Red Velvet Cake
Cake:
3 tablespoons cocoa powder
2 tablespoons red food coloring
1 cup buttermilk
1 teaspoon white cider vinegar
1 teaspoon salt
1 ½ teaspoons baking soda
2 cups sugar
1 cup vegetable oil
2 eggs
2 ½ cups all-purpose flour
Frosting:
1 cup milk
6 tablespoons all-purpose flour
4-5 cups confectioner’s sugar
12 tablespoons butter
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Double if company’s coming!
Grease two 9-inch round cake pans. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
In a glass measuring cup, combine buttermilk, color,
salt, and vinegar. Set soda
aside. In a large bowl, mix cocoa
and sugar. Add oil, and beat in
eggs one at a time. Mix soda into
buttermilk. Alternately add
buttermilk mixture and flour to the batter, mixing very little.
Pour into prepared pans. Bake in the preheated oven for 30 minutes, or until a wooden
toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. Cool layers completely on racks before frosting.
To make the frosting, cook milk and flour over medium
heat until mixture leaves the sides of the pan in a ball. Combine with sugar and vanilla. Add the butter in small pieces. Whip until it reaches spreading
consistency, adding milk or sugar as needed. Don’t worry about lumps!
Split cakes to yield four thin layers. Smooth frosting between layers to seal,
coating the outside for best effect. Refrigerate until served.
* * *
In the family recipe scratched on notebook paper that
Catherine fingered, the first two lines spelled trouble. Cocoa, specifically, and red food
coloring, the absolute basics in the traditional Southern dessert. Born a baker, to a line of women who
had made the cake for many a christening and anniversary, Catherine worried
that freckles of her ancestors’ batter, dried over the script on the page, hid
something crucial.
Anything not within plain sight atop her pocked kitchen
table vexed, disappointed, or just wore her out. At 70 years old, she had outlived a husband and son, three
fancy cake plates her in-laws had stacked and tied with a silver bow hiding
crocheted baby booties, and the Currier and Ives pastry server her own daddy
had stolen, and was stolen back off the gift table at Herbie and Catherine’s
wedding reception fifty five years before. Who would have thought, a little after Easter dawned on the
Lord’s 2009, that the widow Gower had outlived cocoa and color?
Her hands printed sweat on the oak table at the paper’s
dog-ears, so she caressed the sugar and flour canisters set out with the
fixings. She wiped the middle
front of the housedress she wore minus undergarments, wetting the plaid like
she’d had an accident. She wound
stray curls of pewter hair back from the pulse beating at each temple; her
plain wedding band scratched an ear, shrunken to a sulfured apple slice. She spread her fuzzy slippers as far
apart on the plank floor as her shoulder knobs would allow, ignored the black
coffee she had percolated until it got cold in “The World’s Best Gram!” mug,
and faced the unpleasantness.
Corey and Collin, her twin great-grandsons, had turned up
their noses at the hot drink she had made from scratch the last time her
granddaughter dragged them by. What she had poured down the sink left one shooter marble of cocoa,
grayed not so edibly, in the box that Catherine rattled. Good enough, meaning not just the
chocolate. The kids’ C-named dad went to jail for cooking,
how was that?, and the granddaughter had moved in with a Dave, leaving
Catherine shed of the whole lot. She ground the bittersweet taw into sugar.
Dye was the second lack, drunk up for the most part in
home-boiled hummingbird nectar summers past. She shook the little glass bottle, holding it upside down
with the cap on. By crook pink traces
inside ran together. She smacked
the plastic garnet top once on the table, but settled on smooth arcs, tamping
the mercury inside a pretend glass thermometer.
“Mus,” she said, “we’re riding the hind leg of bad
luck.” She aimed her voice to the
swag near the radiator where her little rat terrier had slept, cached bones,
and ultimately died. Mustard was
his Christian name, his fur the yellow-brown color of bottle-fed calf
scours. Mus spoiled rotten in her
flour-puffed cotton lap, the two keeping cozy in the kitchen.
