Chapter 15
The Sherry, the Lamb and a Little White Lie
For me, visits from my in-laws were exciting times. I usually greeted them with a mop and bucket as I washed my way out of the house, anxious to show my mother-in-law that I kept a clean house for her only son. That week I did, anyway!
One day, just after I’d finished washing the kitchen floor, our then four-year-old Diane burst in the back door. She saw what I was doing and pulled up just in time, holding her foot in the air. Just like the pedal-bin container in the kitchen, when the foot went down her mouth flew open. “I’m hungry!” she yelled. Diane was always hungry, but never gained weight.
“I don’t care if you are hungry. You know Grandma and Grandpa will be here soon and I want this house spic and span. Go jump in the lake Diane!”
“Mother! I’m hungry not thirsty!” She was quick, like her Dad, with the one-liners. Diane had not only a quick wit, but also a sharp nose for sniffing out hidden candy. Our children certainly kept us on our toes with their diversity.
Bill’s Dad was impressed with our vegetable garden and our experimental crop of Brussels sprouts, a vegetable not often seen growing in the Midwest. No one I spoke to in Manson seemed to know anything about growing them. Brussels sprouts were despised by our children, the rule being: ‘eat two Brussels sprouts or, no dessert’. Bill also chose only two Brussels sprouts.
During one of Mother and Dad’s visits I took down the cooking sherry from the top shelf to use in a recipe while Grandpa Frost was seated at the kitchen table, reading the local paper. He picked up the bottle and sniffed the cork. “How long have you had this bottle of sherry Ruth?”
“I bought that for a Christmas cake when we lived in Avoca. Oh! I’d say.... it must be about seven years old. Would you like a glass of sherry, Dad?”
“Ooh! No! No! No! I wouldn’t dare touch hard liquor.” This was a side of my father-in-law I hadn’t heard before. I had never seen him take a drink stronger than iced tea and I was curious to hear more. After all, I came from a long line of alcoholics, and I was beginning to think that I would hear a little more about Bill’s family skeletons.
“Did it make you sick at one time, Dad?” I hoped he would take my lead.
“When I was a young fella, I liked the taste of whisky. After I met Mother, I was ready to settle down homesteading in South Dakota, and I needed to give up drinking whisky. It was then that it struck me that I liked it far too much.”
Every year when they visited after that, Dad Frost, with a twinkle in his eye, would ask if I still had that bottle of sherry. He would take it out of the cupboard, smell the cork, put the cork back in the bottle and place it back on the shelf. I never asked him again if he wanted a drink.
During that visit I was anxious to show off our new freezer to Mother and Dad.
They, like most viewers of our new purchase, uttered the same exclamation. “Oh! It’s so big! How are you ever going to fill it?” On opening the door, Mother and Dad couldn’t believe that it was almost full.
“What are all those packages?” Mother asked, bewildered. I showed them as quickly as I could, not wanting to leave the door open for too long (and have the children tell me that I wasn’t supposed to do that because the cold air escapes. They learned their lesson well!). For the rest of that day Mother and Dad wanted to know all about the contents of the freezer. When I told them that I had 530 pounds of pork, half a sheep, fifteen chickens, vegetables from the garden, plus all the things I had baked, they were amazed.
“Most of the meals while you are here will come out of the freezer already prepared. I don’t have to do any baking during your stay; it’s all in there. One item that is missing on this visit is a lemon meringue pie, since I found out how much it upsets you, Mother.” We all had a good laugh when we told Mother she didn’t have to be a martyr any longer.
I described how Bill and the children hated the smell of any kind of meat being prepared for canning. It was a long, hot process, steaming up the whole house with the large hot water bath simmering on the stove. It always seemed to be done on the hottest and most humid day of the summer. Since the arrival of the freezer they had never had to complain about the smell of meat being processed.
When I related the story of how we bought the freezer, my in-laws gave me their full attention. “Bill kept saying we couldn’t afford a freezer and I agreed, but he didn’t know I had a cache put aside - from my knitting orders and the lamb cakes I made for children’s birthday parties. I had saved $133, which I called my frozen assets. We did have a look at a 12 cubic foot model, which we considered a good size, and thought maybe in six months we could afford it.
“Our neighbour next door, Bill Partlow, called me from his realtors’ office, telling me where I could get a freezer and at a reasonable price; it was practically new and had been repossessed. Bill P. always had his finger on the pulse of what was happening in town. My friend, Marion, took care of the children while I went to Bill P.’s office to find out more about the freezer. As you know, it was a huge 25 cubic foot upright freezer, at a price even lower than the new, 12 cubic foot model we had looked at. I didn’t think we could get it in the house! Everyone in the office assured me it would fit.
“I told Bill P. we couldn’t afford it. I explained how much I had saved, and he offered to put it on his books with $120 deposit, no interest, and I could pay it off $10 a month. He is such a good neighbor!” I took a breather to see what the children were up to.
“Hurrying down to the Journal office, I told Bill I had just bought a freezer and they were going to deliver it at 4.30pm. All he had to do was take off the backdoor and help the two deliverymen get the freezer down the basement steps.”
Dad leaned forward to look at the back door and the stairwell. “I bet that was a tight squeeze! Not much room there!”
“Bill complained that he couldn’t find his tools, and then had trouble getting the door off when the freezer arrived. Was he ever surprised when he saw the size of it?” We all had a good laugh at Bill’s expense.
After taking a break amid all the laughing and pouring coffee for the three of us, I was finishing my story just as Mavis Partlow came over to see if I would take care of her son, Perry, while she did some shopping. As she came through the front door and heard the laughter, she realised there must have been several people in the kitchen.
