The Apron

The Apron

By Stephanie C. Merryfield

Four cups of flour…four tablespoons of natural sugar cane… one and a half cups of butter milk… two tablespoons of Clabber Girl baking powder & half a cup of soft, real butter.

This was the start of Nana’s biscuit bread. The buttermilk was one of the ugliest sights the eye could conceive in a kitchen¾clotted and slightly yellow. The smell could tumble a horse. It was only a little less sickening than flies lighting on runny, decaying road kill under the mid-day sun of July. Yet to her it was familiar. She kneaded the dough across the countertop of this small southern home, ignoring the smell.

It was the last small modular to be put in place on Rochelle Road, since the departure of eight of the children for the city. Some, mostly the boys, went to Gary, Indiana. But the girls, they stayed closer to home. Jackson, Tennessee had been home to the Chism’s since the emancipation. To her, the three hundred, thirty acres represented a legacy. Her mind wandered to recessed areas, still covered with evergreens. She kneaded more intently. This home was a gift. What exactly had she received?

This rural place was unlike the home on the farm. She wiped her hands feverishly on the apron. She wiped off of her fingers the loss that culminated in the bank’s foreclosure on the acreage. She wiped from underneath her fingernails the memories of her vegetable garden that had helped to feed thirteen children. She wiped onto the apron flesh that had soothed her husband’s weary brow for over sixty years. Hubert always wanted to be touched. That was his love language; of course the eight girls and five boys she birthed at home evidenced that.

Hubert was a very determined man. He convinced her at nineteen that he would love her always. Savera consented. He purchased the acreage with sobriety and ambition. He wasn’t contented to be a sharecropper. During the winter’s to supplement his income, he left for the city.

“Savera, you’re a good woman.” Those words were of little comfort now.

“Slam,” sounded the oven door, threatening to come off the hinge and burn her ankle. She winced at the thought of the casket door being closed over him during the funeral services. She thought this time he would come home, too, but no. Many times before, he had been in the hospital and had always come home.

“Pneumonia,” the doctor concluded sternly. She said this without compassion, almost blankly before leaving the hospital room.

Savera attempted to encourage the children and their children who had all gathered anxiously in the tiny sterile space. She, however, received little comfort that evening as she watched him slip from this life to another unceremoniously. The two were as they had been before they started a family, alone.

The bread would bake for fifty minutes. This bread has always been comfort food for her children, her grandchildren and her husband. Now, perhaps it would be of comfort to her as well. She removed the old apron and placed it, for the first time in many years, into a drawer¾out of the way. She knew she would not use it as often now. The bread’s fragrance filled the nearly empty house with memories.