The Woman Who Fried the Chicken

Then three years ago the fire inspector wrote up the hood over the fryer. The trustees got a quote of a little over six thousand dollars to bring it up to code. The church did not have six thousand dollars for a fryer it used four times a year, so they sold it to a man who was opening a cafe in Windsor, and I believe they got four hundred and fifty for it.

That fall the fellowship committee met about what to do for the supper.

Cheryl chairs that committee. She has for eleven years. She said the sensible thing, which was to order all of it from the deli counter at the grocery store and be done with it.

Mom was at that meeting. She does not say much in meetings. She said, “I have a stove.”

They settled it down the middle. The committee buys trays of deli chicken to fill out the count, and for three years now Mom has fried hers alone, at home, on the same gas range she has had since my father was alive. Three cast iron skillets going at once. Twelve chickens, cut up eight pieces to the bird.

Ninety-six pieces.

That is all one woman and one stove can do in a day, and she knows it is not enough for two hundred, and it grieves her. Nobody goes hungry. There are the deli trays, and two hams, and a long table of covered dishes. But anybody can tell store chicken from skillet chicken at ten feet, and the roasters empty long before the trays do. The old men come early and get in line on account of it.

The supper is on Sunday evening at five. That means Mom fries on Sunday morning.

It is the only Sunday of the year she misses preaching.

I want you to hold onto that, because it matters. Every fall, on the morning of the harvest supper, Pastor Lyle stands in the pulpit and says something kind about the meal that is coming. He has been with us six years. He is a good man and he means every word.

And every fall, what he says is, “Let’s be sure and thank Cheryl and her committee for all their hard work.”

And people clap. And Cheryl, in the third pew, nods and smiles.

And our mother is not there to hear it, because she is four miles away in her kitchen with flour to her elbows.

I had sat through that eleven times. Eleven years I had wanted to stand up in my pew and say one plain sentence.

I never did, because Mom would not have it.

I brought it up to her once, the second year. She was at the sink. She did not even turn around.

“The Lord knows who fried it,” she said. “That will do, Jan.”

That morning I had been at her back door at half past five, same as always. The kitchen light was already on. It is a small house on the east side of Clinton, a block off the old Katy tracks, and you could smell the lard from the driveway.

She had been up since four.

She had the first two birds cut up already and soaking. Her hands are not what they were. The knuckles are big as walnuts now, and I watched her work the knife through a thigh joint with her whole shoulder behind it, and I said, “Mom, let me do that.”

“You do the flour,” she said.

So I did the flour. That is my job and has been since I was tall enough to see into the bag. Flour, salt, a good deal of black pepper, a little paprika. She does not measure. She looks.