Catherine, muzzy, felt her mind wander. The dog’s rough coat she missed picking
for burrs, the arthritis fully awake in a thumb, a blister of dye she’d
splatted by the hardest into the buttermilk. She knuckle-walked her writing hand along the window ledge,
feeling for the sewing needle she used for mending when the light shafted
in. Picking it up by dry-rotted
thread through the eye, she swung the miniature witching stick. When it braked of inertia, shine
twinkled on the pad of her left ring finger.
God, she was of a sudden freezing, but she whorled that
hand. She squeezed a fist, slapped
the veins over top where the bones spoked finest, milked the finger underneath
the gold band. Many strokes later, the member resurrected, tinting in turn from
butter bean to eggplant to overripe bell pepper. Holding juice in the tip with the other fingers, Catherine
stuck. The needle stood up on its
own. Nothing much came, the flesh
too mummified. She stretched
coffee-stained lips over front teeth that were still her own, and blew a
stagnant breath. She bit out the
lancet. Blood began to well, first
in a tense bead, then a rivulet. Crimson ferned the white-spotted nail.
In the end, there was a God’s plenty. She preheated, mixed the recipe’s paste
before it clotted, stirred and spooned without falter. Bent on what she had to do, the written
directions were useless, teats on a boar hog. Bitty meat turnovers Mus craved had been a job, all that
rolling. But two simple layers, a
breeze.
“I still got it,” she bragged, her wooden spoon pulling a
dollop of the slime from the middle of each cake pan. They would rise level. If not, champs like herself knew, bottoms up. She spaced the pans on the corroded rack in the middle of
the oven, and kicked the door shut with a foot.
* * *
Red velvet cakes Catherine had made were a glory. Steady nerve had seen her beyond
scorched rims, cracks where a cream cheese fluff, if she was feeling rich,
should have peaked, and near-substitutions of salt for sugar. Her mommy had taught her the receipt,
what the important parts meant. For example, alternating flour and buttermilk tells you it’s flour first
and last, see, f for flour, you can’t
forget. And from Mama Gower,
though it made her nervous to be in that woman’s kitchen: double if company’s coming.
Yes, Velvet, as precious as Shirley Temple in that
movie. It was her favorite sweet,
the assembled confection multiplying what bready crumbs and pinkie-finger licks
of frosting portended. That much
she had sampled. Architects of
good food in southwest Virginia ate last. Starched elders forever held out china in palsied hands at a couple’s 50th anniversary party, or teenagers at a retirement picnic for someone’s gramps
flapped paper towels across strong fingers stained with barbecue sauce. This cake had been her legacy, her own,
the only after-dinner treat worth a snort.
Catherine tallied every slab that went out to a
supplicant. She had blushed at the
compliments when it had been second nature to sculpt one of the heavy
beauties. “Whip, flip, and wash,”
Mommy had said, and the last as fundamental as the sugar and vanilla, because
everything was scarce as the crank-handle sifter and cut-glass pedestal. As late as Christmas season, Catherine
promised to slip the recipe into the next holiday or get-well card she put a
stamp on. She didn’t.
* * *
Easter marked months since the old lady had baked, and she
was rusty. Measure precisely, stab
a spoon and court the range, the chicken scratch on the paper hard to see
around cataracts. And she hadn’t
slept the night before. Holy
Saturday, that explained it, when Jesus lay a corpse. She scooched her chair from the window to alongside her
personal kiln, stretched purple ankles toward anywhere three hundred fifty
degrees might leak out, and dropped her chin on her sunken chest.
She snored as beasts must, rolled up in their humid dens or
caves, but her visions were purely mortal. Dust sifted auburn on her church shoes, when she and Daddy
took the tomato. Summer before she
married, she the woman of the house, coaxing the family plot all school recess. Daddy had spotted the tomato early,
size of a green gooseberry. Stake
it, tie the branches with ripped bedclothes, water with pee at daybreak, he
taught about the vine. She shaded
one special globe from blister as it plumped, cradled it princess-and-the-pea
on sawdust as it ripened. Until
August, the county fair.
