Unk

Come in, come in, she called to us as I knocked on the mended combination screen door at the front porch. I opened it and with my wife trailing behind me, threaded my way along the path that remained between the stacks of stuffed plastic grocery bags stacked on both sides.

He’s out on the back porch, my aunt said as I stepped into the room. She sat in her recliner that rested on a wooden platform to facilitate moving her into a wheelchair. Her bulk along with her arthritis made her nearly an immovable object. Her family brought things to her, hence the assortment of dirty dishes in the seat of the chair beside her. She slept in the chair and worked in the chair, now mending by hand a pair of jeans that belonged to one of the boys. She left the chair only for bathroom needs, and for a weekly trip into town to have her hair done.

After greeting my aunt, I left my wife sitting in one of the many recliners that were aimed at the television and crossed the dark shaggy carpet to the kitchen to knock at the door that opened onto the back porch, thinking as I did that people customarily rapped to get in, not to get out. My uncle didn’t hear me at first as he was vacuuming the porch floor. Like my late father he was hearing impaired; in fact, he wore my father’s old hearing aids.

As I waited I glanced about the familiar kitchen. Summers when I was a boy I would often see a cheese-spread juice glass in the windowsill with a few sprigs of clove pinks in it. My grandparents lived in the house then, and Unk was a young man who tended flower gardens when he wasn’t milking cows or working in the fields. Now at age eighty-five he was the housekeeper. My three cousins, the “boys,” ran the farm. When Garrison Keillor spoke of the pure bachelor farmers around Lake Wobegone, I thought of my cousins. My aunt was of Norwegian stock, and the boys, now approaching their sunset years, had never dated. They were working out in the fields now.

Cooking for the three hulking men would have been a chore for a relatively young person, but my ancient uncle assumed the responsibility without complaint. The shabby kitchen, with its rust-stained enamel sink and food-charred range bore evidence of his labor, and all available space was covered with food and dishes and pots and pans in various stages of preparation or consumption.

Finally Unk noticed me, turned off his vacuum cleaner, and opened the door. Hi, he grinned, I was doing some cleaning but I guess I didn’t get it done before you got here!

I had called earlier to see if they would be home. A year had passed since my father’s funeral when they had hosted the lunch after the burial. I told my aunt on the telephone that we had already eaten, not only to spare my uncle from the chores of fixing another meal, but my wife was reluctant to eat food prepared in that kitchen.

Looks fine to me, I said. The back porch was also a repository for packed plastic grocery bags, again with a narrow passage left between the piles.

He shoved the vacuum to one side and straightened up, almost to his six-one height, his hair was still tufted from sleep. Always a thin man, he was gaunt now, having recovered from colon cancer a couple of years ago; my aunt had told me at the time how many inches he had had removed, but I no longer recalled. His shirt fell from his shoulder as if from a metal hanger, and his loose denim jeans were gathered by a belt at his waist.

I have some questions I’ve been wanting to ask you, he said, if I can remember them!

I followed him into the living room where my wife and aunt were making conversation, and as I sat, he walked back to the refrigerator door. Do you know anything about corn smut in Mexican cooking? he asked, handing me a newspaper clipping that mentioned Huitlachoche. I didn’t, I told him. He knew that I liked to cook. I wrote down the name of the Mexican dish and told him I’d Ggoogle it, see what I could find.

He handed me a framed regimental photography of WWI soldiers. I think this is Gramp, he said. What do you think? He pulled a kitchen chair next to me and hovered close.

I’m not so sure, I said. His face looks too broad, doesn’t it? I scanned the three rows of young men in the panoramic photo, but couldn’t settle on one that looked more like Gramp. In their identical uniforms and with their close-cropped heads, they looked remarkably similar.

And do you know who this is? he asked, handing me a gilt-framed photo of a bearded patriarch.

Yes, I said. That’s Isaac Johnson, my great-grandfather.

Did that woman from Georgia get a hold of you? he asked.

She did, I said, and I gave her what information I had. But it wasn’t much.

He nodded. I sent her some stuff, too.

The woman was my great-uncle Hank’s granddaughter. Hank had been the black sheep of the family. According to the official version of the story, Hank’s wife Hannah had accidentally killed herself with a shotgun, wounding one of their two children in the process. The woman who had e-mailed me was the daughter of the wounded son. Everyone in the family, and everybody in the neighborhood, thought that Hank had come home drunk and done it, but he had an alibi; a drinking buddy claimed they were in a tavern at the time.

