The Grape Vine

Granny set the plate of homemade biscuits on the kitchen table. “I made these this morning,” she said, “and I held some back for you.” For Granny, morning meant not too long after dawn; she liked to get her work, especially baking, done before the day got too warm.

She set an empty plate and a butter knife in front of me and removed the cloth that covered the biscuits. A little steam rose. “I just warmed them a little, in the oven,” she told me. “I have butter, too, real butter,” then she leaned in close and lowered her voice, “not that margarine like your mama uses.”

She walked to the refrigerator and took out the butter, saw a spot of mold on one end, and took the butter straight to the sink. “I’ll just scrape off that part,” she said, then put the butter on a plate and set it on the table. “The rest of it is good and I don’t see a need to waste food. And I have some of the grape jelly I made last week, if you want to have a little with your biscuits.”

“Grapes from your vines?” I asked. Granny had said that she had always wanted her own grape vine, and she had ordered two small roots from a seed catalog. She started them off next to the pole that held her clothesline; when the vines outgrew it, we built her an arbor high enough that she could walk under it, and, within a few years, vines encased the structure. “Yes,” she said, and looked very pleased with herself. She got a jar of jelly from the pantry and set it on the table. “I was able to put up a good lot of it this year.” I watched her as she moved about the kitchen; though a petite woman, barely five feet tall, and well into her seventies, she still moved quickly. She knew her kitchen, had a place for everything and kept everything in its place. In fact, Granny always seemed to be in motion. She did not like to sit while a visitor might possibly need something, and often preferred to eat sitting next to her stove, perched on her red metal stool, the one with a pull-out step.

“Sometimes,” she said, “biscuits with a little butter and jelly were all we had to make a meal of.” Granny had often told me that they were dirt farmers, her family, “Just poor dirt farmers,” she’d say. She grew up on a small farm in Southwest Virginia, past South Hill, near the North Carolina state line. It was tobacco country, and the rolling red dirt fields of tobacco and feed corn seemed to go on forever. “And when there was a little flour and some drippings to use,” she went on, “mama would make gravy too. And we had eggs, what we didn’t sell. Mama kept chickens in the little yard.” I stirred the butter and jelly together on my plate, then smeared it onto a biscuit. Granny’s fresh biscuits and homemade grape jelly were always a treat, and eating them this way, with the butter and jelly mixed the way she showed me, made them even better.

“How’s your garden doing?” I asked. Grandma kept a small vegetable plot in the back yard, raised tomatoes, yellow squash and zucchini, sometimes cantaloupes.

“Well, I am getting a lot of tomatoes,” she said. “And that reminds me; don’t leave here without taking some of them with you. I don’t want them to go to waste.”

“I can take some, yes,” I said. “They’re always good.”

“And I have some extra crookneck squash, you can cook that in the pan with a little bacon,” she said. “And whatever salt or seasonings you might want. And there’s always plenty of that zucchini you can take.”

“Have you made any zucchini bread yet?” I asked. It sounded strange, a bread made with a large green squash, and I did not believe it at first. But it was real; it had a nutty flavor and really was very good, especially warm from the oven. I always bought her the supplies whenever I could convince her to make extra loaves for me. And canning jars and sugar for the extra jelly she made for me. It took a lot of sugar to make jelly, and I knew buying extra would be a strain on her budget.

“I made some of that bread this morning, while the oven was already heated,” she said. “Three loaves; you can take two of them with you, and I’ll keep one here in case anybody drops in tomorrow and might want a little something to eat.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I will. These biscuits are great, by the way.”

“There are some of those for you to take with you, too, and a quart jar of grape jelly, I know you always like it.” I looked out through the glass storm door into the back yard where late day shadows already grew long, merged. I could not see the little vegetable garden or grape arbor from this angle, but I could see the iris bed, now past bloom, and the birds hopping through the grass, pecking at the ground for bugs. “Are the birds eating up your garden?” I asked. “I see a lot of them out there.”

“Well not as much as they were before I put up those pie pans,” she said. “I tied two of those aluminum pans to sticks I stuck in the ground. A little wind will move them around, you know, and maybe that will keep the old birds away from the plants. “And whenever I have some little scraps like bread leftover from sandwiches or lunch, I’ll scrape them out near the irises for the birds, to try to keep them over that way.” She walked closer to the door and looked out. “I think that might be helping keep them out of the vegetables.”

I was finished with all that I was going to eat and stood up to take my plate to the sink to rinse. “That was really good, Granny,” I said. “Thanks.”

