THE HEART OF THE MATTER

By Janet Lorimer

           When I was a kid, I never wanted to learn how to cook. Not even when I hit my teens. In my town that was what girls and women did, but I was a bit of a tomboy and all I wanted to do was hang out with my cousins and go to the funerals.  

    Funerals were a big deal in my town. There were more of them than holidays. Most of the funerals were held for our menfolk, but a lot of those were because of the mine. Mines are dangerous places, and accidents happen a lot. 

    There were the fights, of course. Lots of men liked to get drunk on payday and brawl. Daddy always said it was good entertainment. But bunches of those fights ended up with someone dead. 

    Then there were the heart attacks.  Men in our town were real macho. They never listened when Doc told them how to prevent heart disease, and a right large number died of just that. But no one cared, because they so loved the cooking their women did.   

    Before I turned sixteen, Mama had a warning for me. We’d just buried Daddy, but there was no time for mourning. Life had to go on. And I must say that after Daddy was laid to rest, Mama did seem a whole heap happier. Maybe because her face had finally healed up real good. 

    But now Mama started looking at me with a critical eye. “You listen, Betsy,” she warned. “All this tomboy foolishness has got to stop. Boys are starting to look at you and before you know it, you’ll be looking back. Remember, the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. You need to know that before it’s too late.” 

    Daddy was one of those who’d had a massive heart attack before he died. That’s because he just loved Mama’s cooking. She took her cooking real serious, and she made the best Shoofly Pie in the whole county. It was a secret recipe come down to her from her mama and her granny, and more than once it had won blue ribbons at the county fair.

    The day I turned sixteen, everything changed. We were at a funeral, this time for Hiram Blocker. His wife Lizzy didn’t look too sad, but then her face wasn’t as black and blue as it usually was, so I guessed that since Hiram had died, she hadn’t been falling down the stairs or running into doorknobs as much.

    I was in the church hall, nibbling on one of Mama’s butter cream sugar cookies, and I looked up and there was Jeb Blocker, Hiram’s oldest boy, on the other side of the room. I’d known Jeb for forever but I’d never paid much attention to him. That day it was like I was seeing him for the first time. I blinked hard, trying to understand why my heart was beating so fast and why my hands had gone all sweaty, and then he looked at me and smiled. It was like he was seeing me for the first time, too. 

    Well, one thing led to another, and before Hiram was even cold in the ground, Jeb was sweet-talking me. And oh, how I ate it up. Next thing I knew, we were going out, and he was treating me so fine. I felt like a real princess. You know, the kind in the storybooks who always gets to live happily ever after.

    Mama said, “I see the lay of the land, Betsy. So hear me now. I taught you how to launder and iron. I taught you how to scrub floors proper on your hands and knees and make windows shine with vinegar and wash dishes. But you never took to cooking. Time you started, girl.”

    Well, I did know how to cook. Kind of. But mostly I liked what I learned about cooking light in the women’s magazines I read while I was standing in the check-out line at the market. 

    Mama just shook her head. “Betsy, you are not listening, girl. The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, and Jeb is not going to take kindly to that rabbit food. Forget the vegetables. You’ll keep him a whole lot happier with buttermilk biscuits and bacon gravy.” 

    But I thought of myself as a modern woman, and I paid Mama no heed. 

    I dropped out of high school, so as Jeb and me could get married. We didn’t have much money to speak of, just Jeb’s salary from the mine, but I figured I’d get me a job waiting tables or stocking shelves at the dollar store.  

    Jeb didn’t take to that idea at all. “I don’t want you working,” he said. “I want you home, tending the house and taking care of our kids and cooking.”

    I pointed out that we could barely afford the rent, let alone kids, but before I got the whole sentence out, his fist met my upper lip and that was the end of that. Needless to say, that princess life I’d imagined melted away pretty darn quick.

