Daddy's Cabbage

The huge head of cabbage fills his lap, milky jade moon,still a little grimy from the gardens at Forest Hill. As if he'd unearthed a dinosaur egg,or caught a minor asteroid on the fly. His smile is broad, proud, and in his faceeven at age eighty, there's the force of Palatinate farmers, founders of our bloodline,men little different from us, despite the centuries, loving hearth fire, Moselle,sauerkraut flavored with bacon grease, a beautiful body undressed.

What will Daddy dowith cabbage? (In West Virginia, we squander nothing. We use,as he likes to say,every part of the pig except the squeal, so you can be sure that,short of three or four outer leaves peeled off for the compost pile,nothing will be wasted). He'll cook cabbage rolls, perhaps,the recipe his mother learnedin the 1920's off an immigrant from Hungary.Or fried cabbage,that New Year's tradition, cooked with a coinfor luck to come.Or chow chow, the homemade relish we spoon atop brown beansto satisfy our taste for sweet/sour, that German yearning.

Whatever form it takes,we are expected to make a fuss, my sister and I, expatiate onthe high deliciousnessof cabbage, as his ego demands. Satellites all our lives, we're unableto imagine this customary orbit suddenly without a center, when the hill will openand ancestors stream outto take him in, leaving us with only cans of chow chowand his last summer'scabbage heads stored in the pantry. It is, perhaps, the nearness of this future

that permits me finally to admit—at age forty-four, despite legacies of neurosis and the usualfilial resentments—that I love my father. To the photograph I whisper the secret.The farmer smiles back, gray-browedDepression child, self-reliant, triumphant. Trust no one, he seems to say.We grew this,the earth and I. You must learn to live without needing the world.