famous. None of my recipes has made it into a book. My three-ringed notebook from school gathers dust in the café kitchen. Clarice Lytle, who went to work for Will after high school and, to hear the town's version of it, got involved with him after we got married, may still have the floral recipe box I gave her; I don't know. It was a graduation present.
I had bought the recipe box at Ardor Department Store, but that was before the recognition. Clarice Lytle was not much older than Sheila Jones, and I was not much older than either of them. I think of this again as I look back at our years as a whole. That summer was like both an end and a beginning to our lives, longer and full of different meaning, when the drought broke heat lightning and the news broke about Sheila Jones, so the entire town found out about her and Earnest March. I can look back and see a particular day before all hell broke loose. I can see a day before rocks pummeled the café windows and all our white customers threatened to leave the café, and I wonder if we were plain naive. Or is trouble all of a piece only in the remembering?
The days were all alike and ran into one another, and the mind is a sort of sieve, but the day I remember was during my second year at the café working full-time. Sheila Jones had come in after school, as girls did, for Cocolas and shakes. Then Emma Magee and Lynn Hardin followed and took seats at the counter next to her. At the start, it wasn't exactly a gay gathering. In the first place, the typical day didn't make for much chitchat. In the second place, there was the heat, and folk coming in to the air-conditioning took a minute to revive. In the third place, Sheila wasn't particularly chummy with Emma or Lynn, or any of the girls, for that matter. So she sat sucking on her straw and gave herself over to her thoughts. I reckon she had a lot to think about. For one thing, she could think about all that had happened since her father died while she was still out in California, and her mother had packed up all their belongings and brought her back to Persia, back to the old family home that had belonged to her mother's side for years. She would have a lot to think about over a tall, cool milk shake, for there had been a lot of changes.
I noticed Sheila, first and most, maybe because of her father. But I felt there was something childishly sequestered about her looks, and I connected her with that feeling. The straight brown bangs, gray-green eyes, crescent of freckles across her cheeks. Nary a curve to show under a tight shirt, or a short skirt, like the other girls. She wore baggy rolled-up Wranglers and saddle oxfords. No makeup, like the others. She had a space between her front teeth faint as a pencil line that showed just enough for her to hold her top lip down when she smiled. She leaned her head low over her shake, cheeks hollowing over her straw. When her bra strap slipped out of her shirt, she lowered her shoulder just under the counter, still sucking the straw, and quickly pulled it up.
I remember Eugenia saying how Sheila had shaken as if she would convulse during her father's funeral. How on the trip to the cemetery she and her mother had been driven by the preacher himself. Most folk stood politely through the service waiting for it to be done with, until they saw Sheila rush the coffin. They saw her paw wildly at it before Brother Works had even managed to come to a real stop and heard her call her daddy, who was a good three days dead, as she ran out of the cemetery and down the street.
Why Sheila would eventually choose me to talk to, I don't know. Maybe the café was a nice diversion. The cool counter, the tall, frosted glasses. Or maybe I wasn't threatening. When you work in a café, folk often have a habit of punching a hole in the air where you are. Later, when folk started chalking up reasons for her involvement with Earnest March—a mind skidded on grief, all those years in California—I could attest to the fact that they were wrong. I was the one, maybe the only one, she took time to explain it to.
Now Mattie at the kitchen door, in armhole apron. A pea hull stuck to the front.
"Milk delivery," she said, and I left the girls sipping their shakes at the counter. I followed her back to the kitchen. She nodded to Earnest March, who was her cousin; he nodded back. Then she took her seat by a basket of peas. Earnest had deposited a crate on the table along with a pink receipt slip. I hollered "Much obliged!" as he headed out the back door.
For a second I watched Mattie as she picked up a peapod and snapped it. The light hit her on her brown face, which was damp now with sweat, and her chopped-off black hair was spongy and wild, and her black eyes burning right out of her face at me. I could tell she was riled. She presented a profile stiff as a tin duck in a shooting gallery.
