Grandpap's a-Makin'

GRANDMA would look at the sun mark on the kitchen floor. ‘It’s not eleven o’clock yet, honey,’ she would say. ‘You just go right on down to the sorghum mill while yore ma and I set a spell an’ visit. Better have a cooky to piece on.’

I’d get a cooky from the crock placed on the lowest step of the stairs. Then I’d go out the back door, through the thickets of peach and plum trees, past the cherry groves, and down the lane.

Visiting at Grandpa’s was a little like going to see Once-upon-a-Time Land. My own memories were confused with the stories I’d heard of the childhood of my mother and aunts, a fascinating hodgepodge of things I knew and things I’d heard about, giving a comfortable feeling of deeply rooted continuity. My mother, too, had been a little girl playing under these trees and following the lane to the sorghum mill down by the ‘little well.’

I can remember the October sun with that peculiar warm haze which I always associate with the Missouri Ozarks. The trees seemed to pen it in so that I walked in a golden glow.

The big orchard was on one side. As I walked, I chanted a magic formula of the names of the apple trees: ‘Maiden Blush, Sweet Apple, Striped June, Red June, Winesaps, Romanites, Ben Davis, Limbertwig, Hubbardston Nonesuch, Jennitons, Jonathans.’ I could see my mother and her sisters, in the quaint calico frocks shown in their faded pictures, making playhouses under the trees in summer and going out on cold winter nights to dig buried apples. I’d never eaten a buried apple, but I knew all about its peculiar flavor.

Before I could glimpse the sorghum mill, I could smell the spicy odor of the boiling syrup and hear the creak of the mill as Dobbin and Coley pulled the pole around. Grandpa had a two-horse sorghum mill which gave him considerable prestige in the neighborhood. He made sorghum for the whole district and occasionally shipped to the city.

Ben, the hired man, would be driving the team and pushing the cane stalks through the grinder. The juice ran into a tub and was piped down the hill into barrels to await its turn in the evaporator.

Grandpa would be at the evaporator, a long, shallow, divided pan on a stone fireplace. Hickory wood burned clear and hot under the pan. Grandpa did n’t trust anyone else with the skimming of the boiling syrup. If the sorghum boiled too long it was no good. If it did n’t boil long enough it was ‘runny.’

As he gently removed the greenish scum which rose constantly to the surface, Grandpa sang camp-meeting hymns.

‘“At the Cross, at the Cross, where I first saw the light,” ’ he sang. '’Bout time for this batch to go down into th’ coolin’ pans.’

The cooling pans were covered with muslin to keep out dirt. They were terraced downhill from the evaporator. From the covered pans the sorghum was poured into barrels.

For a while I would stand silently, sniffing the aroma of bubbling sorghum, listening to the creak of the grinder, the slow ‘giddups’ of Ben, the minor music of Grandpa’s singing. Then he would see me.

‘Howdy, missy,’ he would say. ‘Want a sasser o’ sorghum or a cane sucker?’

He always kept a saucer and a big spoon so that the farmers might have samples. Everyone licked the same spoon.

I took a cane sucker, though, a piece of cane which I dipped into the hot syrup and licked. Then I walked to the end of the furnace to peer inside. Sometimes sweet potatoes would be baking in the coals, to be eaten hot, dripping with butter and flavored with fresh molasses.

After that I’d sprawl on a pile of ‘pummies,’ which would later be used for thatching the stable and pigpens. Peace would settle drowsily over me. Eyes half-shut, I would stare dreamily at the sugar maples around the little well. In the distance beyond the orchard, a thin spiral of smoke arose from the kitchen chimney. A creaking of wheels, a neighing of horses, and the slow clop-clop of hoofs heralded the arrival of a wagonload of cane.

Half-awake, I would listen to the slow ceremony of hillbilly greetings.

‘Howdy. Get down, get down.’

‘Howdy, howdy. How be ye?’

Then the doings of all the folks would be leisurely discussed while Grandpa continued to skim the sorghum, pouring the scum into a pail. Hogs were fattened on the ‘skimmin’s.’ The visitor would ‘sasser’ some sorghum.

‘Ote Benskin’s got a mighty good crop o’ cane this year.’

‘Yep, them’s good sorghum,’ Grandpa would reply.

The rhythm of the neighbor unloading his cane at one of the stakes surrounding the mill would be added to the pattern of the slowly treading horses, the bubble of the syrup, the rhythmic sweep of Grandpa’s skimmer, his camp-meeting hymns.

Even to my childish mind there was something complete about it, a pattern of contented, productive living. Grandpa’s sorghum would be long sweetening for the neighborhood all winter, providing cakes, pies, preserves, popcorn balls, even a ‘drap t’ sweeten th’ cawffee.’

Nowadays I speed in shiny cars down the concrete highways that wind through my native hills. The smart young visitors in their chic culottes, Hollywood slacks, and the latest sandals from Palm Beach laugh at the sight of a sorghum mill along the roadside.

‘Look, how quaint, how Ozarkian!’ they shriek. ‘We really ought to take a picture.’

But I have a nostalgic picture locked in my heart of a blue and gold and brown October day, of the smoke rising from a furnace chimney, the enticing odor of boiling spicy syrup, the creak of the grinder, the slow plodding of the horses, and Grandpa singing, ‘There’s a land that is fairer than day.’ And for a moment I forget that my companions are enlightened, civilized people come to look at my quaint fellow natives, and wish that again I was sprawling on a pile of pummies, drowsing in the sunshine and happy because ‘Grandpap’s a-makin’.'