I might have fancied myself a rural advocate, but I soon learned that early American homestead cooking was not for the weak. I’d read that before electric mixers came along, meringues were whipped to a froth, then to shiny peaks, on a shallow platter with a kitchen fork. I used a whisk, but still: None of these recipe writers thought to mention how much it hurts. The physicality of early American cooking—the dough beating, the heavy pot-hauling, the picking of leaves and stems from an entire bushel of chokecherries—called up energy from a part of me I hadn’t known I had. The part, it turned out, that got a kick out of monotonous hand labor.
Toward the end of one afternoon’s nonelectric flourless-chocolate-cake production, my whisk hurling into egg whites that were finally firming up like cement compound in sand, my arm began to throw fire and burn high up on the deltoid. I listened to the birds arguing and the swans squawking and the squirrels chittering over select bits from our compost pile, and then I let out a screaming chorus into the wilderness, happy to be making cake by hand and to be almost done with it. I hoped my brother Marc would appreciate it.
Like homing pigeons, two out of us three kids had returned to Park Rapids, Marc to live with Dad for his last few years of high school. I felt a need to take care of him, the baby brother so far from the mother nest, and did so in the only way I knew how, by leaving phone messages with the night’s menu on his answering machine. He expertly played baby-of-the-family aloofness and accepted only reluctantly, if and when the menu sounded good enough, usually on my second or third offer. But I knew that our house was to him what it was to me: within driving distance of childhood but thankfully outside its borders.
I stuck a corsage of fragrant pot marigolds into the mirrored ganache top of the chocolate cake, slid the braised chicken in wine sauce into the stove’s tiny firebox to bake slowly into itself, and retired to the porch, where Aaron and I both liked to have our predinner smokes—a stanky Camel for me and an odiferous pipe for him. The porch was still in process at that point, just raw boards laid on square pilings, like a boardwalk hastily assembled for the set of a Western movie. What happened next could have been written in the script.
Sitting in our lawn chairs, I noticed something diving in and out of the corner of my eye. A rabbit. It sat on drummie haunches at the edge of the woods, perfectly still but for a slow tic in its nose, the luxury of its silky gray fur standing out like a foreign object against the brittle underbrush. I was getting good at spotting incongruent textures amid the foliage—the moist skin of the wild mushrooms, the velvety fur of this rabbit. Proudly, without saying a word to Aaron, I squinted, lifted a stiff arm, pointed straight at the rabbit, and froze, as if I were a pointer dog.
He crept to get his shotgun, came back, and shot the rabbit in the gut. It screamed. He shot it twice more. Three times in total before its chest stopped swelling.
I was accustomed to Aaron taking out the garden marauders—the brazen woodchucks that mercilessly mowed our bean rows at dusk, the porcupines we’d find by the light of the flashlight gnawing flat-faced into the wooden siding of the shed—and didn’t feel any shame about it. They were so guilty. Just a few days previously Aaron had woken me up in the middle of the night and hissed at me to come down from the loft. I stumbled down the ladder in the dark, put on the sweater hanging by the door, and took his outstretched flashlight.
Before we’d officially cleared out a place in it, the forest fluttered dangerously close to the edges of the house. It quivered with creature movement. Our woods didn’t have the stately self-assurance of a graybeard old-growth forest, but instead the scrappy, taunting nature of the truly wild. Skinny poplars swayed perilously in the wind. Branchy, bent-up jack pines leaned on one another for support like old drunks, sometimes for years, before eventually crashing to the dirty forest floor. Our night yard was not necessarily inhospitable to us, but indifferent. I shivered, not from cold, but from ruffled nerves. I felt more unprotected than I ever had. When I shone my light beam onto the compost pile I saw them: two surprised raccoons, their bright eyes glowing in the moonlit food dump, looking as if they’d just been caught shagging. Being half-asleep didn’t make killing raccoons any less disturbing, but I forced myself to buck up. Everyone said that raccoons would find a way into your house if you let them. They had wiggled into our friend Bob’s remote writer’s hermitage while he was away and partied there for months, snacking through his pantry and pissing on every piece of paper and every book they could balance on. Protecting our house and garden like true pioneers was what I thought we were supposed to do.
But now, face-to-face with a rabbit by the light of day, what was supposed to be a simpler task—bagging dinner—was anything but.
“Did you get him?” I whispered.
“I should think so.” We walked over to where the rabbit was lying. It looked so much scrawnier without its twitch. Aaron opened his buck knife. I visualized peeling its fur off at the ankles, as I would turn a sock inside out, and reached out to tug at the fringed tufts near the top of its paws. The toe bones were like hard marbles in a plush case. I recoiled my hand and watched the first of what would be many complications to my throwback fantasy blow away with the breeze.
As we stood there looking at the rabbit’s downy belly hair, I knew I just couldn’t do it, couldn’t skin and gut this creature. The truth felt heavy and inevitable. I was going to waste it. I know what Grandma Dion, and her mom, Great-Grandma Hesch, would have done: They would have jerked the rabbit’s fur down past its furry little head, slit it to reveal its soft innards, let them tumble out and flop onto the ground at the edge of the woods, and cooked the damn thing.
I knew what my brother Marc would say. “Jesus Christ!” he’d blow incredulously. “A venison backstrap, I’d like that, but a jackrabbit? Hang it a day or two for me at least!” Marc, whose palate was as discriminating as mine, wasn’t wrong. Even if I’d had the balls to properly finish the rabbit off, cooking it fresh wouldn’t have been doing it justice.
My experiment in taking my place in a long line of fearless Midwestern women cooks who were possessed of sharp knives, sprawling cut-flower gardens, and big opinions about food was to be a little harder than just knocking off a rabbit. I had the flowers and the big opinions down but hadn’t quite mastered the knife.
13
IF YOU DON’T LOOK YOU DON’T SEE