On the Wing (9 page)

The woman gave me, as well as a woman in a marshmallow getup can, a look simultaneously incredulous and dismissive. “Toasted clams?” she inquired icily.

“What?” I said.

“I was just thinking that since your clam fest is
just like
our marshmallow fest you must put clams on a stick and toast them over a campfire.”

“No—of course not—we—”

“But certainly you put them in Jell-O, don't you?”

“No,” I admitted.

“That would be really disgusting!” said the charred man. He sounded as if he might actually be ill, and I'll admit that the thought of clams in Jell-O makes me feel a little ill myself.

“I think that clams are disgusting any way you serve them!” said the charred man's companion.

This was an affront, and my first impulse was to respond in kind, to defend Babbington and its clams by attacking Mallowdale and its marshmallows. I looked at the plate of items I'd taken from the buffet, seeking inspiration there. For a moment, pride in Babbington and its esculent mollusk made me think of feigning revulsion to show these marshmallow boosters a thing or two, but the tidbits on my plate looked tasty to me. I sampled a marshmallow split open like a baked potato and stuffed with a scoop of peanut butter and found it good. I tried a melted marshmallow sandwiched between two golden crackers and found it even better. It wasn't long before I returned to the banquet table for another selection of the tasty treats. I was enjoying myself, just as I would have at the clam fest back home.

*   *   *

WHEN WE HAD FINISHED EATING, a hush began to settle over the crowd. People began shushing those who persisted in their conversations, poking their neighbors with their elbows, and nodding, sometimes even pointing, in the direction of the museum. Along with everyone else, I turned in that direction. There I saw a man standing at a lectern set in the middle of a table that ran along the rear of the museum, a table like all the others but distinguished by being set at a right angle to them and elevated a foot or so above them, and I realized with some excitement that I was about to hear an after-dinner speaker.

“This is another thing we have at the Clam Fest,” I said, “an after-dinner speaker. Usually, it's the mayor. He spoke at the gathering on Main Street when I started my trip, too—just a few words, but—”

“Shhh,” said my tablemates in chorus.

“We have gathered here today,” the speaker began, “as we do every year at this time, to celebrate the roots of Mallowdale.”

This opening was greeted with universal chuckling. Even I chuckled. Chuckling can be contagious.

“But seriously, we are quite literally celebrating the roots that give us the plump little confection that has made us what we are, the community we are, the neighbors we are, the people we are: we are celebrating the roots of the marsh mallow, the mallow that grows in our marshes. And we are here to listen to a story.”

The hush grew deeper as the audience settled into the drowsy quietude that follows a big meal, even one with as much sugar as the one we had consumed, and accepted the pleasant invitation to return to the childhood habit of listening to a story.

“It is a story that begins with the couple we know as Ma and Pa Mallow, though their true names have been lost to history. Of course, when I attended these festivals with my family, when I was just a nipper, the story was about Mother and Father Mallow, but these are more relaxed times, so they have become Ma and Pa, and children—like those who are running around at the back of the crowd apparently beyond the control of their parents or guardians—are permitted a degree of disrespect that would have earned them a good hiding in my day.”

He paused, and a number of embarrassed parents scurried to the back of the crowd to gather their children.

When the children were settled to his satisfaction, he continued. “Ma and Pa were out walking in the marshes one day, long ago, before any of us was born, sometime early in the last century, when our country was still young, younger than many of the people who lived in it, younger than Ma and Pa Mallow themselves. And it was much, much younger than the marshes.”

“Which it still is and always will be,” muttered a dark-haired girl in a chic marshmallow beret and a slim bamboo-stick shift. I looked in her direction, and her lips formed for the briefest of moments a trace of a mischievous smile.

“Ma and Pa almost certainly did not know that the Mallowdale salt marshes are what geologists call an anomaly. They didn't know that inland salt marshes like ours are so rare as to be almost unheard of. The few that exist, including one in the aptly named town of Saltville, Virginia, are spring-fed, and their springs originate in vast caverns of salt.”

