The Last of the Easter Ham II: Thursday

"Heaven would be a warm place like a working kitchen in which there is one metal, Tennessee-forged cast iron, and the Blessed are swathed in the eternal aroma of rendered pork fat."

[Back in the days before Substack, I would share this short story annually on Low Sunday (the Sunday after Easter) and the Sundays following. I wrote it some years ago, and I cannot vouch for how well it has aged, but in the spirit of resurrection, I felt an urge to bring Maureen back to life for a new platform, and for all the new readers who have joined the Substack Followship since the last time Maureen made her characteristically dramatic entrance. “The Last of the Easter Ham” is now the first part of an unpublished novella entitled The Spirit Version, whose future is vague. This second installment is set on Maundy Thursday. I hope you enjoy the Ham.]

Listen to me read:

THURSDAY

Ten days earlier, Maureen heaved her cast-iron Dutch oven from a bottom drawer. She groaned and laid it as gently as she could on the range. A thin layer of rust covered its surface. It made her think of her children. “Lord, forgive me,” she said to herself. “Ought never let it get to this state.” She knew you weren’t supposed to store up for yourself treasures on earth and all that, but she figured if she were going to have any treasures on earth they would be made of cast-iron. She hated it when people talked about heaven as some misty cloud city where there was nothing but gold and silver and pearls. Not that there was anything wrong with gold or silver or—Lord knows—pearls, but they got it all wrong. No, heaven would be a warm place like a working kitchen in which there is one metal, Tennessee-forged cast iron, and the Blessed are swathed in the eternal aroma of rendered pork fat.

“I’ll give you my cast iron when you pry it from my cold, dead hands,” she said to no one, but imagined she was speaking to the folks who were all into ceramics and non-stick surfaces and wild marsh reed oil or whatever it was now. She just wished they could see that her larder was an actual larder, and not a pantry—whose shudder-inducing name made her think of underwear. They’d find in there, to their delicious horror, shelf upon shelf of lard, butter, duck fat, ham hock, schmaltz, salt pork, pork belly, all of which, if it was worth its salt, didn’t need to be refrigerated. If they’d really look between the droves and droves of animal fat, they might see a lone canister of vegetable shortening. Sometimes you had to make concessions to a decadent age. Leaf lard just wasn’t as easy to come by as it used to be.

The cast iron was like her own kids—lovingly seasoned in the occasional fire of love, cherished, sometimes stored away in a closet for a while, but never forsaken. And Jesus knew what he was talking about when he said that bit about the moths and rust and stuff. As she scrubbed the surface down with warm fat and coarse salt, she resolved never to put back in the drawer what she could just as well leave out on the stove. That way the rust that destroys would always be in front of her, and maybe it would remind her that her children should call her.

The last time she’d spoken to Billy was Palm Sunday, but that seemed like ages ago. “Well you all are more than welcome to come for Easter, dear,” she had said to him on the phone. “I know it’s a trek for you and the kids, and I know you have your own things going on, but you always have a home here. But I’ll be just fine. Don’t trouble yourself.”

“Mother, you know we want to be there more than anything. And I’d get out of it if we could, but Cassie is a sheep in the Easter pageant this year, and we can’t miss that.”

“Oh yes, I understand, son.” A sheep? she thought. Really? Is that the best I could do with my grandkids? 

“Maybe you’d like to come down for it? Cassie’d be so thrilled.”

“Oh sweetheart, you know I would love to. But my hands are firmly fixed to this plow. It’s just impossible for me to get away for Easter.”

Maureen didn’t really have plans for Easter Sunday apart from being tired. She’d go to the eleven o’clock service if only to get her money’s worth from her Maundy Thursday pedicure.

“I suspect that y’all are having a big Easter this year?” she said but she did not suspect that at all.

“You know, the usual. Early church on Sunday morning. A sunrise service at the lake. Should be nice, but it will be a challenge getting the kids up and ready at that hour.”