She and Daddy had walked to judging, that slick tomato in
the held-together skirt of her babyish print sundress. Church shoes tacked through dirt,
chafing her heels and cramping her toes. Catherine had a notion to watch Herbie take a premium with
his horses over at the pull, but Daddy wanted her away from the dragging sleds,
guarding the tomato. That meant
hours suffocating inside the shed on the fairgrounds, smiling at strangers
traipsing up to see winning vegetables.
What with the humidity, the blue ribbon curled on itself
like a dead blacksnake over a hoe blade. The seeded bulb she’d grown squatted on plywood, oozing pulp out the
blossom end. Everybody in Wythe
County’d ogled it, less the Stilwells whose truck wouldn’t run, when two
white-haired kids Catherine had seen in the lower grades at school came over.
“Give you a penny,” the Stilwell with bad teeth said. He chewed a sore at the corner of his
mouth.
“Nope,” Catherine said. Herbie and his daddy would be oiling the leather traces,
checking the four metal hames hooking their draft horses to the stone
boat. “The ribbon’s mine,” she
said. “I won.”
“Ours blighted,” the Stilwell girl with the mashed hand
said. She licked her crooked wrist
like double-dip for a nickel, strawberry, for sale on the midway.
The boy’s sore cracked, and corroded iron seeped. He pinched into his shirt pocket and
showed Catherine the penny. “For
the mater,” he said. “Can’t eat
first place.”
* * *
Decrepit Catherine, dozing in the kitchen, groaned and
twitched. The batter heated,
sponged, and bloomed into fine grains. Between the baking magic’s middle chemistry and late physics, she
conjured buckets of red. Five. Her little brother’s
forehead gash (a cinder she threw wild), him twisting a white rag. Eleve. Mommy rinsing hemorrhage out a white slip, bargaining with
the homeplace sink to delay the surgery. Fifteen. Red flannel
underwear Catherine had heard wearing to bed was good luck, white bridal
nightgown overtop.
In the minute the cake wafted that dry nag, done, and don’t
bother plucking a broomstraw to check, Catherine cranked to her feet. She had drifted off with oven mitts on
her hands, ready, intending to rotate the layers halfway. Fuschia drabs spotted bowls and spoons
all over creation. No Mus for her
to hoist, have him lick up the mess. As she skidded hot pans onto the grid she’d set out, she counted. Red velvet cake was two of seven deadly
sins.
Her nose had been in the air since tomato time. She had sat on her bed afterward,
flattening the ribbon in her Bible, forgetting the food she had left to
rot. Vanity equal to that powered
these wicked cakes, prizes nobody ate to fend off starving. Number one transgression, no doubt,
pride.
Two. Lust. Nothing to do with
shriveled girl parts, hairless ear lobes between her leathern thighs. Nor the cleft that Herbie had found
their first week laying together, but she couldn’t say where, until it tore
when the baby’s shoulders whopper-jawed. No, lust was just her stomach falling away quicker than her head could
catch up. Not wanting to look but
did. Vermillion, showy, scary, the
inside-out of a red velvet when a knife scores the first triangle.
And what she had done, incorporating the beating blood,
tied the prideful and the lust until not even the day’s risen Jesus would
forgive her. Mutilation stung her
mitt-covered hand, and she prayed she hadn’t stained the quilting. She pitched the padded waving hands
(Hiya! New outfit?) on the floor at Mus’s dent, and by a miracle beat the
icing. She swayed as she hacked
two layers into four, going swimmy-headed after she smeared a crumb coat of
purest white on each. The
effect? Glistening lobes of hog’s
liver, bleached gauze staunching what an edge fresh from the whetstone could
do. Daddy butchered
Thanksgivings.
Muscle straps plaiting her ribs quivered; she gulped air syrupy with bile. Where her belly usually anchored, guts slipped. Lust hit her anew. She lost herself – mind, body, or
both – until she had minced outside. By the hardest, she toted a four-layer red velvet cake,
brick-red exterior, icing mortar. A
chipped plate, everyday supper dish, was the cake foundation. And where the creation was traveling,
if Catherine could manage to deliver, was straight to the tangle of forsythia.
