The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer's Craft

Pepper

Pepper In college I signed up for the class called "Camp Cookery" just because I was curious and had Wednesdaynights free. It turned out to be a required course for allgeology majors,and we twelve men rolled up our sleeves,put on our aprons, and were instructed byMiss Pelch in the mysteries of mock apple pie and the secrets of the stove. Imagine a row of eleven pies baked golden brown, and then my cinder. One night Miss Pelch told us a private trick, which I have never used in cooking, but which has saved my writing often from lapsing to the simply sweet: pepper in the apple pie. "The tongue is fooled," she said, "if you sneak a pinch of pepper along with the cinnamon and sugar. Fooled to a deeper bliss." Is that true in cookery? I know it's true in writing. Pepper in the prose, pepper in the poem can makethe sweetlysentimental return to life and vigor. I guess we could call this edge, or contrast, but I prefer to think of it as pepper. It is that secret ingredient in the arts that intensifies the sense of the particularlybeautiful in the real. The photographer Joel Meyerowitz, in his portraits, seekswhat he calls "life's jewelry" on the body: freckles, birthmarks,scars.These, with the light of spirit in the eyes and the grace of tired slouch or dancer's balance, authenticate the beautiful. As my sculptor friend says of her injured nudes in Cararamarble, "My work is beautiful, but it is not pretty." My own reminder of this trick residesin the following set of notes I made when visiting the parents of a writer friend up near Battle Ground. The visit was a sweet one in many ways—the wild rabbit haunting the garden, the cherries spilling crimson along the branches of their fertile tree, the rose bush seeming to prop up the old barn, and in the kitchen, canaries singing in their cage.But allthis wasmade more powerful by the hard things that worked against easy pleasures, and deepened their flavor: 1. Mr. Caldwell, old Irish, is sitting in his chair sucking on a cigarette at eighty-seven. He wears the suspenders and the powerful body of a working man, a hero. He does not recognize his own son: "Hey, old man, do you know me?" "You look familiar." "I'm Keith!" "Do you know the best trade?" "I'm your sonF "Of all the trades agoing,your begging is the best, / For when a man is tired, be can lay down and rest!' "Mom, he doesn't know me." "He knows you're familiar. He likes you? "Dad, tell my friend a story—about your logging days." "Well... it was always easier to carry a dead man out of the woods, but when they were still alive, you had to be careful how you held 'em." 2. Outside, at the pasture's edge, an old oak straddles the sunlight, magisterial. "There's the oak where mygreat-great-grandmother dropped dead of a heart attack carrying a pail of water to the workers in thefield." T H E M U S E S A M O N G U S IO2 3- In the hymn silence of the barn, on a shelf over the threshing floor, a sheaf of wheat lies bundled where it was cut by horsedrawn combine fifty years ago. Beside it, the old man has nailed to the hand-hewn beam a withered possum's foot. 4. "Yeah, Mom loves her canaries.She kept breeding them, until she got about three hundred, and then it was odd for a while." 5. In the late afternoon sun, the cows are moving slowlytoward the barn. "You know,there are three kinds of dairies: Grade A, Grade B, and Grade C. They never made much ice cream out of ourmilk." 6. The family cemetery is a calm refuge, drowsy with shade. "He told us to plant potatoes on his grave, so whenever he got hungry he could reach up and pick one. He also told us to pour whiskey on his grave now and then. We said, 'Sure, well pour whiskey on your grave, but we're going to drink it first.'" Pepper \ 103 ...