“We were laughing at the story about the freezer arriving,” Mother said. “That must have been something to see. It’s sooo big! I’m surprised they got it into the basement.”
“Ruth, tell them about the half a sheep you got from Harold Turpin. Now that was funny!” Mavis said, grinning. “I’ll leave you to enjoy that one - see you later.”
“Harold Turpin lives across the street.” I took up the tale. “He teaches the agriculture class at the high school, and his class had raised several lambs. He asked me if I would like to share one of the sheep with his family.
“As you know, lamb is more popular than beef in Australia, and we utilize every part of the lamb, even the wool on the sheep’s back. The only parts we throw away are the hooves. When the butcher delivered my half he didn’t include the head or the innards, so I called him. He hadn’t thrown anything away, and I got the lot.” Both Mother and Dad looked at me curiously, and for Mother’s sake I decided not to go into any more detail about what I did with all the spare parts.
“Did Bill ever tell you about the bad experience he had with lamb in the Ballarat camp in Australia?” I inquired.
“No, Bill never told us very much about his wartime experiences after he came home,” Dad replied.
“When the US Army got a shipment of very mature lamb, called two-tooth mutton, the cooks didn’t want to touch it. When they were ordered to cook it, the soldiers couldn’t stand the smell; they wouldn’t eat it. Most of the American boys had never tasted lamb before.”
“I tasted it once in Ohio,” Dad interjected. “That was enough for me!”
Oh my goodness! I was in trouble! I had a lamb stew already prepared for the next day. Could I pull the same stunt (pull the wool over their eyes, so to speak) with my in-laws as I did with Bill? I was thinking about the first lamb stew I made for the family, to which I had added a can of vegetable beef soup just in case Bill asked me what kind of stew I had made. My planned reply was: “I had some beef already cooked!” I convinced myself that I wasn’t really lying! Moments before Bill arrived home from work I fried up a large onion and that was all he could smell when he walked in the door. Fried onions always cover every other cooking odour and whet the appetite too!
Our family loved the stew, also the leftovers the next day. Bill didn’t know till weeks later that it was made with lamb shanks. I certainly couldn’t tell my in-laws that story. I just may write about it years later when members of the family couldn’t possibly take offence.
“Ruth, how did you cook the head?” Dad asked.
“Well, I didn’t get to use it because the butcher forgot to take the wool off. In Australia they cook it for stock and add the stock to soups and stews. Don’t worry, Dad, I have plenty of beef in the freezer.” Maybe that would appease them for now, and I won’t serve the lamb stew until later in the week.
The back door burst open with a bunch of hungry children. They gathered up some cookies and a jug of Cool-aid and took it out to the backyard for a picnic.
It was a welcome diversion at that time; perhaps it helped to change the subject from the lamb. I was wrong. They were still caught up in the moment and wanted to know how Bill re-acted.
“What did Bill say when the sheep was delivered?” Mother said, wanting to hear more.
“He never did see the carcass. I had to work fast and wrap it in paper and a bed sheet, and then bounce it down the basement stairs on some thick cardboard. It was too awkward to carry. The children were playing with the Eccles kids in the yard, like they are now and I had cleared most of the evidence away before Bill arrived home for lunch. I felt really proud of my efforts.
“I remember that Jerilyn and Sandy had come in wanting to go to the bathroom. They looked around the kitchen and spied the newspaper package of meat remnants on the table. ‘Phew! What is that awful smell? What is that in the package Mother?’ Jerilyn asked, while the two girls held their noses.
‘That’s just garbage. I don’t smell anything! What does it smell like?’ I asked.
‘Oh! It smells rotten! I’ve gotta get out of here!’ Sandy said in disgust.
“It was a good thing the girls came in and smelled the lamb; I then knew I would have to spray some perfume around before Bill walked in the door.”
Later, after I had finished my story and the neighbourhood children had left the backyard, Grandma read to Billy and Janis, and Grandpa said he would pull some weeds in the garden till it was time for dinner.
Later that week, I thawed the lamb stew, very strong with rosemary in the oven while Mother and Dad were at the Jones’s house for the day. I still added the fried onions and a can of beef soup before they arrived home, just to cover my tracks. An ominous feeling haunted me all through the meal, and I was on tenterhooks, expecting one of the children to say something about the lamb stew. It wasn’t till we were washing the dishes that Mother brought up the subject.
“Ruth, that was a very fine meal. The angel food cake with the strawberries from the garden tasted so good! Did you freeze the cake too?” Mother inquired, and then added: “You know, I still can’t bake an angel food cake no matter how hard I try. The lamb stew was very tasty, also.” She looked at me with a glint in her eye - what a sense of humour!
“I guess I couldn’t pull the lamb’s wool over your eyes, Mother. Do you think Dad guessed?”
“I don’t think so. We women can make a stew taste different if we use the right seasonings. I liked the fresh home grown rosemary you used; I have never grown some of the herbs you grow. Frying the onions at the last minute, like you did, was a clever touch!” I was laughing so hard at Mother’s powers of deduction that it brought the rest of the family in to see what they might be missing. We didn’t tell them; that was our secret. Bill’s mother understood me very well.
After they spent a week with Grace and Lloyd’s family, we all got together for a Fourth of July picnic. We seemed to do nothing but eat! The following day, we went to the Jones’s house to see Mother and Dad off for their visit with another daughter, Blanche and her family at Mitchell, South Dakota. Bill was standing aside, having a conversation with his parents beside their car, and the three of them were laughing as I approached.
“You know, Mother and Dad, I married a devious woman!” Bill said, still laughing. “I never know what she’s up to - I just let her get on with it. What surprised me, though - I never thought she would pull the lamb stew trick on you two!” I smiled to myself. That’s my secret ingredient for making our marriage fun - the element of surprise!
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