Some marriages are built on love, others out of want or need. My grandparents' marriage was pasted together with sawmill gravy.
My father called it papier-mâché, and it’s true that it stuck like glue to everything it touched: the cast-iron skillet, a silver-plated spoon, the roof of your mouth. But come every third Sunday, Grandma’s sawmill gravy was the only thing to look forward to as we made our way over long-neglected roads to the house my father grew up in.
In many ways, Grandma’s gravy was like those roads, unexpectedly smooth in some places but uncomfortably lumpy in others, the exploded peppercorns like collapsed tarmac kicking up a fuss on my tongue. You could pave over the potholes of any meal long as there was sawmill gravy on the table because...
Well, because she couldn’t cook worth a damn. Hardtack biscuits, charred chicken and green beans boiled to pap were her signature dishes. In each, the culinary skills on display weren’t those gleaned from the pages of women’s dailies, but from a life lived on the edges of abject poverty.
(Did she know about the money my grandfather had squirreled away in coffee cans, stashed under sacks of chicken feed, and hidden behind a loose brick in the hearth? It’s silly to think she’d have bought herself cooking lessons, even if she had.)
I’m not sure she ever bought herself much of anything. Her housedresses had been homespun long before I entered the world and they all wore the same scars – the jagged seams of rips mended too many times, the burn marks of spewed and sputtered grease, the zipper permanently broken and held together by a diaper pin. They smelled of Fairy Snow and moldy grass cuttings and were line-dried stiff. They crackled like bacon burning when she bent over the kerosene stove in the small mill house my grandfather purchased with sweat equity.
My grandfather terrified me, sitting in the dimly lit den, his square head and lantern jaw shadow-casting Frankenstein’s monster on the wall, his long, gaunt frame seemingly plastered to the plastic-covered armchair from which he held court and rarely moved. He grumbled through the same stories, speaking to no one in particular, his voice as gravelly as Grandma’s sawmill gravy and the long road home.
He hated everything Grandma made and never tired of telling anyone within earshot. He once threw one of her biscuits against the wall to prove his point. Then, as we cowered over our plates, staring intently into our gelatinous mounds of green beans, he walked to where the biscuit had landed whole and intact, brought it back to the table, smothered it in sawmill gravy, and spent the next ten minutes in utter silence, gnawing at that biscuit.
That's the last time I ever saw him. And the last time I ever had Grandma's sawmill gravy. He died two weeks later, and my grandmother moved into an assisted living home. She never cooked again.
© 2019 Malice Grant
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