The Best Revenge by Rebecca Rule

Author:Rebecca Rule [Rule, Rebecca]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of New Hampshire Press

Peach Baby Food Sandwiches

The idea of peach baby food sandwiches hovered like a cloud of midgies all that long morning fishing. Midgies—those tiny humming bugs too small to swat, so small you hardly feel them biting and so what if they do since it doesn’t really hurt. Still, they bother, especially when they come around at night, slide in through the screen and eat you all over in your sleep. Can’t get at them, can’t get away from them, drive a person wild. And so on this particular day, like a swarm of midgies, the idea of peach baby food sandwiches tormented me—the idea that some time along I might actually have to eat one.

I was out fishing with Pop, who had declined Grammie Dix’s funeral: she was no blood relation of his after all. And there was a rule in our family that kids didn’t have to go to funerals until they hit double digits. I was only nine.

Fishing Duardo Lake is a tradition in our family. At one time Pop’s father, my great-grandfather, owned property on the north shore—where he erected the famous Duardo Lake cross: twenty-five feet tall, hewn of spruce wood, and visible from all over the lake because it was positioned high on the bald-faced lookout. Unlike the Reverend, Pop steered clear of churches. He told me that on Easter Sunday, still, ones from a certain church trooped up to the cross to make holy water, pray for their mortal souls, sing hallelujah, and so forth. He said the lookout was, generally and especially on Easter Sunday, a good place to avoid.

When I looked up at the cross from the middle seat of Pop’s old wooden boat, I got a feeling in my stomach—a kind of queasy, uneasy feeling. For a minute I thought I was getting religion. Then I realized probably it was just my subconscious reminding my insides about the peach baby food sandwich with my name on it in the brown paper bag next to the gas can. I prayed for divine intervention—the way Grammie Dix taught me when I stayed over at her house and we watched Billy Graham. Dear God let the winds come, let a wave crest over this boat, lift that lunch bag up, and carry it away to Kingdom Come. And, I added, God-bless-Grammie-Dix-on-her-way-to-heaven-if-there-is-one.

That morning—in the rush of funeral arrangements, getting me and my equipment to Pop’s house, figuring out who was going to ride with who and just where to meet up with the relatives from Vermont—my mother forgot to pack me a lunch. “I don’t know where my mind is,” she said.

“Don’t worry about it,” Pop said. “You’ve got enough on your mind. Shel can eat what I’m eating.”

Later, when he said, “I’m eating peach baby food sandwiches today; that sound good to you?” I said I’d never tried one but . . . and he said, “Better than that shit you eat at home—potato chips and candies and grease: I know what you kids eat.

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