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Show -45 faces, clumsily hacked out of the log and made cruder by layers of thick bright enamel, but one or two showed evidence of greater skill in the carving. The one looking at me now had been given a satyr's face, full of casual evil and careless malice. Through the open kitchen door I could see further reminders of Adam. My father was a thin man but he took an artist's delight in food. He cooked heavy loaves of dark brown bread, hung strings of onions to dry from the rafters in the garage, put up glass jars of green beans, peas, limas, shelled corn; deep in the cellar he filled wooden bins with beets, turnips, winter squash, and awkward potatoes painfully dug up from his garden; in the attic were heaps of dry red beans, parched corn, bags of store-bought soy flour and cans of powdered protein and dehydrated milk. When curious visitors pressed him to explain, Adam would prophesy his Great American Famine and produce statistics to prove it jvas inevitable. He wanted to be prepared. But I suspect now that it wasn't that half-wish, half-fear that turned him into such a prodigious gardener. I think he was working off some darker compulsion; his fear of famine was only the excuse that Reason invented. This mysterious urge made my dad a pickler, a canner, preserve-maker, cooker of sweet jams and jellies-everything except an eater. "I don't suppose that I'll ever get married," Carlo said. |