"What's got you?" I said.
She kept snapping. There was a faint crescent of purple under her fingernails, purple tinge on her apron. She took a breath. She dropped an emptied pod into the garbage. Finally she said, "None of your business."
"Aw now," I said and grinned. Then, "What is it?"
"A dream I had. You satisfied?" Another snap. The symptoms seemed to be running true to form. We'd get started like that over nothing, me waiting and grinning and Mattie working up her black eyes to a glitter and a coil of her hair would separate from the rest and hang down by her forehead so she would have to wipe it back with her forearm. She would say plenty and I would grin, for when I wasn't concentrating on cooking, it was kind of interesting to see Mattie riled. Unless she hit one of my sore spots, and she was one of the few who could. One of the few who knew how. Then the circus would really start. But this was not one of those times, and so I kept grinning.
"What kind of dream?" I said.
"You think it's so funny, oh yeah, so funny. But you won't think it's so funny when you hear what it's about." She stopped, then said, "Part of it's about you."
"What about me?"
"I saw you, I don't know, surrounded by, hubcaps."
"Hubcaps?" I looked at her. "What am I, one of Sikes Daughtry's rosebushes?"
"Oh it's so funny, yeah, yeah." And she started snapping as though she might snap a button off her starched white dress.
After a minute, I said, "I'm sorry. What's the rest of the dream?"
"Oh. So now you want to hear it?"
Another snap.
I watched her.
"Well, I'd really like to hear it but I hadn't got all day. I got to go back out front, to the counter, all those girls—"
"The rest was foggy—you satisfied? I was walking along. Couldn't see a thing. Then, in the middle of that I saw something."
"What?"
"I don't know." She shook her head. "A shadow. Four-legged. Like an animal but—I don't know." Then she returned to the snapping.
At the comer of the kitchen, a scurry, like a mouse.
"Hell's bells," I said. "Hell's bells sonofabitch. You better not be what I think you are." I went to the comer and grabbed the broom, and pulled out the crates of potatoes and onions. There, sure enough, was a new hole above the molding, eaten through fresh plaster.
"He's back," I said. "Monsieur Bigbutt after the potatoes."
"It ain't the potatoes. It's the pecans."
"They all wrapped up."
"I don't care. He can smell them."
"Well he's back." I grinned again at Mattie. "You sure he ain't the one in your dreams? Creeping at you through that fog?"
"Say what you like, Missy. Say what you like and I'll put your tongue in that pickle jar."
I checked the mousetrap by the icebox. A piece of cheese, dried the color of clay, untouched. So I got a fresh piece and reset it, washed my hands, put up the milk, picked up the receipt on the table, and copied the amount in Eugenia's ledger. It was a thick book I added the figures to, the binding cracked, bowed out slightly on the sides so the receipt was cradled within the text of pages. A pink slip stamped Piggly Wiggly, signed in blue ink: "Sweet milk. Ten gallons. EM."
I looked at the small, gnarled handwriting.



The only closer look I had at Earnest March, before the close look at his murdered body, came the night before I got married. Eugenia threw a dinner party for me at her house, just outside Persia on Huit Road (which we called in high school "Do It Road"—it was that secluded). In part, Eugenia saw this dinner as a wedding present.
So we sat down to the dining room table, with Eugenia at one end. Eugenia tamped down at her temple one blue-tinted curl and gave a last look around the table to see if anything was missing, and then she bowed her head for the prayer and blessed these children and the food and the table and all the folk sitting at it. She went on at some length and blessed the café and the county and the state and the country and the president, and she spoke about the poor and the hungry and the weather and other problems with particular reference to the farmers and she asked it all in Jesus' name amen and looked up and reached for the dinner rolls.
"Amen," said Brother Works, who was the only one there not kin. The dinner I am referring to was on a hot evening in July, back in 1961, and I sat next to Will. Mama was there, and Amos, just as Eugenia had planned.
