The Best Cook in the World by Rick Bragg

Author:Rick Bragg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2018-04-24T04:00:00+00:00

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My mother’s education had actually begun four years before, before her first intelligent thought, before her first step, long before her first memory. She wonders now if maybe the first things she ever witnessed were that cool, dark path through the great trees, or the red carpets of wild strawberries, or the fluff of watercress that clung to the banks of the clear streams and the brown, slow-moving creeks. It may be that the first sound to register in her mind was birdsong. There are worse things to believe.

On another walk, Ava showed my mother the heart plant, which wasn’t edible or valuable in any practical way, but when you pulled it from the earth, to transplant the plant, with its purple heart-shaped leaves, to your own yard, there was a perfect little brown jug on the taproot.

“I guess it ain’t worth nothin’,” she told her daughter, “but it’s purty to look at.”

On another, she broke open a smooth green maypop, to reveal the soft white edible pulp, and a surprise, a tiny ballerina that you could spin between your thumb and forefinger, to make her pirouette. She showed it to my mother year after year after year, till one day, in pure delight, the little girl’s imagination allowed her to see it, really to see.

My mother knows, as an old woman, that it might not make much sense to some people, how her momma tried to explain this riot of life in the deep woods to someone year after year after year, especially to a child who could only hang there and drool, or toddle behind her. But I guess it is what Ava did for her girls instead of playing Mozart, or singing lullabies to them in the womb. And in time, of course, it did sink in. This is why, when you asked her all her life how she knew a thing, she would simply parrot those words: “Well, I’ve always knowed.” But it only seemed that way, after so much time.

Her sisters sometimes trailed behind them on the path like baby ducks, half listening to their mother talk. They had heard it all before, too, beginning, as my mother had, when they were in swaddling clothes, till it was all imprinted in their minds. By the time they started school, they knew the secrets of the hawthorn plant, and the value of a kudzu blossom, and how to make a salad from the dandelions. And it continued, that education, until they were twelve or thirteen.

Some of it, maybe, was less than sound in its practicality. She had them gather spiderwebs, which could be rolled into a ball and swallowed to ease asthma, and wild-cherry-tree bark to make a tonic. The children drew the line at searching for a skunk, live or dead, though it could be rendered down to oil and used to cure pneumonia. The girls decided that if the choice was death or a teaspoon of skunk oil, they would ask the Lord to carry them home.

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