I’m sorry I asked, she thought. That boy needs to have the rust scrubbed off of him. As lovely and poignant as sunrise services were, Maureen did not care for them. They struck her as a little too sentimental and maybe just a tiny bit pagan. The Lord rose in the nighttime, she said to herself, when the light shone in the darkness, which she thought was not only theologically profound but made good practical sense. It meant that you could celebrate Easter on Saturday night and then you could sleep in on Sunday—provided you’d done all the Holy Week stuff before. Sunrise services were for people who went to church once a year, or for people who, like Billy, were Baptists. Or for people who were just plain lazy, and for whom getting up early one Sunday a year felt like a sort of atonement for being pathetic. Resurrection takes work, she thought. Like dying first.

She raised him to be different, to have some appreciation for beauty and time and the church calendar and everything, but he went off and married that Baptist girl. She had infected him with a fondness for simplicity. “Modesty was Jesus’ greatest lesson,” that girl had said once. Maureen could not believe her ears. But at least the girl had been consistent about the simplicity. Her dinner parties (of course the girl never called them that) were fine but did not excite any great passion. Though they were primitive, at least there was wine, but the way the girl and her son consumed it—never beyond one glass—seemed orchestrated to teach Maureen a lesson.

I don’t give a fig for that nonsense, she thought, and then thought what a wonderful expression “I don’t give a fig” was and how sad it was that no one under seventy used it. People just don’t understand the value of figs anymore. Maybe if they were treated to them at a lavish dinner or church picnic, they would. Good, fresh ones—from California or Turkey—and not those God-awful dried ones that you had to gnaw on like beef jerky and then pick out of your teeth the rest of the day. She was reminded of that time in the Bible when Jesus cursed the fig tree for not bearing any fruit. It was hardly the tree’s fault, it not being fig season, but she figured that Jesus wouldn’t have bothered to curse the tree in the first place if he hadn’t liked figs so much. Sometimes you just get an Almighty hankering, she thought, and Our Lord was no exception, him being fully human and all.

Maureen didn’t say the part about not giving a fig at the time, but she thought it a lot last November when Billy and that girl hosted Thanksgiving at their place. She hadn’t really wanted to go. As an incentive, Billy asked his mother if she would roast the bird that year. She could hardly resist, even though she thought it was the man of the house’s job. “I’ll carve,” Billy had said, and that was enough. She would be there, with the bird.

And she was. She couldn’t believe what fine young people her grandkids had almost turned out to be. They said “Yes, ma’am,” and “No, ma’am,” and presumably they would have said “Yes, sir, No sir,” if Harold had still been around to hear it.

A tin can-shaped column of cranberry sauce quivered as Billy set the steaming turkey in the center of the table. That’s just like him, she thought, and that Baptist girl. Always taking shortcuts. She thought the Puritan plainness of the table setting actually helped to accentuate her bird, the way a cast of mediocre actors help to showcase the major talent.

“Beautiful turkey, Maureen,” the girl said.

As a gesture of hospitality, presumably, Billy said grace before he set to cutting up the turkey. It was a lovely prayer, she thought, but unusually eloquent for Billy, who was not given to wordy prayers. He tended to pepper his with a lot of we just’s and used the word Lord like a punctuation mark. She didn’t like the way he carved the turkey, slicing it into thin slivers like deli meat, which was not a genre of food that one ought to try and imitate in one’s own home. That Baptist girl didn’t seem to care for either the turkey or the prayer. She didn’t say Amen to either of them.

“What a lovely grace, Billy,” Maureen said.

“Thanks, mom. I thought you might like it.”

When he told her that he had simply read the Collect for Thanksgiving Day from The Book of Common Prayer, she became irritated. While she was touched by the gesture, she could have done without it just the same.

“Oh,” she said, “I know, sweetheart,” but Billy and the girl could see clearly that she hadn’t recognized it at all. “It is a lovely sentiment, dear. I’ll be honest, it’s not Cranmer, but I appreciate it anyhow.”

The look the girl shot across the table to Billy was a clear signal that this was the last time Maureen would be invited for Thanksgiving.

