Loss Leader

A stump scout, I guess you'd to call him. We'd just bought the farm in Mississippi and were strapped for cash, and this guy shows up, jeans, flannel shirt, well-worn John Deer hat, and he wants to know if there are any walnut stumps on the place. There were, and he bought ten of them for $100 each, sent a crew in to dig them out, then filled the holes. He worked for the Colt company and they used the wood for pistol grips, left me a card. A year or so later I was having coffee with Troy, at the hardware store in Duck Hill, and two good-old-boys came in looking to sell a load of firewood. Cut and split Black Walnut; I bought it for fifty dollars. Stacked it in one of the numerous sheds and called the stump guy, Henry, he stopped by a week later and bought the wood for a thousand dollars. I did miles of fencing in Mississippi and used hundreds of cedar fence-posts. Cedar splits like a dream, but I always saved the butt log, four feet, knot-less and perfect, because the pencil guys paid top dollar. As it turns out, cedar is perfect for pencils, and I had a lot of it. My grandfather, Tom, the last ten or fifteen years of his life, retired from mule-trading, spent most of his time whittling cedar splits down to nothing. In the course of an afternoon, telling stories the whole time, he'd reduce a stick of wood into beautifully curled shavings. His knife, a Schrade Stockman, was incredibly sharp. He honed it every night while Myrtle read, out loud, from the bible. Their one decadence was a root-beer float after dinner. Dinner was actually called supper, because dinner was the mid-day meal. Myrtle was a great country cook, and she made wonderful cornbread. Home-cured ham and red-eye gravy, mixed greens cooked with salt-pork, chicken fried in lard (her chickens, she had a stump where she chopped off their heads), and great cream pies. She always had a Jersey cow and made butter. The last summer I spent with them, I must have been fourteen, Tom let me buy and sell a few animals at the weekly livestock auction. He had some holding pens, where we could keep pigs or calves and the occasional mule (he never quite retired) and I loved the wheeling and dealing that went on. It was extraordinarily complex, like playing chess. Who needs what. I hadn't thought about it, but I'm much more influenced by my grandparents than I am by my parents. My parents were digging out of the depression; my grandparents were still trading mules, grinding corn, and curing hams in the smokehouse. Yeah, well. I still like to fry up a piece of salt pork, a streak-of-lean, with a strip of skin that I can chew for hours. Henry David is credited with the invention of raisin bread. I'm not sure I believe this. As soon as I invented bread I'd start putting things into it. Stuffed crust pizza. Fried dough stuffed with bacon fat, duck or goose liver. Reading about engineering, I was thinking about the new work down at the damn and spillway, what McPhee called The Control Of Nature, and this was a very well executed project, good people, great equipment, and I'm sure it cost several million dollars. I met one of the designers, a hydraulic engineer. He came up to the house for a drink and we talked about stress failure. He was concerned about the wing walls at the spillway. He took about a dozen photographs of my staircase and thought it was remarkable, I pointed out several mistakes. Imperfect joints. I'd made a jig, for notching the posts, which gave me the depth and angle of the notch, but the two surfaces were both natural edges, uncut, so they didn't fit perfectly. I actually know several carpenters who would have made the joints fit perfectly. It's always good to remember that someone does anything better than you. I only notice the not-quite-perfect joints when I'm feeling maudlin and self-critical. Usually I just marvel that I built them. They're probably the best example of what I preach about letting the materials speak. It's not meant to be at all mystical, it's actually purely practical. If you're trying to build something square a post needs one flat side, a corner post needs two, a free-standing post doesn't need a flat side at all, it just has to carry the load. I like exposing a natural edge. I also didn't know that Thoreau lived in the Emerson household for a couple of years, running errands and such. I get a strong Melville, Hawthorn vibe off that; not that Melville would have gotten a coffee to go, or sat on a stake-out with Nate, but you get the drift. I walked over and looked at the pantry and I'm in good shape, I want to back up some of the back-up items, but I'd be fine for a couple of months. Black beans on corn pone, Spam with wild greens, wilted watercress (hot bacon fat) on toast with a fried egg. I have beans from Dove Creek and rice from Louisiana. I make a great sausage gravy. Once you realize polenta is just solidified grits, life gets easier.