After that incident Hank had moved to Oklahoma, to work I had assumed.

He was in Leavenworth, Unk said. He had been working in a mine up in Iron Mountain with another guy from back home. His friend had a house he rented, and Hank had opened a letter addressed to the guy, taken a rent check and cashed it. It was only for five bucks, but they sent him to federal prison. Tampering with the mail, I guess. Federal offense.

Wow, I said.

Yeah, Unk said. I’ve got Uncle Bill’s stuff in a trunk upstairs. Bill was Hank’s brother. There was a letter where Hank asked Bill to sendt him a dollar so he could buy cigarettes so he didn’t have to mooch off other guys.

Wow.

Would you like a piece of cake? he asked. I’ve made some coffee.

Sure, I said. I’d like some.

None for me, my wife said. I ate such a big breakfast I couldn’t possibly eat a bite!

Coffee?

Thanks, but no, she said. I drank too much coffee at breakfast!

While I waited for my cake, I thought about one of the reasons I had stopped for a visit. I had quarreled with my sisters at the time of my father’s death. Because I had been named executor of the estate in the will, I learned that my sisters had manipulated my dad into leaving them the bulk of his estate. Little was left to probate. Angry at my sisters for shamelessly and selfishly exploiting my senile father, and equally angry at him for letting them, I refused to go with them to make funeral arrangements. In spite, they had asked Unk to go with them to pick out the casket and plan the service.

At the wake he had taken me aside and tearfully urged me to makeup with my sisters. He recounted a time when my aunt and my father had quarreled. It was just awful! he said. I nodded and told him that some day I’d tell him about the terrible things my siblings had done.

This was to be the day. But I realized there was no need. Families might succeed in keeping secrets from the outside world, but not from each other. My uncle had known my sisters as long as I had; little that they might do would surprise him.

Unk presented me with a cereal bowl filled with his cake. This has rhubarb and blackcaps on the bottom, he said, then miniature marshmallows and a cake-mix on top of that. The rhubarb was fresh from his garden, and the black raspberries by way of his freezer.

This is good, I said, and it was, not exactly haute cuisine, but homemade and tasty all the same. The coffee was not as good, as it had been kept waiting on a warmer.

My aunt announced that maybe she could eat a little cake. He brought her a heaping serving that she ate readily, and a smaller helping for himself.

Unk had always been a gardener, and he had always been a cook; my mother used to say that he was the daughter Granny never had, as he had taken piano lessons when he was a boy and used to play at the church for the Christmas program. And had had an unlikely part-time business for a farmer: he baked and decorated wedding cakes, a self-taught pastry chef with work-battered hands.

Well, my wife said, a tight smile on her face, I guess we should think about going pretty soon.

Don’t wait so long before you come to see us again! my aunt said.

I’m really glad you came, my uncle said, taking my empty cake bowl and coffee cup, but looking at me as if he hoped to find a message in my eyes. Oh, he said, I have to show you my seedlings.

And he did, the tomatoes and pepper plants that he had started, putting the containers of dirt on the furnace in the basement until the seeds had sprouted, and then moving them to a sunny window. He knew that I gardened, too, and would be interested. He collected many of his seeds from one year to use for the next.

It’s good seeing you again, I said. Thanks for the cake. It was delicious. I waved in the direction of my aunt who sat in her chair like a monument, and with my wife in tow threaded our way through the plastic bags on the porch and down the wheelchair ramp to the lawn. Unk followed us. While my wife settled herself in the car Unk pointed out his rhubarb patch and his cabbage plants that he had mulched with black plastic. He made sauerkraut every fall. And he put rhubarb in the freezer, made jams and jellies, canned tomatoes, dug potatoes for the winter, all to feed his three boys, and my aunt, too, of course.

Well, I said, offering my hand. He took it, but then rather than shaking it, I put my other arm around him in an embrace, patting him on the back as men do. When I stepped back from him, he had tears in his eyes.

I’m awfully glad you came, he said quietly, and I nodded and got in my car.

Bio:

Gary Jones, a freelance writer and teacher, lives near Sister Bay tending gardens with his wife of many years.