That evening, they all attended the annual Thanksgiving Day service at that girl’s Baptist church. The girl was a non-demoninationalist herself, but as a marital compromise she went to a Baptist church that Billy liked. It was non-denominational in appearance but when Maureen entered it on Thanksgiving, as brass-tacks Baptist as she expected it would be, all “Be Thou My Vision” and “Just As I Am.” It felt to her less like going to church than hearing some washed-up old folk singer performing his greatest hits at the retirement home. Thirty minutes with these people, she thought, and I can see why they’re always singing about being in the garden alone.

The preacher was just what she feared, too: one of those extemporaneous types who seem to think that preaching without a written text is somehow proof that the Holy Ghost is speaking directly through them. His sermon began with the Pilgrims and how they sailed to this great land with a fervent love of the Lord Jesus and a desire to worship in the beauty of holiness, then careened into a tepid but mildly stirring diatribe against the waywardness of society these days. It pulled up short just as it was getting good, just when it seemed the preacher was about to plunge a knife deep into the dark heart of the idols of the age. He started off on some other, much less interesting subject.

Maureen would have preferred that the Holy Ghost had moved him to talk about the actual food itself. A better preacher might be able to deliver a more edifying sermon just by talking about the religious value of sweet potatoes. This one, though, said the word “holiness” too much and “beauty” too little. But beauty was a lot to expect from this crowd, who had outgrown their downtown space and moved into a prosaic new building in the suburbs that looked like a warehouse. The old building was stately and grand in a way that suggested “Faith of Our Fathers,” but it had occupied valuable real estate in the center of town—too valuable to remain a church property. It was torn down, and in its place was a rising tangle of steel girders and plywood that would one day be, they said, a mixed-use development. And whatever that was, it was probably preferable to the new church building, which was built out of beige cinder block and tan brick, with an accent of—probably fake, some sort of plastic—green tile running all the way around it like a belt, and had a huge Italianate portcullis on the front. It looked confused. A church ought to look different from a tortilla factory, she thought, but Baptists have never been in the vanguard of church architecture, now have they? No one was going to be inspired to the beauty of holiness or the love of God or anyone else by the sight of this thing. It made her think of Dresden, only no one would regard this building as significant or beautiful enough to drop a bomb on. It didn’t soar upwards the way older churches did, even some of the better Baptist ones. It just sat there as if it fell out of the sky and upon impact had wiped out everything in the perimeter for hundreds of yards, where a blast zone of asphalt now stretched from the main road out to a line of white pines behind. What did they do with all the dead, she thought, when they left the old place behind? Could you really call a church without a graveyard a church?

After the service was over she waited in line to greet the pastor, a tall older gentleman with a severe gray-blonde comb-over that swept from the back of his head all the way up and around to the other side. “Nice to meet you,” she said, but she was thinking about the line from the gospels about how the Lord knows the numbers of the hairs on our head. Or maybe it was Isaiah. Let it go, old man, she thought. You’re not fooling anybody.

When she was done seasoning the cast iron, she toweled it off and set it on the stove. It was a beautiful thing. She would’ve taken a bath in it if she could. It was barely nine o’clock in the morning, and she still had to get the lamb on. It would need at least five hours, maybe six. Father had decided to hold a Passover seder before the Maundy Thursday service this year, which Maureen thought a nice touch. It would remind us of our fellowship with the People of the Covenant, and more festivity was a good thing, especially if it involved roast lamb and an old-timey recipe. And the Jews were nothing if not old-timey. They don’t come much older than that, she thought.

The task of preparing the lamb shanks for the seder had been divided between three people, each assigned five pounds a piece. They were given strict instructions to follow the exact same recipe, and it would all be thrown together in one big pot. Maureen didn’t especially like this plan but could hardly object to it. She just hoped that the other two would have gotten their hands on a proper spring lamb, prepared in accordance with all those stringent Jewish dietary laws. Father had emphasized as much and that, while we are not subject to the Law in the same way, we should respect the tradition. Still, she knew that one or both of the others might be tempted to cut corners and go to Kroger.