"Commence! Commence!" she cried, a little too eagerly, once the prayer was done. Eugenia, by this time, was around seventy, and she was starting to show her age. She wore what we called catglasses, her eyes swimming so huge behind the thick lenses you wondered if it were an optical illusion. But then Eugenia was one of those old people whose sentiment resides openly in her eyes; I saw, magnified, her eagerness was genuine. She was starting up the talk and keeping a sharp eye for a vacant space on any plate and her face seemed to smooth itself out as she looked around at the group sitting before her burgundy rose-border china; a platter of the same pattern hung on the wall just behind her, along with a large print of some other, unidentifiable flower. Candlelight flickered; thighs shifted; Mama sat in scrutinizing silence as Will and I passed platters. There was reason for tension. I could feel the sweat behind my knees. The general overwhelmingness of the occasion was reinforced by the feeling that the implication of theft, as Mama initially saw our engagement, had somehow taken on an inevitability of its own, for there had been, between Will and my family, a lot of water under the bridge.
Throughout this dinner Mama would glance questioningly at me. She wore a green dress she had made for the occasion, which showed off the color of her eyes, and it amazes me to think how young she was then. Thirty-nine. I watched her pick up her napkin and delicately dab the comer of her lip. Eugenia would tease her about it, as she teased her about everything: her notions of culture, her love of classical music, her fear of getting fat, and her encounters with various men, about which she was apt to hold forth with sharp humor, including her own brief husband by the name of Jefferson Bell. He worked the river docks and had a temper and a restless nature, so news of Mama's pregnancy provoked a fight about who was to blame. Mama said the only thing he left behind was a pair of thick, black rubber boots. Mama wore these whenever she worked our flowerbeds, and confided that someday she hoped to catch a handsome fireman with them.
But now Mama put down her napkin. She frowned openly at me as Eugenia flowed at the swelling and silent Will, "Nonsense, nonsense, son, you haven't begun to eat yet! Now what's the matter with you? Now you just pass your plate for another helping."
"Yessum," he managed. "This is awful good." He sat there, pressed to his chair, his face held a certain way, as always with the hint of held-back, keyed-up intensity, though the expression was hidden under the smooth surface of the face. But the intensity was more than usual, which I could tell. Once in a while I caught Eugenia glancing soberly and consideringly at Will, and he would look to his plate. He had used Amos's Brylcreem, so the black hair was clean-parted and slicked back like an eight ball on a pool table. The black eyelashes very long. The brown eyes that, I remember noticing then, were shaped like Amos's eyes, but in which the Scottish blue was replaced by the circle of dark brown inside of which was a smaller circle of coiling troubled amber. He had on a shirt and tie. He had what must have been the cleanest fingernails in Persia County.
And old Amos, hair slicked back too and stubbled chin razornicked, fumbling his fork with tool-hardened hands. And Brother Works, the only person I knew who could outtalk Eugenia. Indeed, he had a voice that was to his ear like a face slow to leave a mirror. I was not a regular churchgoer, but as Eugenia said, he was a necessary part of this function. Having made my own private connection between God and food, I felt moral enough not to pay close attention. Besides, I had already passed my own judgment on Brother Works: I had seen him at the café smothering the contents of an entire lunch plate with ketchup.
"Say, Brother Works," Eugenia said, "I hear you been blessing the cows, you been laying on the hands?"
"Yes ma'am."
"Burl Magee says you lay hands on the fence, the barn, the salt lick."
"He speaks the truth."
"Well, I don't profess to know all these things myself, like I was a high-toned preacher. But I do remember a preacher coming here back in the great flood, back in'thirty-six, some of you weren't even yet in this world, oh well, but there were a lot of problems connected with that preacher. Folk expected a lot. He cured some folk and offered to pray over their fields and lay the hands on their kin and their livestock and was apparently kicking up his heels in the pasture so to speak like a good brother in Beulah land and I don't like to say it but it got bad. I think it did."
