Early Hungers

REFLECTION Early Hungers Bo Ball At the Presley two-room school, dinner was butter and sugar biscuits. Or tomato slices bleeding into the bread. Bees fought you for those. Some children "packed" milk and crumbled cornbread in half-gallon lard cans that spelled out Armour. Buttermilk, usually, for it lasted longer. A thunderclap, a fork of lightning, and sweet milk blinked. The Johnsons brought their pone unbroken—atop the pail. ("Don't like my milk'nbread mushy," they said.) The Fletchers substituted lassies (molasses) for milk, and their cornbread also rested on the lids. Poor families rarely had wheat bread, not even for breakfast. Meal (from their own corn) could be batter-fried into goodness. And, to this day, I prefer cornmeal gravy to the fancy kind offered in cookbooks. Yet our neighbors hungered for wheat. Marybell Johnson would darken our door at breakfast and beg, "Sissie wonts a piece of wheat bread, and I do too." My mother gave out cat-head biscuits (the Johnsons then brought salt to swap for sugar). Mid-recess at the Presley School, and, weather allowing, we gathered on the big rock just below the dirt road: the primer and first grade on the lowest slope; second and third graders all the way up to the highest, the seventh. About forty in all, and only the wormy children without food. Lice knitted crusts into their heads. They sometimes got dibs on 'materbiscuits. Or lard pails. The Bible said the poor would always be with us. We nodded to that notion every day. Jo and I played with the nit-heads, the worm-gullets. We invited them to spend nights with us. A guarantee of a crop of lice (and kerosene dousings). Sometimes ringworm that would kill you if it circled just right. Pink eye. Three kinds of itch. Our mother always had pintos, angurns, and cornbread. "I like 'ese beans, I do," a Barton would say and rub what could have been a stomach. "'Ese beans is good, dey is," a Hess would say. Without the protein in pintos, rickets and pellagra would have ravaged Appalachia. The world traveler and writer Sherwood Anderson—when he moved to southwest Virginia—wrote that no other place on earth served beans as good as those in Appalachia. He couldn't figure out the mystery. Slow cooking on a wood stove? An 33 overnight soaking in water flavored by limestone? The mystery is the lowly pork skin—not thrown to dogs, but salted down and used for "seasoning," sometimes with the hair still decorating the pores. When the pintos were cleaned from the bowl, the nit-heads fought for the rubbery skin. Toughened in time, it became their chewing gum into evening. In bed, Jo and I hugged our swollen little bellies and talked of what we'd do when we grew up and "excaped" to campfires way out West. Our first crime involved the nit-heads, the worm-gullets. On our way home from school we passed two stores. The first, a little room, was tended by Mrs. Hale. She sometimes gave Jo and me a broken cookie. A mashed moon pie (her drunk husband, Marion, came to our house and threw pennies into the air for us to fight over). Mrs. Hale had few customers. She liked to hear us talk about boogeymen. About ole Billy Nolley Peck. Raw Bones and Bloody Skull. When we filed in with the nit-heads, though, she kept her eyes on her counter display of Baby Ruths and Fifth Avenues. The second store—Roosevelt Lambert's—would have held Presley School. Glass showcases guarded against grimy hands. From the ceiling hung tubs and country hams. Jo and I were not supposed to charge up, but one rainy day she pointed to a Hershey bar and whispered, "Daddy said set it down." I nodded to Roosey it was so. We divided the little squares with the Bartons. Else they'd bash our heads in. From that one Hershey we graduated to moon pies. Power Houses. Treats for Jo and me, but dinner and breakfast for the Bartons and their hookworms. (And we knew that squirm. The scalding pain. The quick vomit...