But she didn’t think about that for long. She began to scramble as if time were bearing down on her. She rubbed the lamb with ground black pepper and kosher salt, which seemed appropriate, and became anxious that it would not be done in time. Suddenly five o’clock didn’t seem so far off, and she still had to factor in time for taking the lamb out, laying it out on a presentable platter, building a little tent of tin foil for it so it wouldn’t be all smeared, finding some clean, level space in the Cutlass where she could lay it down so that the juices wouldn’t spill all over her floorboard, plotting a route to the church that didn’t involve any of those damn speed bumps that were too harsh at any speed, moving the lamb into the fellowship hall and figuring out where to put it during the service, whether it would be mixed with the other ten pounds before or after, no, wait we’re having the seder before the service, all while making sure that the meat didn’t drop to room temperature.

She had to get the lamb in before ten-thirty, to leave enough time to make her appointment at the pedicurist at eleven. She had made it at a salon that took appointments, and not one of those nasty walk-in places. You just couldn’t take your chances. Least of all at the Maundy Thursday foot-washing. If some other parishioner were going to wash her feet, they could not be seen in their normal state. Yes, I know that the Lord accepts us as we are, fasciitis and plantar warts and hangnails and all, but. Maybe the Lord will, but I’m not so sure about Hollis. When the pedicurist asked her about color, she hesitated. Red would be appropriate for Holy Week, but maybe it was a bit much? After all, it would only be good for a few more days, until Easter, when the color turned white for fifty days, and it would not do to have your toes all red and penitential when they were supposed to be celebrating the resurrection.

“Thank you for squeezing me in, sweetie,” she said to the pedicurist kneeling at her feet.

“Oh it’s no trouble, really,” the pedicurist said. “So do you have a color in mind this time?”

“Something red, dear,” she said, “but not too flashy.”

Sitting next to her was a tall, skinny-legged man, a bushy grey mustache overhanging his upper lip, and a small, pointed white beard protruding from his chin. She hadn’t noticed him when she came in. His thinning hair was matted down on his head as if he had been wearing a hat, but he made no attempt to conceal his baldness the way that Baptist girl’s preacher man did. His eyes were covered with a thick, purple terry cloth eye mask, and he wore a look of serene placidity on the rest of his weathered face. He was leaning back in the big vinyl club chair, his pale white ankles shooting out from rolled-up hems of a pair of tattered Wranglers. His toes were splayed out and separated from each other by a foam divider, which made Maureen think of a trussed chicken.

“Fine day for a ride, ain’t it?” the man said. His voice sounded like crushed gravel.

“Beg your pardon?” Maureen said.

“I seen you drive up in that Cutlass. Couldn’t help but notice. It ain’t every day you see a fine looking woman such as yourself step out of a fine looking automobile as that.”

Maureen felt hot in places she had forgotten about.

“Well aren’t you just the sweetest thing,” she said. “My husband bought me that car after our first was born. I’m not even sure if there are seat belts in the back. Don’t rightly know, as I haven’t ridden back there in a while. Heh heh. One time we took a road trip to Orlando and the kids rode most of I-75 in the back window. Those were different times.”

“Oh yeah, tell me about it.”

“They don’t make them like they used to, that’s for certain.”

“They don’t make them at all anymore, madam.”

At the word madam all those warm places suddenly went cold.

“Oldsmobiles, I mean,” he continued. “A great American car, now dead and gone. She have the 455?”

“Yes, I believe so,” Maureen said, but she wasn’t sure to what or whom 455 referred. She was sure that Harold had told her all these details about the Cutlass at one time, but she couldn’t remember any of that. Maybe she wasn’t really paying attention then, or maybe she just let that slip.

“Mmmmmm. I thought so. ’76?”

“Sounds about right.”

“Uh huh. 7.46 liter Turbo Hydra-matic. You know one of those when you hear it. Truth is I heard it before I ever laid eyes on it. Original paint?”

“Yes, sir,” she said.

“Well you hang on to that one. You got yourself a keeper there. A real vixen if I may say so.”

What a ridiculous sight, she thought as she looked him over, but the world is changed now, I reckon. Men were getting pedicures and chest waxes and all the rest. She only learned this with a shriek of horror as she read over the glossy trifold brochure next to her chair, advertising the salon’s offerings. It contained all sorts of unheard-of torture treatments for men under the heading “manscaping.” This was a ghastly new word to her. Maybe it was all a part of the Devil’s larger Tupperware strategy. It sounded a hair’s breadth away from lawn-mowing, which was a nicer word but named a reality that she didn’t welcome either. Harold had left the mowing to her, the old fool. But he wasn’t fool enough to go in for a chest wax, that’s for damn sure. 