Because if Catherine’s soul hung in the balance after a
near-century of sinning, the yard was already condemned to Purgatory. Where the time went, how she could have
ignored rafts of fallen maple limbs from the previous summer, she couldn’t
say. Floppy-headed daffodils had
spiked out yellow that frost had bit. Petal tabs she imagined as petticoats were wind-charred, and the
narcissus had collapsed. The
showiest survivors wouldn’t persist until her yard boy/man, whatever, mowed the
tangled grass. Wait, he had quit,
left for military school, fought a war whose name she couldn’t recall.
Noon sun overhead prickled her scalp. She poked across the yard. Frosting on the sacrificial cake
needn’t melt, not before she lobbed it under the flowering shrub. No pride, no lust complicated her
tithe, not a speck, barely a lunch for the finches and leftovers for night
critters. The payoff for her
handiwork, if she didn’t bust the communion wafer on the cheap paten, was the
biggest forgiveness God could grant.
“CATHERINE ALVA. “ A woman spoke, not God the Father,
nearly causing Gram Gower to spend a penny down her leg. Answering to the whole name that
primary teachers had deviled her with, she wobbled her head to see beyond the
saucer-rims of her cataracts and belched, “Who you?”
“You’d know if you wasn’t so fixed on that impressive
package. Where you going in your
socks?” That the woman didn’t
notice the mangy fur was a blessing. Catherine swiveled, fast. Had the outdoor glare backlit her crotch?
“It’s your neighbors Dan and Sadie, plus Dan’s sister’s
girls,” the nice voice said. “You
children say hey. Mrs. Gower sat
in first grade with Grandmommyandthem.”
“Happy Easter,” Catherine said. “Coming from service?” Several girls said hey, and Catherine talked over them. “Catch a spray of flowers so’s we can
have dessert.”
Dan, she figured -- horror that a man had to -- cleared the
nasty table indoors and washed up. Sadie found a lace swatch in the china cabinet to use for a tablecloth,
and the girls trucked plates, napkins, and the bulk hardware of every fork in
the house. Catherine, doing less
to hostess, put on underpants in the bedroom. She kept a stack in the bureau, sprinkled with
cornstarch. She skinned off each
embarrassing slipper with its opposite foot, and stepped into church
shoes. Hooking a white cardigan
over her shoulders, declaring the work dress festive, she caught the end of a
rousing Christ the Lord is Risen Today, a-a-ah-lay-loo-lee-yah,
belted out by the pastel-frocked nieces.
What a party. Sadie cut huge pieces, scraped up extra icing; Dan worked the soap
suds. Everybody took turns parked
in the few chairs, balancing plates and cups and utensils on their knees. As sets gummed up, Dan did the dishes,
and they had sufficient. Catherine
stood and sat in rotation with the others, no dibs on her chair, and wolfed two
portions. One little girl, on her
third, flopped down where ancient Mus had stalked phantom bunnies between the
radiator fins. An older sister
held a baby’s curls out of the way, and spoon-fed the delicious last.
“We thought you’d bake,” a shirt-and-tie gentleman said,
clapping the screen door. Sam
plunked a spray of baby’s breath, whittled from the paltry bush at the front
gate, into a spare teapot. “My
Easter Bonnets bloomed early, Cat,” he said. “Already finished dead-heading. Unnatural, salmon and pistachio jonquils.” Donnie’s pocketknife blade flashed,
cutting red velvet for the whole crew. How the four sooty walls held the crowd, how the plenitude continued,
Catherine never gave a thought.
Bill, who had driven Donnie and Sam, shared gossip from the
feed and fertilizer store. Many
Milsteads, joking with the Mexicans who worked their farms, tramped milking
boots everywhere. Newlyweds,
switching between Spanish and English, made tea at the stovetop, and combed
frosting from the window muntins dividing wavy panes with twenty fingers. A ten-year-old boy named Milagro played
harmonica tunes on some toddler’s sippy cup. Young’uns wrestled, pulled each other’s hair with sticky
hands, and fell asleep glassy-eyed. Adults drank tea and coffee the livelong afternoon, switching to hot
water with lemon slices, and the occasional whole clove, at twilight.