“I'd like to see those caverns someday,” muttered the dark-haired girl.

“I certainly hope you are not questioning the veracity or accuracy of this account,” said a stern voice from inside a charred marshmallow head below which the point of a carefully trimmed gray beard projected.

The dark-haired girl frowned slightly and shook her head, just barely.

“On this day, Ma and Pa weren't walking in the marshes for pleasure,” the speaker asserted. “They weren't out for a stroll to look at the scenery. Ma and Pa had fallen on hard times. They were hungry, and they were searching for food. They were probably after meat, perhaps a water rat or a snake, but they didn't find anything so substantial, not that day. In desperation they were driven to pull the weeds that grew around them.”

He paused for effect.

“And they pulled the mallow.”

He paused again. The dark-haired girl rolled her eyes.

“They pulled the mallow!” the speaker almost shouted. “Why? Why did they pull the mallow? Why that plant? Perhaps there was an element of chance, of luck. It could be that they were attracted to the mallow by its delicate pink flowers. Perhaps they dislodged a mallow plant accidentally. Maybe they tripped over a plant, or snagged one on a crude boot, exposing its thick pale yellow root, and making them wonder whether, like the root of the carrot or the rutabaga, it was edible.”

“The rutabaga is just barely edible, if you ask me,” whispered the dark-haired girl, and she was whispering to me.

“We know many things about the mallow that Ma and Pa did not know. For one thing, we know that the mallow plants they found in the salty water of the Mallowdale marshes were immigrants. They were probably the descendants of stowaways, seeds that had traveled from the old world to the new world, possibly clinging to the shoes of a human immigrant, maybe also a stowaway.”

“That's an interesting idea—” said the dark-haired girl.

I nodded in agreement. A low chorus of shushing arose around us.

“Ma and Pa didn't know that. Nor did they know that the roots of the mallow plant had been eaten for centuries in the fabled lands of Asia and Arabia, that the food they were about to prepare and eat had once been reserved for the pharaohs of ancient Egypt, and forbidden to poor folk like Ma and Pa Mallow.”

“I'd like to know how he knows what they didn't know,” muttered the girl, right into my ear. Her warm breath tickled and thrilled me.

“That evening, they ate the mallow root,” the speaker said, dropping his voice to underscore the import of that momentous occurrence. “We don't know how they prepared it, and we might ask ourselves about that, but there is a more interesting question: why did they eat it at all? Perhaps they already knew, from a friend or neighbor, that they could eat the roots of the plant, but if that was the case, then we must ask the same question of those friends or neighbors, and we can continue asking the question as far back in time as we care to travel, but still we must come to the first eaters of mallow root and ask why they ate it. As somebody said, ‘It was a brave man who first ate an oyster.'”

“Or a clam,” said the charred marshmallow with the stern voice.

“What if they were poison?” whispered a slight woman to her slight companion. Her pale marshmallow head seemed to wear a furrowed brow.

“Clams aren't poison,” I said, annoyed by the suggestion.

The charred marshmallow raised an admonitory finger to the area of his head that I supposed hid his pursed lips.

“Necessity, we are told, is the mother of invention, and such was the case with Ma and Pa. They were driven by expediency, by their desperate hunger, to experiment. Their need was so great that they would have tried eating
anything
that they could harvest from the marshes. For whatever reason, they pulled as many of the mallow plants as they could carry, took them home, and prepared a humble dinner from their roots.”

“They could have died in agony,” the worried woman pointed out, glancing to her right and left for some support.

The shushing became insistent.

“From the desperate eating of the mallow root to the leisurely enjoyment of the puffy confection we know today is a long journey and a long story, a story that takes humankind from subsistence to luxury.”

“Let's hope we're not going to make that journey,” whispered the dark-haired girl.

