Best meal I ever eat

If you enjoy food as much as I do,  occasionally you think back to all the great meals you’ve eaten in your life.  I’ve had the good fortune to have dined in restaurants of note across the nation.  From The Del Coronado in San Diego to the French Quarter in New Orleans to fancy grub put on by IBM in Poughkeepsie, NY.  I’ve eaten barbeque at The County Line east of Austin, Texas and a steak at Chick and Millie’s Blue Moon Café in Ponca City, Oklahoma. 

As far as home cooking,  Mary is an excellent cook.  She tutored under her mother who was a true farmwife.  They raised their own chickens, eggs, pigs, cows, vegetables, nuts and fruits, etc.  Every meal was a BIG meal.

For the very best,  you’d probably think I’d pick the Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner my mom, or grandma made.  While I can remember quite a number of great meals,  still one comes to mind that wasn’t a result of the above list.

In the spring of ‘69,  I had completed my first year of trade school.  As our family was by no means rich in dollars,  I had to accumulate as much money as I could to pay room and board and such for the coming year.  I had always worked with my dad in his logging and stave bolt business and he paid me what he could.  Late spring,  the farmers started putting up hay.  This was before round balers and tractors with stingers.  They still square baled and put it up in the barn the old fashioned away.  That required stout young men that were willing to do this type of hard work.  Few could be found.

Well, after a couple of desperate calls from local farmers,  I struck on the idea of getting together a hay crew and using dad’s flat bed truck.  I put together a crew of a couple of cousins to buck the bales and my soon to be life long mate, Mary, to drive the truck.  I charged the farmers 12-15 cents/bale to take charge of getting their hay from field and into the barn – depending on if the barn was near the field or a distance away or if we had to stack in a loft or on the ground.  I’d pay the buckers 2 cents if we stacked on the ground or 3 cents if we had to put it in the loft.  Mary got 1 cent a bale.  The farmers sure squealed but they had little choice.  We worked hard and were dependable, so after a job or two,  we had to turn down work. 

This is how I worked it:   I’d help dad load and deliver a load of logs in the morning and shortly after lunch,  I’d start to round up the crew.  I’d get a loaf of Wonder bread,  a pound of bologna, cheese slices,  big bag of chips,  and an eight-bottle carton of 16-oz Cokes and iced it down to feed the hay crew for the supper break. 

We’d get to the field about 3:00 in the afternoon.  The farmer had probably started baling about mid-morning and would have 500 or more bales on the ground.  We didn’t work too hard in the heat of the day – taking about a half hour break between loads.  Once the sun went down,  we’d kick it up a notch and work until midnight or later until we got everything in. 

One of the farms was owned by Mr. Swan Ferguson.  It was a beautiful, well-kept farm in a small valley.  He raised pure bred, prizewinning Polled Hereford bulls.  The hay was so thick that we had to move one row of bales in front of the truck to drive between them.  He liked his bales tight – so tight you could hardly get your fingers under the strings.  But they were all uniform size and weighed about 75 lbs each – making them easy to stack. 

Mr. Ferguson was probably well in his 70’s.  He’d bale until late in the afternoon when the moisture level started to make the hay “tough”.  He would come out to the barn on every load we brought in – even if it was midnight or past.  He never instructed or corrected our work – in fact, he was very complementary on the job we were doing and mostly just visited. 

He had his herd bull in the barn lot.  I couldn’t tell you what it weighed but it looked huge with a head about the size of a number one washtub.  It was tame as a pup - too tame for one of my cousins who had just started helping us as he was afraid of him.  The bull would come up to every load and go around and sample it as if to inspect it for fitness.  If he thought he should look under a bale on the bottom, he’d just bulldoze a bale with his big head.  He came close to overturning some loads.  My cousin got used to the bull by the end of the first evening and began to slip off the load onto it’s back.  The bull only wanted someone to scratch his face.

It was about 11:00 when we came in with a load and before the first bale was unloaded,  Mr. Ferguson was out there.  Our Wonder bread and bologna sandwiches had worn off and we were getting hungry.  We were talking about it and someone on the crew suggested he was so hungry he could drag that bull into the barn and burn it down so he could cook him and eat him.

The next load in, Mr. Ferguson arrived as usual but at the end of the unloading, said: “When you come in with the next load and get it unloaded,  come to the house.  We’ll have something for you to eat.”

The crew perked up and we got the next load in and stacked in the loft.  He led us to the garden hose to wash off the chaff,  dirt, and sweat.  It must have been one in the morning. 

We came into the house and were led through the kitchen to their dining room though we were hardly fit to set at the dining room table.  Food was everywhere!  It was like finding King Tut’s tomb!  Mrs. Ferguson had baked a thick roast beef and a whole country cured ham – complete with gravy to match.  There were mashed potatoes, candied yams, green beans,  corn on the cob and other vegetables from the garden.  To drink, there was iced tea, lemonade, and Kool-aid.  There were jars of jams and jellies she had put up to go on the rolls she’d baked.  Needless to say,  we ate and ate and ate.  Still, she wasn’t sure we’d eaten enough, though our earlier flat stomachs were now bulging,  so she brought out the ice cream to go on the cream, apple and blackberry pies and a cake she’d made from scratch and fresh baked.  It was a sinful binge of eating we enjoyed suffering over.

To multiply the circumstances,  it was quite warm and heating up the house with all that baking and cooking had to be uncomfortable in a house without air-conditioning.  But she had not become soft to the summer heat over her seventy some years in spite of being confined to a wheel chair since a young woman because of fall from a horse.