“The woman replied, ‘I’m hungry myself, but I don’t have a scrap of food in the whole house.’
“De traveler said, ‘Well, in dat case, maybe I can help you. Do you happen to have some water and a cooking pot?’
“‘Why, yes, I do.’
“Reaching into his pocket, de traveler pulled out a shiny nail and said, ‘I have a magic nail here. If we put it into a pot of boiling water it will make a fine soup, den we both can eat.’
“‘Do tell,’ the lady said. ‘Come on in the house and let’s put a pot of water on the fire.’
“Once the water was boiling the traveler dropped the nail in the pot and said, ‘Now, pretty soon we’ll have us a fine bowl of soup, but, you know, if we just had a potato, den de soup would be outstanding.’
“Whereupon the lady said, ‘Well, I do happen to have just one potato in my pantry.’
“After adding the potato to the pot the traveler proclaimed, ‘Yes, ma’am, dis soup gon’ be mighty good, but, you know, if we just had a piece of meat, den it would be delicious.’
“The lady jumped to her feet and said, ‘Guess what, I do have one small piece of meat.’
“A little while later while dey both were sitting at the table enjoying de soup de lady said, ‘This is some very good soup. And just think, we made it from nothing but water and a magic nail.’”
Jake stopped talking and I realized the story was over. I also figured there was some kind of hidden meaning in it and he was waiting for me to tell him what I thought it was.
My feelings were confirmed when he asked, “All right, Mister Ted, what do you think dat story means?”
“That people hide their food?”
Jake chuckled and said, “Dat too, but something more—think about it some.”
I did, and then said, “The traveler tricked the lady into giving him some food?”
“Yes he did, but then he shared it with the lady. The main point is dat a smart man, a resourceful man, can always figure out a way to find hisself a bite to eat. So, don’t you be worrying about old Jake, ’cause I’ll be all right.”
I wanted to spend more time with Jake, but I knew it was getting on toward midafternoon. Pretty soon my cousin Robert would be driving my mother and Fred home. If they found me on the road I’d have to explain where I had been, so I said good-bye to Jake, sneaked through the woods, and started walking toward home.
My father hadn’t seen me coming down the road. He was on the front porch skinning squirrels and singing a mournful sounding song. I heard two lines of the tune before he saw me. It went like this:
“All around the water tank
“Just waiting for the train . . .”
When he saw me he stopped singing and asked, “Where’s your mother and your brother?”
“They’re visiting Uncle Curtis. I wanted to come on home and see if you got a turkey.”
“Naw, I saw a big old gobbler, but I wasn’t able to call him up. He outsmarted me today, but I’ll get him sooner or later.”
I had been turkey hunting with him before. He would scrape a piece of slate across a small wooden box he had made out of cedar, imitating the sound of a hen turkey, drawing the gobbler in close enough for the kill with his shotgun. All the while you had to sit hidden and motionless for a very long time, ignoring the bug bites and cramps. Then the sudden blast of the shotgun would make me just about jump out of my skin. Still, it was better than going to church. He always cut the beards off the big birds and gave them to me. I kept them in a cigar box underneath my bed. “What’s that song you were singing about?”
“Oh, it’s about a man, a hobo, hanging around the water tank beside the railroad track because he knows the train will stop there. While it’s stopped he’s gonna sneak into a box car and travel on down the line to some place where he might find some kind of work.”
Jake was right! White folks could sing the blues. My father had just been singing them and didn’t even know it.
He kept dressing those squirrels while he talked. I looked into the pan of murky water and saw six skinned and gutted carcasses floating there. I knew that later my mother would cut them up with her butcher knife, roll them in flour, drop them into hot grease, and fry them up crispy and brown. Then she would make the gravy and drop the fried pieces of squirrel into it. While it bubbled away on the stove, she would bake the big biscuits. Eventually we would burst them open, cover them with gravy, and eat them with the fried squirrel. I liked the back legs. It wasn’t turkey, but squirrel was good.
“Where’s Ned?” I asked, while following my father from the front porch to the kitchen.
He set the pan containing our dinner on the table and answered, “He’s gone back in the woods with a bucket. He found a honey tree and he’s gone back to rob it.”
My brother Ned was good at finding a honey tree, which was a hollow tree with a wild bee hive inside it. The bees gathered pollen from the wild flowers in the woods and the fields, resulting in the production of the most delectable honey to ever touch your mouth. I know how he captured the honey—I had been with him when he did it. He would build a small fire around the tree, throw some wet leaves on the fire, and the smoke would drive the bees away. While they were away he would scoop the honeycombs out with his hands, deposit them into a bucket and be gone before the bees returned. He never got stung and always brought home the honey.
Today was no exception. After a while I saw him emerging from the edge of the woods lugging a five-gallon bucket, which he set on the front porch. He was smoky and sticky, so I dipped water into the wash pan for him. While he was washing up he said to me, “Taste and see if it is good and sweet.”
I dug my hand into the bucket, tore off a piece of honeycomb and stuffed into my mouth, and started chewing. My mouth was a flower garden. I chewed until there was nothing left but a hunk of wax, which I spat out in the yard.
“Well?” Ned asked.
“It’s great,” I said, licking my fingers.
Later my mother squeezed the honey from the combs and had six quarts of golden liquid on the table at supper time. Besides the squirrel gravy on the biscuits, we also had the nectar of the gods, thanks to my brother Ned, the bee hunter.
After supper, as we were all sitting around the table, my mother asked, “Well, how was everything?”
I said, “It was a lot better than nail soup,” then I got up and left the table with everyone staring at me.
5
Monday was a work day for everyone. My mother began doling out chores right after breakfast. We needed corn meal, so Ned’s job was to shuck and shell twenty-five pounds of dried corn, which he would put in a cloth sack, drape the sack over his shoulder, and carry it to the mill to be ground into meal. No money was involved. The miller kept five pounds and Ned would return home with twenty pounds. I had been to the mill with him before. It was a long walk, several miles past Miss Lena’s store on the way to Coffeeville. This wasn’t such a tough job for Ned because he was fifteen years old, big, and strong; besides, he liked to visit and talk with the folks at the mill while waiting for the corn to be ground. At one time the mill had been on the creek near my hiding place under the wooden bridge. Then it was water-powered, but now it was run by a motor like the one at the sawmill, just not nearly as big.
Much to Fred’s sorrow he was assigned to pull weeds in our garden. There were long rows of peas, green beans, butter beans, okra, squash, tomatoes, and corn.
When I heard my task I knew