“Where did the idea for the marshmallow confection come from? Or, to put that question in another, more far-reaching and profound way, what are the roots of human ingenuity? What insight inspires an invention? These are things we do not know, and perhaps never will know. They are part of ‘The Riddle of the Marshmallow'—which just happens to be the title of the series of lectures I will be delivering on Wednesday evenings over the next six weeks, right here at the Marshmallow Museum. Tickets are going fast, but there are still places available. You will find the fee modest, and you can sign up—”

“I just think Ma and Pa were very, very brave,” said the worried woman with the furrowed marshmallow brow.

No one bothered shushing her. Most of the people at our table—and at the others—were pushing their chairs back, rising, and making their way toward the exits.

*   *   *

I ALLOWED MYSELF to be moved by the crowd as it made its way toward the nearest exit. The dark-haired girl was in the section of the crowd that I was in, tantalizingly near but too distant for conversation. I would have had to shout to her. The flow of the crowd carried her little by little farther away, until I lost sight of her and I despaired of ever seeing her again. Making my way toward the exit, I grew increasingly depressed by the loss of the dark-haired girl and the thought that I had nowhere to stay for the night and might have a tough time finding a place in a community where I was so obviously an outsider. I began examining the crowd, searching for someone who looked accommodating.

“Excuse me—”

Miracle of miracles, it was the dark-haired girl, at my side, touching my sleeve.

“Oh, I'm sorry,” she said. “I didn't mean to startle you.”

“You didn't! I mean, well, you did, but I'm glad you did. I mean you surprised me, but it's a nice surprise—”

“You showed them a thing or two back there.”

“I did?”

“You certainly did. You gave them a lesson in humility—and a lesson in generosity.”

“I did?”

“Don't be so modest. You know you did. I think they treated you abominably.”

“Well—”

“I felt as if I could actually see into your mind, and your heart, when you said that the Marshmallow Festival was just like the Clams and Oysters Festival—”

“It's—it's—Clam Fest—”

“—and I could feel your loneliness, the terrible isolation of an outsider in an alien culture, clinging for consolation to familiar rituals and customs, yet at the same time trying desperately to ingratiate yourself with the people around you by demonstrating that you had something in common with them, a culture of festivals and a reverence for local produce, for the harvest, a fondness for regional cuisine, and civic pride. But they rejected you, rejected your home town, your local comestible, everything you hold dear.”

“Not everything—”

“I thought it was wonderful, really admirable, the way you held back, the way you restrained yourself from commenting on the food on your plate. You might have asserted the superiority of your home town, its customs and its cuisine, but you chose not to, you decided—or you knew—that it wasn't necessary. I thought that was fine and funny.”

“Funny?”

“Yes.”

“Why funny?”

“I'm not sure,” she said. “You just seem funny to me. Of course, I recognize that the sense of humor, so called, varies enormously from one person to another, and that someone else might not think you were funny, but you just seem funny to me.”

Before I could respond, she had bestowed upon me a parting smile and was gone, lost again in the moving crowd.

*   *   *

I SPENT THE NIGHT IN JAIL. It was a first for me, but there isn't much to say about it. After wandering around for a while, stopping
Spirit
when I saw a likely house, and knocking on the door to ask if I might spend the night, I was accosted by an officer of the Mallowdale police. He informed me that I had been alarming the citizens, which was a misdemeanor in Mallowdale. I explained my situation. He offered the collective hospitality of the community in place of the individual hospitality of any of its members. I hesitated, because I had hoped that chance might lead me to the door of the dark-haired girl, where I would be welcomed. He noticed my hesitation and offered the alternative of getting out of town “toot-sweet.” I chose a night in jail.

*   *   *

AFTER A MEAGER BREAKFAST of oatmeal and weak coffee the next morning, I was escorted outside. I recognized the signs: the sheriff, or whoever he was, intended to have a private word with me, to give me a word to the wise. I was right.

“Son—” he began, “I think you know what I'm going to say.”

“I do?”