Crab Orchard Review Vol. 12, No. 2, our

Heather E. Goodman
“Snapper soup—worst to make, best to eat,” Dad said, when
his buddies came over for his annual party dubbed the Feast of
Washaw. Even when we were kids, most of the women stayed away,
but Mom drank with the boys and told just as many skinning and
fishing stories as the rest of them. Charged with keeping an eye on my
younger brother Jared, I steered him to our tree fort where we spied on
the adults. We laughed hardest when Mom outdid the men with her
tale of chasing a real estate developer with a maggot-filled squirrel.
Mom always prepared snapper soup with Dad. They butchered
turtles, toasted beer cans, gave Jared and me turtle claws to string
as pendants. We drove thin nails through them to make holes, then
guided string through the claws and wore them around our necks.
When Mom and Dad finished cleaning the meat from the shell,
she took my hand, and just the two of us walked past the swamp. She
laid the shell in a nest of dried leaves under a few walnut and oak
trees, pulled me to her and told me the shell would be immaculate
white, a bowl to eat from. Over the years, I checked the progress of the
shells less frequently, but always she and I went together to take it from
its place. The feast long over, we were left with a pristine bowl, gritty
and sun bleached. We filled it with walnuts from the ground, Mom a
constant provider.
This year, Dad had hoped to be well enough so we could carry
him out on a chair for the feast. Instead, on his last night, he asked us
to honor him by hosting the feast one last time. All of the old-timers
from the mill will be here tomorrow, a week since Dad died.
Will and I brought Dad home from the hospital when the
doctors couldn’t do anything else. They thought he’d have a week, but it
was two days. Just two last days at the swamp together. He slept, barely
ate. We didn’t talk when I washed him or helped him with the bed pan.
When I carried him outside to watch the birds on the reeds, he
was so light I thought he would slip through my arms, sawdust. My
body bulged against his. My skin, tight, his, a cobweb hanging.
“Might need your help with the feast this year,” he said, following
the flight of a red-winged blackbird.
“Of course.” I looked at him and thought of his first body, the one
from my childhood. I remembered being terrified of the black snake,
thicker than my arm and longer than a fishing pole, that moved in
under the cabin. He had caught the snake, held it over his head, legs
spread wide, and yelped.
Crab Orchard Review ◆ 45