The Wood I Ricked Against Her Porch

The Pie

She made us a pie that Saturday. The last Saturday, as it turned out, because the wood was all in by then and there was nothing left to do but admire it.

It was a black walnut pie, which if you are not from the hills you may not know, but black walnut is the taste of the Ozarks in the fall, bitter and rich and nothing like the English walnuts from the store. The trees drop the nuts in October and you gather them and you let them cure and you crack them with a hammer or a vise because a nutcracker will not touch them, and the hulls stain your hands black for a week. It is a lot of work for a cup of nutmeats. Grandma had been gathering and cracking those walnuts all fall, in the cold, with her stained old hands, while she was rationing her stove.

She had been saving them. She told me that at the table. She had been saving the walnuts to make a pie when the wood was in, as a thank you, and she had not been sure there would be enough wood to feel right about firing up the oven for a pie, and now there was wood enough for two winters so she had baked it.

We ate it warm at her kitchen table with the stove roaring and the windows sweating from the heat, Denny and me and Carl Reed and the Hadley sisters, who had stayed, and it was the best thing I have ever put in my mouth and I have thought about it every October since.

Denny does not say much, I have told you that. He had two pieces of that pie and then he sat back and he looked at Grandma Opal across her own warm kitchen and he said, “Miss Opal, that is the finest pie I ever ate, and I ate it in the warmest kitchen in this county, and I want you to keep it that warm all winter, you hear me, I did not cut all that wood for you to sit here cold being polite.”

Grandma laughed. She had not laughed, that I had heard, since August.

“I hear you, Denny,” she said. “The damper stays open. I give you my word.”