     One night after we’d been married a while, Jeb went crazy because he didn’t like what I’d cooked. He took one look at his plate and threw it across the room. “No more of that green shit,” he yelled. “I want real food, man food. Beef stew and dumplings and gravy like my mama makes. You go talk to my mama, Bets. Get her to teach you how to cook if your mama don’t know how.”

    That made me mad. My mama could cook real good and everyone knew it. I told Jeb that. “But your mama and mine, they don’t know about cholesterol and blood pressure and all the stuff I’ve been reading about. You don’t want to end up like your daddy, Jeb.” 

    I no sooner got the last word out of my mouth than his fist connected with my eye.

    “Stop reading that trash at the market,” he roared, as he stormed out of the house. When he come home he was drunk as a skunk, so I hid out in the back yard and stayed real quiet till he went to bed. Then I lit out for Mama’s house. 

    She came to the door, her eyes all blurry with sleep. “What’s wrong?” she croaked.

    “I’ve left him,” I said, and burst into tears.

    Mama pulled me into the house and set about cleaning me up. Not that it helped much. My face looked a lot like Mama’s once had, like Lizzie Blocker’s had, too. Lizzy didn’t look so bad nowadays, unless one of Jeb’s younger brothers took it upon himself to step into his dead daddy’s shoes. You know what they say, the acorn never falls far from the tree.  

    After she got me cleaned up and calmed down, Mama said, “Now you listen, missy. The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.”

    “Don’t start in with that hearts and stomachs shit,” I yelled, angry now. “I’m sick to death of hearing you say that. I swear, one of these days I’m gonna bash his head in with my heaviest frying pan. Or maybe I’ll season his gravy with rat poison. Or—.”

    “Stop talking like a fool,” Mama snapped. “That kind of stupid thinking will land you in jail. Judges and juries don’t care if you’ve been beat all to hell and gone. You poison your husband, you’ll spend your life behind bars.”

    “But—.”

    “There’s better ways to solve your problem,” Mama said, and she took my face in her two hands, looked me square in the eye, and began to talk. 

    She talked about my daddy and Hiram Blocker and how mean men could be. And all about the clumsy women who fell downstairs or ran into doorknobs. And why cooking was so important to a woman’s survival. She talked in a cold, hard voice I’d never heard before, and what she said shocked me plenty. 

    It was an hour or so later when she ran out of talk, and dragged me into the kitchen. 

    So it was, when Jeb came pounding on the front door at five in the morning, Mama was all smiles and a voice full of honey.

    “Why come on in, Jebbie. Looks like you could use some hot coffee, and breakfast. Wait till you see what me and Betsy cooked up for you.”

    She led him into the kitchen and sat him down to a plate heaped with pancakes dripping with butter and syrup, and eggs scrambled with cheese and rich cream, and big fat sausages smothered in gravy. Jeb’s growls turned to grumbles and then faded away altogether. By the time he was done eating, he was almost purring. “That’s more like it,” he said. 

    Watching him, I went from red hot angry to ice cold calm because now I understood.

    Jeb went to work and I went home. And from that day forward I cooked. I cooked with butter and lard. I cooked with whole cream and whipped cream and butter cream. I broiled and fried and roasted. No more salads on my table. Maybe some green beans now and then, but only if they were swimming in bacon grease. 

    And then there were the cakes and cookies and pies.  Shoofly Pie – Mama’s secret recipe – oozing molasses and brown sugar. Apple Pan Dowdy topped with a mountain of whipped cream.

    Mama applauded my efforts. So did my mother-in-law, Lizzie. So did a lot of other ladies I knew. They brought me secret recipes and ingredients and taught me how to cook things Jeb would love.

    “Be patient,” Mama said with a smile. “It may take time, but it’s worth the wait.”

    She was right. It took a good long while, but one day at the mine Jeb keeled over. Heart attack, Doc said. I covered my face with a handkerchief to hide my smile.   

    At Jeb’s funeral, I saw one of my younger girl cousins flirting with one of Jeb’s little brothers. Mama whispered, “You can pass on my Shoofly Pie recipe to her and tell her what we always say: the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. Only legal way to commit murder.”

The End