We ate. She looked at Brother Works.
"They brought dead cows," she said. "Put them in the back of their trucks and brought them right up to the church. It got out of hand."
"You can't do nothing with a dead cow," said Amos.
"Here, here," sniffed Mama.
"Personally I'm inclined to agree with you both." Brother Works nodded. "Folk do expect a lot from a minister of God. But we can leave it to the higher mercies to sort out the wobblers and cowards from those making a simple reach in their faith. It's the way you start—just like folk always want to know how I got started. When I first heard the Word I knew what it was for and there wasn't no mystery about it neither! I heard it first on the radio. Brother Joseph Shane. My mother had bought a crystal set. Bought it through the mail. It come wrapped up in a box and you put it together. We lived in Black Fork and we'd heard about Brother Shane, of course, we heard him on the radio. But we'd never actually seen him in the pulpit with our own eyes till he come for revival. Then I knew what the pulpit was for! Because there could be no delays, you see. A man might harden his heart to the Word, but you stand a few feet from a pulpit? Well, hardness of the heart won't do it there, unless you stone-deaf besides. And the laying of the hands is an extension of this. The laying of the hands is a tactile extension of the Word—"
Brother Works loaded his plate as he talked and then he stopped talking and ate. So we sat around the dining room table at Eugenia's, one hot evening in July, back in 1961, waiting for Brother Works and Eugenia to outlast one another and listening for the silence in the pauses as the night air hummed through the open dining room windows. Twice Will opened his mouth and closed it. But Eugenia was already overwhelming him with regeneration and third helpings. Roasted quail, for instance, new potatoes, black bottom pie. Salted pecans served in a silver dish like a tiny birdbath and black, black coffee. I felt glad for the folds of linen in candlelight as Mama moved frugally and Will continued in silence and Eugenia went on and Amos glanced out at it all from under his rust-colored eyebrows. Brother Works went on too, about the flood of the Delta and the flood of Noah and the glory of sunsets and God's carelessness in creating the female leg.
Anyway, it went like that and during dessert I got up and excused myself. Eugenia had one of those old houses with a detached bathroom and kitchen connected by a little porch. Once outside, I paused to let my eyes adjust. The light from a window fell on part of the porch and withdrew again down the edge of the garden in deepening shadow and damp and a bird chittering somewhere in the dark brush. Then I walked toward the end of the porch. It was there I saw him. A flashlight—like something sprayed out of a hose—lit up the edge of the garden, and I stopped in midstep.
A big-bellied man.
The moonlight revealed his shape in the darkness. Doing what looked to be some odd dance, running a few steps, leaping forward, his legs smashing down, bending and moving a hand along the grass, standing. He was very quick; his shoes made squidging noises along the damp grass.
"Howdy?" I said.
The light leaped up and turned in midair toward my direction. It moved around the garden and through the yard, over the porch steps, and then touched and slid toward me. I couldn't see him for the light. Then he dropped it quickly. The man became just a boy, a skinny one, actually; the big belly became a basket tied to his belt.
"Earnest."
"Yessum."
His eyes on me a second, round and dark as coins. He was just outside the porch steps and did not walk up. He stood sideways to me, not facing.
"Nice night."
He nodded and looked down at his basket.
"You catching crickets?"
He nodded again and slid one foot back in the direction of the garden. He stood that way a moment, feet apart and leaning somewhat to offset the bulk of the basket, from which came cavelike cricket sounds. In the misty sky the stars flickered. I looked off toward the distance and then finally back at him. He stood with his hands composed and motionless over the lid of the basket. In the dropped light of the flashlight, I could see his black high-tops, grass sticking to the rubber soles.
"Well," I said, "good luck." That he took as his release; he did not want conversation and in fact seemed as fierce in his solitude as Sheila Jones, whipping the air back toward the garden in long fervent strides. And from that moment until the last time I saw him alive, we said not a word to each other. Which was all well and proper. Earnest March I knew only by the cold milk bottles or the sound of his feet running.



