Go Outside and Try Not to Die

Chapter 15

Mark and I slept together in the extra room, the one where Grandmother painted. The sharp tang of oil paint and turpentine hung in the air, but I was safe. Our backs pressed together as we lay in the dark. Facing the wall, I traced the word Mom with my finger over and over, wishing she could somehow see it. I wondered if she was safe. I’d been going to the Killingsworth farm, my mom’s parents’ place, for as long as I could remember, but I never understood why until now.

Morning came, and Mark was gone. He was already outside with Granddaddy. According to my grandparents, children belonged outside. I went straight to the kitchen, where Grandmother was already cooking lunch for the men, but she had saved me a plate of biscuits. She split one open, spread it with butter, then pointed the tip of her knife toward one jar and then the other. “Red or purple?” she asked. “Purple.” I said. She smiled as she spread grape jelly across my biscuit. We both loved purple.

When I dropped a biscuit crumb, I touched it with the tip of my finger and popped it into my mouth. No one ever asked me to. I just copied Maggie. Everything Maggie did served two or three purposes because daylight was burning. Nothing was wasted—not time, not food, not even a biscuit crumb. She saved the water from boiled potatoes to start the soup, then cooked something else in the same pot before washing it.

Just the kitchen alone held half a century of biscuits, babies, canning jars, and tired farmers before I ever walked through its screen door. I never met the young woman who married Granddaddy, but I heard stories. By the time I came along, decades of farm life had rounded off her sharp edges. I loved hearing how she fed ten people with one scrawny chicken. Her secret? Use the bones. In her kitchen, you were never hungry or unnoticed. I wished I could live there.

As I watched another morning in Maggie’s kitchen, my body relaxed. Every spice jar had its place. Every dish towel had its drawer. Nothing was ever out of place. Every square inch mattered, and since I was in the room, I mattered. Before I threw anything away, I always asked Maggie first.

“It just might feed a cat.”

To me, Maggie was a mystery. Even her vocabulary made little sense. She talked about “putting up food,” yet she carried jars of peaches, green beans, and tomatoes downstairs to a dark cellar. Then there was “canning,” though everything went into glass jars. Sometimes she called it “pickling,” and she wasn’t always talking about pickles. My job was to watch and stay out of the way while Maggie managed an assembly line of steaming kettles, bubbling jars, and rattling lids. I watched. I trusted. And I clapped when we heard the ping of the lids sealing.

Beyond the kitchen, she tended the chickens, hung laundry on the line, and worked in the garden. But the version of Maggie I loved most was the one rolling scratch biscuits. As long as Maggie had flour on her hands, everything would be okay.

Our conversations were mostly one-sided because I had stopped talking. I listened while Maggie talked me through her day. She never peppered me with questions, and I still don’t know how much my mother told her about that night. For a few days, she let me stay close by her side. Then she eased us back into our usual routine and sent me outside with a simple instruction.

“Go outside and try not to die!”

For the first time since I’d arrived, I smiled and ran for the screen door in search of the cats. Little by little, the farm gave me new memories to carry alongside the old ones. Granddaddy measured life by rain. Maggie measured it by meals. Somehow, between the two of them, they knew exactly what I needed.