Sally Sweatt

Issue 16

Flash Fiction

Jelly rolls, Coca-Colas, and Lucky Strikes were all my Aunt Maude put to her lips. Six-ounce green bottles packed her refrigerator, raspberry jelly rolls packed her cupboard, and cigarette butts packed her ashtrays.   

It’s not that she wasn’t a good cook. To the contrary. Maude grew up on a farm an hour inland from Charleston, in Andrews, a railroad town. She learned to cook slow food, full-fresh, the way God intended and all anybody ate down South before drive-thrus thrust us into cheeseburger kingdom. In Aunt Maude’s words: “If it ain’t picked, shucked, or slaughtered today, it ain’t good enough for slopping’ the hogs, much less to serve up for supper.” The scrawny run-away bride, sixteen-year-old Maude, married Archie, my husky uncle, a railroad man with an appetite as big as his belly. Aunt Maude’s culinary forte was pork. Fried pork chops, baked ham, loin roast, short ribs, barbecued ribs, slab bacon, sausage and beans, pork pilau, pork hash, pork belly, fat back, pickled pig feet, chitlins, and cracklin’ bread. 

Maude’s cracklin’ bread was so good she won blue ribbons at the fair ten years in a row, until Annette Poe entered her fried pork rinds into the contest and beat her. Aunt Maude never showed her face again at the fair. Word swirled around that Annette won because she had had an affair with Lester Brown, one of the judges, and Maude swore Annette had inside knowledge that Lester had a craving for pork rind—among other things. 

Maude was a picky eater but could lay out a spread like a Thanksgiving feed. Butter beans boiled in fatback, creamed corn and fried okra from her garden, white rice—is there any other?—pork gravy browned up in bacon drippings, and macaroni and cheese so creamy it mooed. A bone-in ham, big as a basketball, was the centerpiece. Sitting at the head of the table with a platter of pig parts and a Mason jar of sweet iced tea, Archie sucked the marrow out of the baked ham bone, pure clean, faster than we could bless it. Good he worked long schedules on the train. Aunt Maude’s cooking could give a man a heart attack if he ate that much lard every day. Maude, tiny as a twig, sat at the other end, puffed on a cigarette, picked at a jelly roll, chased with a swig of Coke, and stared out to the garden. 

Aunt Maude liked to watch game shows, and I watched her puffing and swigging. Sitting in the only cool room with an air-conditioner stuck in the window, I breathed in enough second-hand smoke to char a steak. 

In the summer of 1962, I found my way out of her TV room and into the world of music. I discovered Nat King Cole, Ray Charles, Fats Domino, and Johnny Mathis albums stashed in my uncle’s console. My back on the pine floor and eyes shut, I drifted far from Andrews and into a world of piano keys, strings, horns, and romantic melodies. I imagined my head pressed against a red velvet auditorium chair and cool air flowing under my knees. Under the beam of spotlights, Nat and Ray and Fats and Johnny, dressed in tuxedos, looked at me and sang. Magic to my nine-year-old ears, I fell in love with love. In a little hot town in the middle of cotton farms, I “found my thrill on Blueberry Hill.” 

My last summer there, I chose to be serenaded in their blistering living room instead of my aunt’s cool den. The crooners’ vinyl LPs had scratched and warped over time. I had grown older—a little scratched and warped myself. Aunt Maude kept to her game shows, and Uncle Archie piddled in the garage gutting bass and peeling shrimp. I never knew why he kept fishing. If it didn’t oink, Aunt Maude wouldn’t cook it anyway. The doctors finally told my sickly aunt to give up Cokes and quit smoking. She became so fidgety she substituted a pencil for a cigarette between her fingers and began writing. She crafted a cookbook entitled A Hundred Ways to Cook a Pig and dedicated it to Archie. Each page had a watermark—the bottom of a Coca-Cola bottle. She sold ninety-six copies of her book at the county fair and won first place for her entry of smoked pork rinds marinated in Coca-Cola, which she heard threw Annette into a tizzy. 

Maude, shriveled down to eighty-five pounds, died in 1968 after half her stomach and intestines were cut out in open surgery. She was buried with a copy of her cookbook and her blue ribbons resting under her bony fingers. To hear tell it, for years to come, the judges at the county fair missed her pork rind and squabbles with Annette Poe. 

Uncle Archie got let go from the railroad, stayed in Andrews, grew his okra and corn, fished the rivers and seined the creeks along the coast. Trying his hand at frying the stock of bass and shrimp in his freezer, he near burned down the kitchen using pork lard instead of peanut oil. He lost weight. His belly shrank. But after a year of crying over the loss of his beloved, his heart gave way over a platter of fried, center-cut pork chops smothered in Vidalia onion gravy at The Buttered Biscuit. It would have been his ideal last meal anyway—especially had Maude cooked it.