Early the next morning I went out to Tchula Gaze's for eggs. I was making my own wedding cake, of course, and I wanted the freshest ingredients. Leaving town, I carried a basket out Levee Road a bit past Eugenia's house, past Avery Jones's cotton field, and all of a sudden I was on the steep slope by the river.
A timid, tender band of pink caught on the horizon. Mosquito whine and the smell of manure rich as meat. I wasn't sure if it was too early or not. But the feet carried themselves and it felt almost like relief after the flurry of Eugenia's dinner just to walk the path with the dew-taste and croaking frogs that began and then stopped. Then, far below, the sound of the river could be heard. With the lack of light it was almost visible, or at least a few of its glints showed intermittently. A barge moved slowly down the water. Everything moved slowly as it got toward light and I went down the path past the fields, where off in the distance I could see the first field hands. Three tall men, almost black, wearing nothing but cotton trousers and broad straw hats. Side by side they walked carrying hoes over their shoulders, and then they melted into the cotton rows. I went past another pasture, where silver-faced cows questioned my presence and twitched tails over caramel hides. A sign that said POSTED. A twitter of a bird that shot down the slope. It was impossible that time of day not to watch. The path was dirt, puffs of dust at my feet, but there was no real movement. The barge hardly advanced on the water. Finally I reached the slope toward a narrow peninsula, at the beginning of which was a little cemetery, some church ruins, a square of crumbling bricks. Just past it was Tchula Gaze's shack, walled with pine and sod. In 1961 she was ninety, one of the oldest black women in the county, and since her house was next to the church ruins, I thought it looked something like a church. The cool moth smell of it. The way it sat out on the edge of the bluff. To the back was her chicken coop and garden. She had taken a nine-foot crucifix from the church ruins and used it to build a scarecrow, hanging empty Vienna sausage cans that clankled whenever the winds shifted. Straight below, two hundred feet down, was the base of the peninsula; considered a point of danger for barges, it fed a batch of sandbars that had to be carefully navigated. Though fishermen and riverboatmen alike said they got fair warning from Tchula: They could hear her scarecrow before they saw it, high on the air, like a slowed-down sound of chimes.
Then I heard Tchula herself, talking to her chickens. She stood so she was just in the shadow of the coop, bending toward them in their nests. She wore a faded blue dress with gaping armholes that showed her long brown breasts, and her hair was thin and white and tied with one of those strings off a snuff pouch. Tchula couldn't hear too well, but she could pick up on your presence in other ways. Nor was she an easy person to surprise, but then nobody would ever want to surprise Tchula. Not anybody who knew her and had seen the stunts she could pull with the old double-action Colt Lightning that jutted in her right pocket like a hipbone.
"Morning, Tchula," I said, loud enough so she could hear me, so as not to startle her. "Fine morning."
"Best keep away from my eggs," she said in her briny voice. "Don't be tainting my eggs."
"Why surely no. I'm just here for a little purchase. I'm getting married today and I'm making my cake."
"Good weather for marrying. Good weather for practicing, too. Like you and Will been doing. Practice. Practice. Practice."
When Tchula laughed, as she did now, her face cracked into a thousand wrinkles and her mouth bared twisted, darkened teeth. "I always liked that Will," she said. "He never bothered my eggs."
"I like him too."
"I just remember when he was a talker. Talk, talk, talk. He daddy'd bring him out here, to see his mama's grave, he was knee-high to a jaybird. But that was before the accident. You ask me, that accident was the start of that boy's troubles on this earth."



On his eighth birthday, May 14, 1949, Amos bought Will a Red Rider BB gun. There were plenty of BB guns around Persia, usually given to boys that age the way girls were given bicycles or training bras. You could see Will playing with his on trails by the edge of the bluff, high above the water. He would shoot at the river off the houseboat. He would set up empty cans on the end of the dock and take aim, or charge blindly at them with the gun held like a battering ram and knock them in the water, one time falling in himself.
