or Mom received a check from the oil company leasing the drilling
rights on her land in Texas. Mom was always vague about how big the
land was and where exactly it was, and she refused to consider selling it.
All we knew was that every couple of months, this check would show up
and we'd have plenty of food for days at a time.
When the electricity was on, we ate a lot of beans. A big bag of pinto
beans cost under a dollar and would feed us for days. They tasted
especially good if you added a spoonful of mayonnaise. We also ate a lot
of rice mixed with jack mackerel, which Mom said was excellent brain
food. Jack mackerel was not as good as tuna but was better than cat food,
which we ate from time to time when things got really tight. Sometimes
Mom popped up a big batch of popcorn for dinner. It had lots of fiber,
she pointed out, and she had us salt it heavily because the iodine would
keep us from getting goiters. "I don't want my kids looking like
pelicans," she said.
Once, when an extra-big royalty check came in, Mom bought us a whole
canned ham. We ate off it for days, cutting thick slices for sandwiches.
Since we had no refrigerator, we left the ham on a kitchen shelf. After it
had been there for about a week, I went to saw myself a slab at
dinnertime and found it crawling with little white worms.
Mom was sitting on the sofa bed, eating the piece she'd cut. "Mom, that
ham's full of maggots," I said.
"Don't be so picky," she told me. "Just slice off the maggoty parts. The
inside's fine."
Brian and I became expert foragers. We picked crab apples and wild
blackberries and pawpaws during the summer and fall, and we swiped
ears of corn from Old Man Wilson's farm. The corn was tough—Old
Man Wilson grew it as feed for his cattle—but if you chewed it enough,
you could get it down. Once we caught a wounded blackbird by throwing