“Just put that down into the sink,” she told me. “I’ll get them in a bit. And you don’t have to run right off. Come in here and sit with your old Granny for a while.” I followed her into the living room and opened the front door, the wooden inside door, checked to be sure the storm door was locked and then sat in what had been Granddaddy’s chair. Granny sat in her own chair, an upholstered rocking chair, just to the left of me. Late day light struck the carpet, lit the dust motes from where I had walked to the door.

“You know I don’t really like that door open like that,” Granny said. “I don’t like that somebody could walk right up to it and see in.”

“I know,” I replied. “But the door’s locked. Nobody’s going to just walk into the house. And besides, it’s too dark in here with that door closed.” I did not tell her that I liked it open because it reminded me of childhood, of all the summer evenings I had spent there on the rose-patterned carpet, playing games, or looking out through the storm door into the front yard. Granddaddy would make smoke rings with his pipe, filling the air with the sweet smell of tobacco. Sometimes I would try to put my finger through the rings, but that only destroyed them, so usually I just watched the rings rise, elongate, and disappear. Granny, of course, didn’t like Granddaddy smoking in the house, and always fussed at him when he did.

“If you say so,” she said. Then, with a mischievous smile, “You know I have a birthday coming up soon, don’t you? I’ll be 76. Or 77? No, it’s 76, I’ll be 76 in September.” She did not mention that as a gift reminder, she would never have dreamed of it. She had just wanted to remind me that she had lived a lot of years and was thankful for it. But she did not, as she did sometimes, mention how much she missed Granddaddy, missed sitting there with him in the evenings.

“I know,” I said. “The 29th, isn’t it?”

“The 30th,” she corrected me. “Your sister’s is on the 20th. That’s probably what you were thinking.” “Okay,” I said and smiled.

“Did I tell you I heard from Mary today?” she asked. Mary was the oldest daughter in Granny’s family, and at 90 the oldest of her surviving siblings. “No, you didn’t. How is everyone down there?”

“They’re all doing okay, I think. Mary said there’s been enough rain this year, but that Brother’s tobacco crop is getting eaten up by the worms. What they call the tobacco worms,” she said. “You know what they are, don’t you?”

“I guess,” I said. “I’ve never seen one, but you’ve told me about them.” Tobacco worms weren’t worms, exactly, not like earthworms anyway. The way she described them, they sounded more like ugly caterpillars. They could decimate a crop of tobacco and had to be picked off by hand.

“Well,” she said, “they’re nasty, fat green worms, and when you smashed one it was the worse looking thing you’ve ever seen.” She winced at the memory. “I hated picking those things off the plants. But daddy said it had to be done.” Granny looked out through the door, towards the sun getting lower in the sky and she was quiet for a moment. “Many a morning,” she went on, “daddy would take me down to the far end of the field and drop me off, and then he’d go back up the other end with the boys and leave me there to walk the field by myself, to pick those worms off the plants and smash them on the ground. I’d walk up and down the rows all morning long and when I saw a tobacco worm, I picked it off and smashed it into the ground.” Her hands fluttered nervously in her lap, she seemed to be lost in a memory and did not speak for a few moments “I could hear them up there, you know,” she said, “up at the other end of the field.” She was quiet for a moment, then, “I could hear them up there, daddy and the boys and the other men. I could hear them up there together, talking and laughing.” Then, quietly, and with a slight edge to her voice, “Up there having fun.”

“But Granny” I said, “They probably had the kind of work to do that you weren’t big enough to help with.”

“Oh, I know that. I’m not saying they didn’t work. It was a farm, so we all worked. All of us worked.” She paused, looked down at her hands. “But I just wish that sometimes he would’ve taken me with him and the boys, instead of making me work down at the other end of the field by myself.” She reached for a Kleenex from the box she kept on the table by her chair. I noticed again how thin, how frail she had become, and I thought of the little birds outside, pecking at the ground, looking for bugs.

“All morning,” she said, “until time to stop to eat, I had to find those worms and pick them off the plants and smash them on the ground.” Tears began to well in her eyes over the memory. I had never seen her look so forlorn, so sad. And other than at Granddaddy’s funeral I don’t think I had ever seen her cry before then. “I don’t know why daddy never took me with them.” A few tears ran down her cheeks. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” she said, and she was insistent. “I never did anything wrong.” Then in a quiet, almost plaintive voice, “I don’t know why daddy had to do me that way…”

~ ~ ~

This story was originally posted on Medium.

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