Twain's Feast (10 page)

Frank Wolfe has been growing rice in Gillett for more than forty years; he’s been attending Coon Suppers for even longer. By 6:30 A.M., when Frank drives me out to the Harris place from the Rice Paddy Motel where I’m staying, about a third of this year’s six hundred pounds of cut-up raccoon is already boiling furiously in huge outdoor pots. The sky is clear, and it’s cold but not freezing—lucky, since the supper goes on rain or shine, and the only real question is how miserable the cooks will get during the next two days. Beyond the kettles the rice fields lie green and dormant.

The pots are just outside a thirty-yard-long, sheet-steel-covered farm shop. There are fifteen members of the Gillett Farmers’ and Businessmen’s Club here, aged twenty to probably eighty; whatever their ages, they wear tan coveralls and hats reading RICELAND (a farmers’ co-op up north in Stuttgart) or MARTIN FLYING SERVICE (a spraying operation—Frank openly snorts when I ask about growing organic). They stand around the kettles or make runs into the farm shed, returning with shovels and dripping sieves.

Except for a stretch in the army and the winters he spent making a few extra dollars drilling water wells in Haiti and Bangladesh, Frank has lived here for most of his seventy years. He’s been to almost every Coon Supper since their official 1947 inception. For decades, some of the meat for the supper was procured during a single communal hunt; families gathered around bonfires while men and the older boys headed into the woods. One of the men was Frank’s father, who’d worked on the Arkansas River levees during the Depression. “He’d tie up his hounds while he was working,” Frank says. “When he was done, he’d just hunt his way back home. If he could get a coon or two in a week, that’d just about double his salary.” It says something about how hard times were then that the pelts were thought worth the trouble—the fur of Arkansas raccoons is much thinner and less valuable than that of those farther north, which have to contend with brutal winters.

Now Frank smiles mischievously. “Stomach feeling strong?”

“Sure,” I say, and follow Frank into the farm shop. Inside, not far from a dusty 1947 Ford truck, surrounded by white molded-plastic chairs, are a pair of metal cattle-watering troughs. Each trough is lined with a sheet of white plastic; each is halfway full of a slurry of brine and raccoon meat and blood. The sheets keep the salty brine from eating into the aluminum, but my immediate concern is how very brightly red they make the blood look. The liquid is actually probably mostly brine—still, it’s brine that’s gone extremely and thoroughly crimson.

I force a smile and a “Well, would you look at that,” or something similarly lame, and make myself step closer to where Scott Plaice—this year’s head cook and an absolutely enormous man—is loading cut-up raccoon into a sieve by the shovelful. The shovel blade has been drilled with holes (your kitchen probably has slotted spoons; these guys have slotted shovels), and as Scott shovels the meat, the smell of blood is rank and just
everywhere.
The breakfast special at the Paddy was scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast slathered in margarine—they threw in a couple of sausage patties just to be kind—and right now I’m feeling every bite of it.

If I didn’t already know what the cut-up meat is, I’d be hard-pressed to guess. It’s a perfect example of how modern butchering distances us from the animals we eat. Cutting up meat with an ax, as most Americans did before the late eighteenth century, left identifiable pieces of animal—a haunch, a flank, even a head. When you looked in a pot, it was obvious what was simmering there. Butchering with knives or saws, on the other hand, produces cutlets and fillets—pork and beef, instead of pig and cow. There’s a big difference, both visually and conceptually, between roasting a freshly killed raccoon over the coals and simmering a kettle of nearly unidentifiable segments.

So though the hunters skin, gut, and behead each raccoon before sale, Scott and Frank and the rest insist that they leave on at least one paw. “We gotta check, just to make sure they’re not comin’ in with kitty cats or something,” Scott says. Once the animal’s identity is confirmed, they cut up the raccoons in such a way that (if you can put aside the sight of the brining tank) the meat
looks
pretty good. But it sure smells bad.

I retreat outside, stepping across a bloody little rivulet and into what I think will be blessedly clear air, but I at once make the mistake of wandering over to Frank, who—a brief cross-draft masks this fact at first—is immediately downwind from the cooking kettles. Three of the four pots were made by welding sheet steel over sections of three-foot pipe. The fourth, the story goes, was once a Confederate cookpot (or maybe a washbasin), found buried under someone’s grandmother’s front porch and identified by an elderly black woman named Bessie Lee. They used to use all iron pots and wooden paddles. But the health department got interested, forcing the move to stainless-steel implements. (The other point of contention was the homemade pies once served for dessert at the supper. The department has declared that Gillett can serve up six hundred pounds of raccoon at a sitting, but the citizenry is forever safe from the ravages that homemade peach cobbler and huckleberry pie might visit upon them.)

The steam from the kettles is furious, bathing me and Frank in a thick, gray blanket that I feel it would be somehow dishonorable to flee from; I just stand there and use the time to practice breathing through my mouth. I’d imagined that even if the smell of two big vats of raw meat was nauseating, the smell of that same meat cooking in a broth of onions, celery, carrots, and black pepper might be appetizing. But no, I’m soon feeling sick again.
Smells like coon,
the farmers here will say.
That’s it.
And that’s right, raccoon smells exactly like raccoon, a smell like nothing I’ve smelled before but which I’ll now recognize until I die (not, I hope, as a result of eating raccoon).

For the record, though: it’s a smell that’s trying its damnedest to smell good, as would any combination of aromatic vegetables and fatty meat. I keep wanting to offer a compliment, to say how it smells delicious, but always before I can form the words I’m arrested by an iron ballast of Paddy breakfast and a whiff of the pungent, bubbling pots. Probably a small leak in the propane line adds to the funk.