When he was around, she could count on him at the foot-washing. Her feet would be no surprise to him. But he was gone now, and while the foot-washing was a beautiful and humbling exercise, there were years in which she thought its lesson was edifying enough when received from the pew. She didn’t actually have to take off her shoes anymore to get the point. At times she thought that others needed the experience of the lesson more than she did, so she would let them have their turn. But this year, maybe the Spirit would move her to get her butt that was not as small as it used to be off the pew and let her feet be handled by someone else. Maybe it wouldn’t—the Spirit listeth where it likes, she thought. Or is it ‘blows where it liketh?’ Either way, you could not tell what he or she or it would do, nor whose hands might cradle her lovely red toes, nor whose disgusting, linty, fungusy yellow dogs she’d have to hold in hers. She just hoped that they would have the decency to wash between their toes before the service.

When the pedicurist was all done, Maureen slipped her feet back into her flats as if she were putting up the polished silver into its little bespoke felt bags, and was reminded of the service tray for the lamb. That would need polishing too.

When she opened the door to her house, she was hit with an intensely gratifying wall of aroma. She slipped off her shoes and tiptoed into the kitchen as if the lamb was a sleeping baby she didn’t wish to wake. She slowly lifted the lid from the Dutch oven and the lamb gave off a fragrant, rolling cloud of steam. “Hello, little lambykins,” she said. “Aren’t you a handsome little fella?”

Later, when she walked the lamb up to the door of the church, the smokers from the choir were outside in the courtyard. “Why good afternoon, ladies,” Maureen said. One of them growled something that Maureen could not make out, but they smiled kindly toward one another. Maureen made a point not to wave away the smoke from her face the way the smokers always did with the incense, not really to get it away from their nostrils so much as to make a point. She knew such a gesture would be useless, that no one ever quit smoking because of someone else’s flailing about.

The tables in the Fellowship Hall were laid out in the church’s finest linen tablecloths, each one punctuated in the middle with dried herb centerpieces homemade by one of the ladies in the altar guild. The display was just lovely, she thought, and worthy of our Jewish brothers and sisters, apart from the gaudy fluorescent light from the ceiling, which reminded Maureen of a public restroom.

Father Dunbar read the passages from the Haggadah, which outlined exactly what you were supposed to do for the seder. Maureen felt warmed by the sound of it all, the sense of order and ritual that the Jews had observed for so long. They sounded a little like early Episcopalians. When Father shouted, “Kadeish!” people began pouring red wine and drinking it, and Maureen thought how lovely it was for a religion to demand that you drink wine. This was the law, after all, and how wonderful the law could be sometimes if you were really serious about it.

“Why is this night different from other nights?” Father Dunbar read from the text. It’s a rhetorical question, Maureen thought to herself but in her mind she was speaking to the petulant girl at the other table who had her hand raised. One of the dairy-free hypocrites, clearly. This Low Sunday is going to be a different day for you, sweetheart.

Father read on, about how there were four sons, one wicked, one wise, one simple, and one who did not know how to ask. That sounded like Billy. He didn’t think to ask but if he did she’d have told him not to run off with that Baptist girl.

Someone had the bright idea of having the youth group serve everyone the Seder meal, but since there were only two people in the youth group, it took an eternity. Let it go, Maureen thought, the Jews are still waiting too. While other tables were being served roasted lamb shanks and hard boiled eggs, matzo and bitter herbs, Maureen looked around the room at other people’s feet.

When her plate was served, she knew in an instant that it wasn’t her lamb. It was overdone and flavorless, and gave off an odor of lighter fluid. She gave up on examining other people’s feet and scanned the room for ecstatic faces of people who had the good fortune to have been served one of her roast lamb shanks. She saw no smiling faces, only an assembly of people who looked like they didn’t know what to do with themselves.

