My Year of Meats (9 page)

CUT TO FAMILY HISTORY CORNER:

 

Grace and Vern got married, and during the next three years their project began to materialize. Alison was born, then Vernon Junior followed two years later. Vern Senior had a talent for food, and Gracie had her talent for numbers. Together they bought a run-down mill outside of town and turned it into one of the most famous Cajun restaurants in Louisiana. When Alison was seven and Vernon Junior just turned five, they bought the old plantation house, opened the gates, and started to fill it with children.

Joy was first. She was five, just a few months younger than Vernon Junior. They found her in a Christian adoption magazine. She was the Amerasian daughter of a GI and a Korean prostitute. She’d been abandoned at the age of three and a half on the steps of a Catholic church with a note attached to her wrist that read, “This girl’s mother is a whore and her father is an American. God, please raise her for me. Thank you very much.” The adoption magazine had this description of her:

“Well?” Vern Senior had opened the floor for discussion.

Their family meeting was a weekly event, when everyone got together and reviewed the events of the week and made all the decisions that would affect them.

“She’s so cute,” said Alison. “She looks like a little doll.”

“I want a brother,” said Vernon Junior.

“Outbursts of obstinacy?” inquired Vern Senior.

“Sensitivity to music,” concluded Gracie, who was by now the assistant leader of the church choir.

They voted to name her Joy. When she first came to live at the large brick house at the end of the drive, she spoke no English and certain things seemed to terrify her: Vern Senior kissing Alison good night, for example, or birthday parties with noisemakers, or blinking Christmas lights. Other things—the sight of the full Louisiana moon or a black child smaller than she was—would set her off in a different way. It was like something inside her heart just snapped. She would turn to face the nearest vertical surface, press her forehead against it, squeeze.her eyes shut, and emit a high-pitched keening that split ears. She would stand like this for hours, humming like a tuning rod to the pitch of her grief.

“Musical?” Vern Senior asked mildly.

Gracie pursed her lips and waited. In the dead of the night under the moon, or in the toy aisle at Wal-Mart, she would pry her strange new daughter away from the supporting wall, crouch, and wrap her arms around her. But the child remained unbending, unable to explain. The wellspring of her rigor was too deep to reach, and normally serene Grace fretted endlessly.

It took the better part of the year, but the episodes diminished. As Joy learned English, the means of expression seemed to assuage her terrors. Her voice was harsh and nasal at first, but as her language developed and she gained confidence and velocity, it softened. Grace realized then that the girl was a soprano and the keening was the first expression of her talent. She brought Joy to choir practices, and before too Long she was singing solo.

Grace regained her composure and called another family meeting. Good-natured Newton came next.

 

Dong Chul has a cleft palate, but he Laughs easily and babbles well. His good nature, cooing, and laughing endears everyone to him.

 

And then bold Cici:

And big Elvis:

And calm Page:

And then came restless Jake:

And curious Emily May:

And wise Duncan:

And sweet Joey:

And finally dark, conflicted Chelsea:

As the reputation of the Beaudroux restaurant grew, adoption became a yearly event. Once a year, at Christmas, Gracie and Vern called a special family meeting to decide whether to expand the family and, if so, to choose a new sibling. They started by adopting children from one country, with the hope that eventually, in a town with a population of just over a thousand, the adopted kids would form a majority of their own. Several of the children were biologically related. Elvis was Joy’s younger brother, who was six months old when Joy was abandoned. Joy was beside herself when, after an arduous and expensive search in Korea, seven-year-old Young Bum was discovered cleaning rooms at the brothel where their mother had worked before she died. His father was African-American, and his skin was darker and his hair curlier than the rest of the Korean siblings. Joy would beat up anyone who teased him about either his color or his name. Later Elvis was the one who picked Chelsea out of the catalog and Lobbied to adopt her, despite her different racial background. Chelsea, for her part, stuck to Elvis like a burr, Locking the thumb and forefinger of one hand around his belt Loop and sucking the remaining fingers of the other. At number twelve, Chelsea made an even dozen. The family came to a consensus that she would be the final sibling.

CUT TO DOCUMENTARY INTERLUDE:

Kudzu, honored by Japanese farmers for generations, is the most infamous exotic to shoot its root through the thin mantle of American soil. This humble member of the pea family is native to many parts of Asia. It was introduced at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, when the alien twiner was touted as “The Miracle Plant” and praised for its versatility, hardiness, and speed of growth. It could shade a bower in a matter of days and feed a herd of cows and pigs to boot. But this was just the beginning.

By the early part of the century, decades of careless cotton and tobacco farming had depleted Southern soil, and bankrupt farmers were fleeing their barren fields. In 1933, desperate to keep the South from washing away, Congress established the Soil Erosion Service, and kudzu, with its deep, binding roots and its ability to reintroduce nitrogen into the soil, was seen as Dixie’s savior. It could survive drought. It would grow anywhere, even where other plants couldn’t. It could rehabilitate the land. The government paid farmers up to $8.00 an acre to plant the vine.

But kudzu was predaceous, opportunistic, grew rampant, and was soon out of control. By the end of World War II, the invasive Asian weed had overrun an estimated 500,000 acres of the southeastern United States. It engulfed the indigenous vegetation, smothered shrubs and trees, and turned telephone poles and houses into hulking, emerald-green ghosts.

Under ideal conditions it will grow a foot a day. You can measure its growth in miles per hour, say embittered farmers. Drop it and run. Mothers threaten to toss their naughty children into the kudzu patch, where they’ll strangle and drown. Its economic and practical uses have been forgotten. Mostly, nowadays, its only use is metaphoric, to describe the inroads of Japanese industry into the nonunionized South.