One afternoon I had just come into the café when I noticed something under my foot. A fork, its tines turned upward. Silverware scattered everywhere, and an egg turner on the counter. I stepped over a smashed plate and a broken ketchup bottle and saw several dimes on the seat of the chair. A still, muffled quality held the room, an invisible kind of energy. I picked my way across the floor and, seeing two men at the kitchen door, walked around the counter. They were all but blocking my view. Then I heard a voice cry out "I'm sorry," followed by a loud slap.
At first I didn't recognize the voice. And I couldn't see past those men. Then Burl Magee turned and saw me and leaned down and said, "Well, hey, little lady," in a sudden, tripping whisper.
"You know Sheriff Wade," he said. "Sheriff, meet Fannie Bell."
The sheriff bent down and shook my hand. I felt his hand and waited, but at first he did not speak. I looked up at him, hesitating in Mr. Magee's hesitation, and saw his bald head, unexpectedly close and huge in the light, and a single mole on the side of his nose, like a second, tiny bald head.
"Pleased to make your acquaintance," he said. "But I'm sorry about this accident."
"What the sheriff's saying is …" said Mr. Magee, and the words settled a certain way in his lips, in the lines around his mouth. "What the sheriff's saying is, that's Will Leary in the kitchen. Poor boy, he ran into Lawrence Boatwright while playing with that BB gun of his on the bluff. The boy was running and apparently—tripped. Your uncle Lawrence was standing near the edge and was apparently—startled. I wish I could say different, Fannie, but your uncle Lawrence—fell to his death."
Uncle Lawrence, who had been married to Eugenia for thirty-five years, was just recovering from a stroke.
"Uncle Lawrence," I said. "Nunh-unh." I shook my head.
"I'm sorry," said Mr. Magee.
"But it was BBs."
"No, hon," said Mr. Magee, "he fell."
Then the sheriff turned to Eugenia and said, very sharply, "I'll have to ask you not to strike the witness."
I stopped between the two men and saw Will, curled up on the floor and crying. Eugenia was standing next to him. Staring at her hand. She was holding her palm and staring at it like a map of hell, and then she put it down. Then her eyes lost focus.
"My husband was just getting better," she said. "He worked so hard to get back on his feet, and now this?"
To answer, Sheriff Wade seemed to switch direction and walked toward her. He gently placed his hands on her shoulders. At that moment Mama appeared at the door, flush-faced and open-mouthed.
"We know, we know," the sheriff said. "You need to get on home now. We're mighty sorry." He patted Eugenia's shoulders rapidly four times and then led her over and handed her to Mama as though she were a vase he might drop.
"Come on, Fannie," Mama said.
But I was looking at Will. He was holding his arms around himself and rocking. Sitting on the floor and rocking and staring downward through his loosed hair at the shards on the linoleum, his own eyes like splintered glass, and I thought of the word I'd heard for men who'd come back from war: shell-shocked. I could not stop looking at him.
"Come on, Fannie."
Years later, I came to believe that Will would look through a thick whiskey focus straight toward Uncle Lawrence. And that no amount of liquor could visit enough punishment on himself. But in that moment, I simply turned to my mother and left the café.
Afterward Sheriff Wade questioned Will for more than an hour. Will had a small cut on his chest from the butt of the gun in the collision, and the sheriff took him to the doctor for stitches. Then he had Will take him to the exact spot on the bluff where the accident had happened. Amos went along too, but Will did not say anything. For some time after that, he did not speak.
I was eight at the time, and I remember the funeral, Brother Works's voice, the closed coffin, and Eugenia, who looked too small for her navy dress, her face falling in pleats. The body had landed on a rock at the bottom of the bluff, which some commented on as fortunate; had the fall been wider, the river would have taken Uncle Lawrence's body and it might never have been found.