Not so late people who’d postponed chores couldn’t hay the
horses and close the hen house, the stragglers wrapped their take-home in
plastic wrap. Catherine saw them
off, standing on the back stoop, handing a jacket she’d borrowed to its owner
at the last minute. When she
flipped off the porch light, mindful of wasting electricity, she heard frogs
singing in the pond.
She had purely enjoyed the day. Except for the church shoes, which she had hated since she
stuffed into her first shiny pair. Her ashy feet burrowed into slippers while she kneaded a cramp in her
handshaking palm. She floated to
her chair, its cushion creased in new spots, the spindles butting the
stove. Before the hump on her back
hit the padding, her eyelids slammed.
* * *
“In like a bitch, out like a boink.”
“That’s ugly, coming from a Mennonite,” Miles said. “We surveying somebody’s home.” They unloaded their tripod in
Catherine’s front yard.
“March. The
month, you idiot. Never heard ‘in
like a lion?’ Besides, this ain’t
home until they build.”
“You just mad,” Miles said. “You expected to be off, us not have to work Easter
Monday. If it wasn’t 2008, and you
was still milking Holsteins in Pennsylvania, you’d never have a holiday.”
“Well,” Yoder said.
“I’ll give it to you, though, she was a b-word,” Miles allowed. Going to the driver’s side of the
truck, he shut off the ignition, but left the door with the company logo
open. Faster to get away.
“Mean the lady called the office?” Yoder wouldn’t hush.
“Nah. She the
granddaughter,” Miles said, “selling everything she get her hands on since that
boy she married found meth. The
real _itch of the clan, so I hear, was Catherine, one lived in the house.”
“What house? Paperwork says, no dwellings.” Yoder flipped typed papers on a
clipboard.
“Your people heard of metal detectors and bulldozers? Lissen the story,” Miles said. They unwrapped their fast-food egg
biscuits, pried brittle lids off their foam cups, and leaned against the
truck’s tail gate near the baby’s breath.
“This Catherine ended up all alone, after the husband
passed,” Miles said. “And she had
this dog.”
“Love to hear yourself yap, else why talk about a dog?”
“Wait,” Miles said. “She stayed here, and her one mission was to carry these cakes she
developed a reputation for -- red velvet, you’ve eat it -- to
get-togethers. 2006, she was
breaking. General spite gave way
to terrible cooking.
“I know, because the last cake she could manage went --
fact from the woman at the fire auxiliary did it -- into the trash. Crazy Catherine’d put soda, maybe
washing powder, by mistake in the frosting. Firehouse auction had a winning bid of $15. A bachelor man who wrote the check
gouged a thumbful once he set the cake in his lap. Near about puked. Ladies in charge told him, choose double any other food in the raffle
for your trouble. Wouldn’t you
know, that was the station responded.”
“A fire?”
“Yeah, week after,” Miles said. “One the Miller cousins said Catherine called the little dog
Mess, dirtied the kitchen unbelievable. Finally went to his reward.”
“Miller?”
“Naw, the dog. Christmas Eve, 2006. Which
you wouldn’t know, not being from here.”
“Why keep track? Not like Pet Semetery,” Yoder
said. “Thassa movie.” He bubbled a
cough.
“Lots happened, smart-ass. She wrapped a shroud fashioned out a linen dishtowel. Hauled a shovel, the body, and headed
to the orchard over yonder. Tough
cookie. Packed a wooden spoon,
likely one fabricated them god-awful cakes. Chipped the frozen ground, scooped a shallow hole. Tamped that spoon handle in with a
rock, one straight-up bar for a cross.”
“Who sez?” Yoder said. “Family?”
“Everybody. Entire county’s dug up and reburied ole Mess. Granddaughter started the digs, hoping find miser
money. Just one sorry canine. Your turn, Yoder, if we brought a
mattock. Ashes to ashes.”
“You said a fire, Miles.” He wadded the trash into a ball he chucked in the middle of
the plant.
“Coroner
told,” Miles said. “the exact
words on the report he mailed to Richmond: ascending full-thickness burn. How? Wore out
from the graving, maybe chest hurting, she put on shaggy house shoes. Jacked the oven past 450, door wide
open. Sprawled in her chair,
propped her feet. Sparks turned
her a ghost hard to forget.”