Whether by design or by accident, Maureen was sitting next to Hollis at the service. If they were to do the foot washing in order of seating this year, and not at random, at least it would be Hollis and not someone else—God forbid, a total stranger—who would have to hold her bunioned but beautifully pedicured feet. Would he notice them, their color? He, of all people, might appreciate the effort.

The boy who carried the incense in was a handsome teen with the bloom of youth in his cheeks, and while she shuddered to think of what lascivious thoughts might be swirling in his pubescent brain, his appearance and skill with the thurible gave Maureen a glimmer of confidence in the future of Western civilization. A thin cloud of aromatic smoke began to rise from the floor, and puff forward and backward with each swing of the thurible. Maureen closed her eyes and took in a full, deep breath through her nostrils. It smelled ancient and mysterious, distinctly Eastern, and as it enveloped the congregation Maureen felt a warm tingle go down her spine. Until the smokers in the choir began hacking obnoxiously. Maureen could tell by the way the sound came from high up in the back of their throats and not deep down in the phlegmy ventricles of their sooty lungs that they were faking it. Oh spare me, she thought. Spare thou me, O Lord.

Maureen genuflected as the old silver processional cross passed next to her, not just bowing at the waist the way some people did. Still others did nothing at all, and just stood there. If you knew what that thing had been through, she thought, you’d prostrate yourself. While prostrating herself was the appropriate response to the cross, it was simply out of the question for Maureen.

When Dr. Austell got up to read the Old Testament lesson, Maureen looked at Hollis. She pursed her lips and he hung his open and shrugged in an “it beats me” sort of way. She pinched her eyes together and silently mouthed a stretched out whyyyyyy? For a man of such learning and surgical precision, Dr. Austell was a butcher as a lay reader, adding awkward pauses where there should be none, messing up words left and right. Maureen usually did not approve of the distribution of the printed text so that people could follow along with their eyes; she thought that for once everyone should just listen. Besides, the Lord had said, “Hear, O Israel,” and not “Follow along in your bulletin, O Israel.” But in this case it was useful to have it, since she could track along with Dr Austell and mark with the little yellow pew pencil all the places where he had made an error.

The Lord said to Moses Aaron in the…land of Egypt: this moth shall mark for you the beginning…of moths; it shall be the first moth of the year for…you. Tell the whole conflagration of Israel that on the…tenfth of this moth they are to take a lamp from each family, a lamp for each household. If a…household is too…smell for a whole lamp, it shall join its closet neighbor in abstaining…one; the lamp shall be divided in propitiation to the number of people who are eaten of it. 

Lord have mercy, she thought. It’s as if he’s reading his own handwriting. At verse five, she stopped keeping track, and prayed that no one would take him literally when he got to the part detailing exactly how the Passover lamb was supposed to be prepared. By then it was, of course, too late anyway. They had already eaten, remembered the bondage in Egypt that wasn’t really theirs anyway, and as Father’s words at the homily wafted over and away from them, Maureen hoped everyone was thinking of the thing the Lord had commanded of them as they each removed their shoes and socks.

Thank God it was Hollis, she thought as she sat back in her pew and slipped her shoes on again. And the person in front of her, whose feet she’d had to wash—they weren’t that bad. A little dry, maybe, but decent. Nothing grotesque or anything, but nothing exemplary either.

She sat with Hollis in silence as the ladies from the altar guild and the cassocked altar boys stripped the place bare. They took Jesus’s body and blood out first, and it was like watching an old friend get taken away from you. She watched how they unceremoniously took the cross out and hid it away, how they solemnly dismantled everything, and thought how for a moment all the thankless service that they so diligently offered to the church was for once on display, that most people in the church had no idea what these ladies did all the time, and how ultimately it was all done so that it could be undone, and then repeated over and over again. An endless sequence of doing and undoing, folding and unfolding, lighting and extinguishing. At the end of it there was not a fleck of gold left, not a petal of flower, no pictures, not even the residue of incense—nothing but a room.

Maureen got out of the pew first, and began to kneel before the altar. Hollis slapped her on the back. She immediately righted herself and jerked her head around to him.

“Oh, I always forget,” she said.

“You don’t have to do that now,” he said. “He ain’t here.”