A Southern Place Read Online Free PDF Page A

around the empty beer bottle. “Homemakers, women who worked at home. FHA taught girls to sew, to cook and can, freeze, pickle, all that stuff.”
    “So that’s why we have to grow all those tomatoes every summer, and buy that stuff from roadside stands to put up and eat in winter?” I thought about Mama’s raw red hands when she hulled and peeled things to can. “Thank God they don’t make us learn that in school anymore—when I’m grown, I’m gonna buy my food at the store. I hate putting up all those vegetables.”
    Uncle Cal chuckled. “Store-bought won’t taste half as good.”
    “Sure,” I said, rolling my eyes.
    “You’ll be like my daddy, and that story about the first light bread,” he said, peering out the window at the gray rain on the river as though it showed him a film clip from long ago. “Your mama ain’t never told you?”
    I shook my head. Jerry Lee raised his snout to look for Uncle Cal’s hand; he brought it down on the dog’s stomach and commenced rubbing again. “Our Daddy was raised on the family farm, probably never left Dumas County a dozen times in his first twenty years.”
    “Wow.”
    He nodded. His beard had grown into a gray stubble and he touched it while he talked. “They didn’t have a lotta money, but they ate good—killed a hog every winter, cured it themselves, kept chickens for eatin’ and eggs, and enough spring and summer vegetables to eat all year long.”
    Uncle Cal’s green eyes lit up from behind while he talked. It was as if he spoke to the rain and the dogs, in a faraway voice I remembered from when he used to tell me stories as a kid, sitting on his lap on the porch of the house on stilts, watching the fireflies light and go black. “This was back in the Depression,” he said. “And most everybody was poor as Job’s turkey, so it’s not like they were the only ones. Daddy was seventeen or so, been up to Arlington to trade some hogs. He stopped at a general store to maybe get a cold drink. The man behind the counter had a loaf of light bread, fresh off the truck. Told Daddy it was the latest thing, everybody’d be buyin’ it ’fore long.”
    “He’d never seen any light bread?” The idea was crazy.
    Uncle Cal looked over at me and shook his head. “Never in his life,” Cal said. “He had biscuits and cornbread, maybe even some homemade loaf bread once in a while, but never any store bought bread. Ever.” The dog was breathing regular between us, his black nose moist. “The feller behind the counter gave him a piece, hoping to sell a loaf. Daddy ate the whole thing and then told the feller thank you, but he’d pass. Said to him it was what paper would taste like if you tried to eat it.”
    I laughed. The rain slowed down, sounding gentle on the roof.
    “The funniest thing was what he told his family when he got home, ‘It’ll never catch on,’” Uncle Cal said. “Folks’ll never pay good money for something like that.” Uncle Cal pulled out a small gold pin in a clear plastic square of a box. “Your Mama won that,” he said, passing it to me.
    A tiny emblem of a needle and thread and the word “4-H” were embossed on a green four-leaf clover, stamped in the center.
    “Mama got this for sewing?”
    “There’s more medals in here and probably as many more gone to the wayside. Your mama got awards for sewing, cooking, planting trees, and growing a garden. She took to sewing most.”
    “She did? She never told me.” My stomach grumbled and I hoped Mama wouldn’t wonder where I’d got to, but I loved being at Uncle Cal’s house. It was like a present to me with the rain pattering outside and the box between us.
    “Your mama loved to sew, nothing made her happier than a purty piece a material and a new pattern.” It was like he described someone else, a younger, happier woman. It made me feel strange, thinking of Mama in a life without the panty factory, or bills to pay, or me.
    “I know she don’t have time to do a lot