And I did not see Will for an entire summer. It was May of that year, the start of school vacation, and talk went that he'd gone off to the mental ward at Whitfield State Hospital. Folk, as usual, set their plots in motion; few guessed when he actually returned, and holed up, for being a recluse in Persia is an act of pure creativity. I even heard Mama use the word breakdown. What did it mean? I wondered. Was she talking about Will or Eugenia? Breakdown to me sounded like a temporary inconvenience, a flat tire or a hot engine, something to be fixed and not worried over. And I heard Eugenia say, not too long afterward, "No, I won't hold it against him. I won't hold it against him." As though trying to convince herself. "There's enough blame in this town. And that boy's gonna have to live with the God-awful stupid thing he did."




Tchula sweet-talked one of her chickens and cajoled an egg from its nest. "Well, you newlyweds now, you stay away from my eggs."
"We will."
"And do as you will." Tchula sighed deeply. "Do as you will. Folk don't like me, see,'cause I remember. You see down there? Down there, just past that willow, I saw a pirate once, sitting on those rocks. Just sitting there, eyeing me. Like he wasn't in a hurry to go nowhere. But folk nowaday don't want you to remember."
She looked out over the river. A breeze picked up and brushed her dress into a stubborn crookedness; then she turned back to the nest and reached in and took another egg and placed it in my hand. It was warm to the touch and I knew that inside the yolk was warm and floating. I held it for a moment, then set it gently in my basket. The chickens rearranged themselves in the face of this, panicking and fluttering just a little.
"Yes, well, thank you, Tchula," I said. I paid her for the eggs. "Much obliged."
She turned back to her chickens.
And I turned back toward town. As though just remembering. For this is the day, I thought, this is the day, and found myself walking, picking up speed, holding the basket just so, in order not to jostle the eggs. I was going faster then; it was almost full light, and I felt the dew-swelled air in the arms of my shirt and all the colors—the pink-streaked sky, the fuzzy deep green cotton rows, brown-skinned eggs, blue-pooling river shadows—seemed to acquire gel and substance streaking from my fingers like transitory paints.
At the café, closed for the wedding day, I made the cake. It was a Saturday, still early, and there were no folk in sight. Closed signs on the storefronts, empty sagging porches. It was one of those days, opening up the café, you got the feeling you were the only person in town. It was one of those days you tried to imagine what might come along the road under the tall hood of old trees.
I looked at the AIR-COOLED sign on the café front door and thought of old Mrs. Thistle. Then, moving inside to the kitchen, I whipped up cake batter and baked and spent the better part of three hours decorating.
When I finished I carried the cake out to the counter. I set it there for a moment. I was pleased to think of myself as the chef of the establishment and I walked around handling Eugenia's worn and cracked and cupboard-crammed possessions. I turned the lights on and off. I felt the coin-cold of the icebox and heard water trickling into the pan underneath. I tried a button on her black NCR cash register and jumped a little at the noise. Finally, I squared my shoulders and took a deep breath and moved back from the cake to take a look. Then I held up my hands and made a little square, looking through the square the way you might see the cake in a photograph. And whispered, "Yes." And it was then I felt, at the heart of me, a hush and gratitude, for being in this world. White cake on the light counter. Sunlight through the window. A pair of wooden salad forks, propped in a jar, backs to one another and bending outward like the wings of brown geese. Happiness has its way of seeing. Happiness like none I had ever known or have known since.
Mama had made my dress, pale blue lace, with a deep V in the front. I was big-busted before it went out of style and I looked damn good if I do say so myself. Eugenia and Mattie were there; Mama stood up with me; Will almost smiled. And the cake, of course, was perfect. Not one of those tacky haystack cakes with the plastic hand-holding couple. But a two-layer double ring. A fine cake. Tasteful. It said on top, in delicate cursive, amid candy rosevine swirls: Will & Fannie, July 11, 1961.
THE PERSIA CAFÉ. Copyright © 2001 by Melany Neilson. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.