Twain's Feast Read Online Free Page A

with the pigs. . . . I know the taste of maple sap, and when to gather it. . . . I know how a prize watermelon looks when it is sunning its fat rotundity among pumpkin vines and “simblins.” . . . I know the look of green apples and peaches and pears on the trees, and I know how entertaining they are when they are inside of a person. I know how ripe ones look when they are piled in pyramids under the trees, and how pretty they are and how vivid the colors. . . . I know the look of an apple that is roasting and sizzling on a hearth on a winter’s evening, and I know the comfort that comes of eating it hot, along with some sugar and a drench of cream.
    I remember. I can remember. I know. I know. I know. Twain remembers; Twain chants. His memories bound together land and table, as surely as they joined Mark Twain with Sammy Clemens, the boy he once was.
    Of all the incredible bounty of the Quarles table, roasted prairie chicken was perhaps the most rooted, the most fundamentally local. Where tallgrass prairie thrives, with its prairie pinks and “fragrant and fine” wild strawberries, prairie chickens thrive also; and when the grasses vanish, so do the birds. When Twain was a boy, there was still more than enough tallgrass to shelter the prairie chickens, and he remembered well the mornings spent hunting them and other grassland creatures: “I remember . . . how we turned out, mornings, while it was still dark, to go on these expeditions, and how chilly and dismal it was, and how often I regretted that I was well enough to go.” Once in the woods, the party “drifted silently after [the dogs] in the melancholy gloom. But presently the gray dawn stole over the world, the birds piped up, then the sun rose and poured light and comfort all around, everything was fresh and dewy and fragrant, and life was a boon again. After three hours of tramping we arrived back wholesomely tired, overladen with game, very hungry, and just in time for breakfast.”
    But when Twain wanted prairie hens in later years, he thought first of those from Illinois—Illinois, where there was little but prairie, where thousands of years of grass growing and burning and dying, then growing again, had left a bounty of soil among the deepest and blackest ever found, at any time, anywhere in the world. In 1861, when Twain left the Mississippi River for Nevada at the age of twenty-five, fleeing before either North or South could force him into service as a steamboat pilot, he knew that he was leaving behind the howl of the steam whistle, the splash of the paddlewheels, and the long journeys to New Orleans from Cairo, Illinois. He couldn’t have known that there would never be more Illinois prairie chickens than there were at the moment he went west. The young pilot left behind a countryside that would soon be leached of some of its abundance; many would feel the loss, but few as powerfully as did the aging, elegiac, haunted Twain.
    That, more or less, is what I tell Eli. She kisses me; she gets it. I kiss her back, and I’m off for Illinois.
    PRAIRIE CHICKENS
    Cut out all shot, wash thoroughly but quickly, using some soda in the water, rinse and dry, fill with dressing, sew up with cotton thread, and tie down the legs and wings; place in a steamer over hot water till done, remove to a dripping-pan, cover with butter, sprinkle with salt and pepper, dredge with flour, place in the oven and baste with the melted butter until a nice brown; serve with either apple-sauce, cranberries, or currant jelly.
    —Mrs. Godard.
     
    —ESTELLE WOODS WILCOX, Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, 1877
    Newton, Illinois, has three thousand people and two power plants. It has a motel with weekly rates for men who ignore the No Smoking signs in their rooms, having driven from Carbondale and Vandalia and Terre Haute to work in the plants for five days at a time. It has a bowling alley, the Parklane, that serves the only breakfast in town, eggs and potatoes and biscuits