But mostly, everyone agrees, it’s the fat. Raccoon fat is pretty awful stuff. “End of the day, that pot’ll be about half coon grease. Dogs won’t eat it,” Scott says, and Heath Long throws in “that there is the one thing a man’ll eat that a dog won’t touch,” and a third farmer muses, “If I live fifty years, I might could think of something to do with the fat.” When I get too close to look at one of the bubbling cauldrons, a last guy observes that if I let that shit splatter me, I’ll stink all day.

Sometimes the scorn extends to the meat itself. Very early in the day, these members of the Gillett Farmers’ and Businessmen’s Club started cooking up Boston butts and chicken in a homemade smoker with rotating grills, which affords ample chances to compare and contrast the raccoon with other meat: “Yeah, we’re gonna eat real well, but . . . ”—laughing, nodding toward the kettles—“it won’t be comin’ out of
there.
” Yes, the Coon Supper is a sixty-three-year tradition, in a shrinking town that’s only 104 years old to begin with. Still, some of the men will conclude, disdainfully, that the meat’s local importance during the Depression only proves that people were real hungry back then. In this they’re a bit like chef Homaro Cantu at Chicago’s Moto restaurant, who served raccoon with a yellow stripe across the plate to make it look like roadkill (“disdain” may be too strong a word—Cantu would probably vote for “playful”
—
but there was at least as much irony on the plates as there was actual food).

Then there’s Heath’s father, Billy, who declares that he’s going to just eat holy hell out of the raccoon. Most people in Gillett seem to like the flavor; they’re closer in spirit to customers of the semiunderground raccoon trade in Illinois, where a single dealer can sell 250 carcasses in a week, or to those who buy raccoon, possum, muskrat, and beaver from a stall at the Soulard Farmer’s Market in St. Louis. Still, the days of hunting raccoon as a completely integral part of Gillett life, whether for the money from pelts, or a simple meal, are mostly over.

Gillett isn’t a big place, but you have to drive to hunt raccoon—you can’t just walk out your front door with a hound and a .22 and start working the woods. There are miles of rice fields between the kettles and the beginning of the trees. So most of the raccoons are hunted by truly rural people, people whose lawns end in forest or marsh instead of the neighbor’s mowed grass. Besides, raccoon hunts take time, effort, and money, especially when you factor in a good dog or two. Dogs are both necessary and legally required—you can be fined or arrested for hunting after dark without a hound (according to the Arkansas Game & Fish Commission, it’s otherwise just impossible to find the raccoon).

John Cover is Gillett’s self-appointed local historian (he edited a volume of essays on the town for its 2006 centenary), and he has a deep appreciation for the tradition of the supper. He shows me a picture of him and his wife, Linda, at a supper exactly fifty years ago; his father was out hunting raccoon at the precise moment he was born. Over a dinner of Linda’s ham-and-cheese sandwiches, John tells me that he isn’t happy about how hunting raccoon is fading. “You just have to travel too much now,” he says. “Plus, there’s too much on TV, too many distractions. Video games. Too much to keep the kids from wanting to head out and play baseball or football or go hunting.”

When townspeople do hunt, it’s usually for the newly plentiful deer; Frank Wolfe says it used to be an occasion to see as much as a track, whereas hunters will now sometimes take a doe just so they don’t have a tag left over at season’s end. Others guide out-of-towners hunting the ducks that stop to feed on waste rice along the Mississippi fly-way (some say the hunting was better when they harvested rice with binders, which left stalks to dry in easily raided sheaves instead of efficient modern combines). Raccoon hunting just isn’t as central to the town’s life anymore.

Still, they sell their thousand tickets, each and every year (this, I repeat, in a town of eight hundred). And it’s clear that if Gillett abandoned raccoon tomorrow, governor after governor wouldn’t keep driving into town to feast on baked chicken or ham. The supper is completely wrapped up in the place; it’s a natural successor to the Polk County Possum Club in the thirties, which a WPA writer called “Arkansas’ outstanding ceremonial feast” and “characteristically Arkansan in its background and color,” and which drew five hundred people from senators to backwoodsmen. Frank Wolfe and Heath Long and the rest of the farmers can poke fun at the supper, claiming to dislike the annual work and the raccoon meat itself. But there’s a certain inherent rightness to their collective decision to make the Coon Supper Gillett’s public face—the supper makes Gillett different, makes it stand out from other small, struggling, or even dying farm towns. The football team it supported is gone now, but lots of towns have football teams. A Coon Supper is something else.

In some ways the annual gathering may be getting more important as the town’s troubles grow. A few years back, Governor Mike Huckabee sponsored legislation saying that any high school with fewer than 350 people had to consolidate with other schools or close down. Gillett, of course, didn’t come close, and there was some hurried and intense debate over whether to absorb the closest school, a poor, mostly black one in the delta across the Arkansas River. The town took the second option, which was to become a satellite campus of De Witt (where Clinton’s plane crashed); part of the deal was losing the football team—until then a major focus of town life—to the northern school. Now there’s a lot of worry ahead of another upcoming school-consolidation vote, which could mean losing the high school altogether—losing one more thing that binds the young people to town, connects them with local traditions, and gives them a reason to build a life here.

Pretty much anyone who’s heard of Gillett has heard of it because of the supper. I hear it again and again:
He knows where Gillett is.
They say it about Clinton, and Dale Bumpers, and Mike Huckabee (a somewhat detested figure in Gillett now, given his role in the whole De Witt situation). It can be applied to a couple decades’ worth of Miss Arkansases, and any number of congressmen, judges, and attorneys general. It’s interspersed with talk about fuel prices, which the farmers can recite like baseball stats; it comes up as they talk about a neighbor’s new equipment, and a recent Alexander Hamilton biography, and the annoyance of having a girlfriend insisting on trying to text you when you’re out on the tractor.
He knows where Gillett is.