3. More About Papa

My memories of those autumn days in Kentucky are not all etched to the same depth. Of some events which my parents and my sister often spoke in the years to follow, I have no recollection at all. Many occasions, relatively trivial, are clearly remembered.

One sunny afternoon when Lou and I were strolling in the grove we came to a place where the trees were shorter and presently we found an almost open space where an old brick chimney stood in a square frame of ashes. Around the rim of the ashes grew a thick bramble. We investigated. Underneath the broad green leaves we discovered mammoth dead-ripe blackberries. With our mouths and fingers smeared purple we hurried home to report. Papa and Mama followed us with large tin buckets.

Apparently no one had visited the sequestered berry patch for the tall canes were heavily loaded with the luscious fruit. During the next day or two we made several trips to the place and returned with heaping buckets. Papa harnessed Flora to the newly acquired carriage, of which I may speak further, and drove over to the crossroad store for tin cans and glass jars.

We had several meals which consisted only of warm blackberry cobbler, drowning in thick cream. Papa always called a cobbler a flugoo. I recall that when I sat down before my bowl of flugoo I hoped that Mama had baked enough for a second helping. But there would come an unexpected moment, near the bottom of my dish, when one more spoonful would have ruined me. That was the queer thing about these delicious flugoos. You would be downing the delightful stuff with the hope that there might be more to come; when, suddenly, your spoon refused to rise, your eyes glazed and swam, and your stomach raised up feebly on one elbow, muttering No! No!

Blackberry jam! I have had blackberry jam many a time, during the years that have intervened, but none like Mama’s. I hope I haven’t wearied you with these thumb-long blackberries, but they were among the truly eventful delights of my brief career in Kentucky,

Someone has just inquired where the cream for the flugoo came from.

(Dear, dear! There’s another sentence that got away and went strolling out in public with its slip showing. I know, as well as anybody, that it’s wrong to use a preposition to close a sentence with. But sometimes it’s difficult to tuck a preposition back in. It makes a trivial remark sound stuffy and pretentious. I heard of a brittle old English professor who became so zealous on this matter that he once wrote to a neighbor, “The incessant nocturnal barking of your mongrel pooch has become an annoyance up with which I shall no longer put!”)

Oh, yes, the cream. We bought it off the Carpenters, a quarter-mile up the road. Lou and I made a daily trip for it. We did not own a cow while in Kentucky. We had a cow several years later when I was about thirteen. I was unanimously elected as that cow’s guardian, companion and chambermaid. For one whole year she was in my debt for every mouthful she ate and every drop of milk she shed. And did she show any appreciation? She hated me.

On a hot, humid July evening, when the air was crowded with hungry mosquitoes, and both my hands were occupied, that cow would viciously wind up and throw her burr-filled tail (and no animal of my acquaintance ever had a longer tail with the possible exception of the stone lions which sit out in front of the Public Library at the corner of Forty-Second Street and Fifth Avenue) and wrap it about three times around my neck and drag the sharp butts across my face. I am told that the more pious people in India worship cows and give them free run of their streets, sidewalks, and entrances to public buildings. Be it far from me to deride any other man’s form of worship; but, in my opinion, the cow, our cow, or any cow, is the least beloved of all God’s creatures. Our cow’s name was “Bossy.” (And she had several other names, too.)

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