What Happens Next?: Matters of Life and Death

What Was Served

.27. WHAT WAS SERVED our farmhouse sat atop a slight rise in the middle of the acreage. The land, as lawn, sloped away from the foundation and flattened out in all directions until it met the surrounding fields, then continued extremely as rows of corn and soybeans. A wide, pillared porch wrapped around the north and east sides of the house. As a boy, in summer, I sometimes paused in my play to sit for a time on the porch railing and look into the eastern distance. If my father and grandfather Bauer happened to be out there, working in the field that was my view, I watched the two of them on their tractors moving the day’s tending implements back and forth on the horizon. And if the hour were any time from mid-morning till noon, I could also turn, from that same perch on the porch, to look through the screen door just a few steps away into our kitchen where another kind of work was going on. There my mother was preparing the full, hot midday meal, moving about the big floral-patterned wallpapered room, frequently glancing out the windows above the kitchen counter whose view was of that same east field. A large fan sat on the floor in the doorway that opened onto the small back porch. Its air moved futilely against the stove’s a what was served .28. strong heat. A clock was mounted on the wall above the refrigerator , but she told the time by where the men were in the field. Thinking back, I see my father and grandfather, their tractors and machines inching along at an almost imperceptible pace, their sounds made soundless by their distance from the house, while my mother in the kitchen was all bustle and noise. The sharp metallic clang of a spoon against a pot, stovetop burners rattling, oven door opening and thudding shut. And woven through it all, the voices from the radio that sat atop the refrigerator. The absentminded mumbles of Arthur Godfrey. Or “the real-life drama of Helen Trent, who . . . fights bravely, successfully, to prove what so many women long to prove, that because a woman is thirtyfive or more, romance in life need not be over.” Remembering the agrarian stateliness of the tractors silently progressing, and the banging, short-order-cook urgency audible through the screen, what lingers is my impression that, compared to my father’s and grandfather’s work, my mother’s was the harder and more manual labor. My mother’s father, my Grandpa Evans, began his life as a coal miner in the final years of the nineteenth century. A nomad of the bituminous landscape, he traced the Midwest’s longitudinal seams, living in various company towns before settling with his new wife in the village of Colfax, in the center of Iowa. He’d met and married the former Mary Jane Mabie in one of the mining hamlets where he’d worked. Over the next two decades they conceived ten children, six boys and four girls. My mother, born in , was the third youngest. One of her sisters died in childbirth; another died from cancer in her early thirties. Her six brothers, as they grew to adolescence, became a pugnacious tribe, fiercely loyal to one another, a loyalty expressed within the rules of a shouting, scuffling fraternal etiquette: their version, you might say, of a rowdy mining camp. My mother was known to some of her siblings and, later in what was served .29. her life, to all of her nieces and nephews, as Tim, Aunt Tim. She embraced the nickname, for she hated her given name, Maude. And besides, the name was clearly bestowed with fondness, if with a fiendish edge, for Tim was the neighborhood cat that one of her brothers threw in her face when she was a girl, scratching her badly and making her terrified of cats all her life, chills running up and down her arms and legs and her cry of dismay, “Oh, god, there’s a cat!,” if she so much as caught sight of one. It’s hard to imagine what trick of quick complexity her mind worked through every time she heard the name directed to her with affection. All this gravely swarming life took place in a tiny two-story house that looked too tall for its foundation. The house leaned and sagged in important places—the porch roof, the cellar door— and...