Table Talk

Table Talk

Our kitchen table. Solid oak. Thick carved legs. Too heavy to scoot around. So heavy it takes two men at each end to lift it. When I clean it, I can feel dips and divots where the top has been sanded down. Which generation carved initials with a new pocket knife? Which ever-so-great forgot to use a pad under her tracing wheel? The varnish is peeling, and the shims underneath are so dry it requires the surgical precision of my ophthalmologist husband to keep the expansion mechanism on track. We leave one leaf in just in case it quits working. I’ve scheduled the cabinet maker. Before we move to a new house, our old oaken friend will get a facelift. Better it than me.

How many reincarnations has it actually undergone? It’s our Jewish, Presbyterian, Buddhist table. Jewish for me, Presbyterian for Grandma, and Buddhist for all of the thoughts and stories it’s storing in those fat sturdy legs.

That’s because it was always at one ranch house or another- when I was a child, and when Mama was a child, and even when my grandfather and great-grandfather were children. It will soon accompany us, for the third time, to our new house. I have three tables, from three women. I have three grown children. I wonder which child will choose which table.

When all three leaves are in, it seats eighteen. That’s a good thing. It was also a good thing a hundred and fifty and maybe more years ago. My great-great had, over the course of forty years of fatherhood, sired twenty children. My grandfather’s uncles were younger that he.

It arrived in our valley in 1879 in a wagon train that brought the Corn family to New Mexico from Kerville, Texas. Pat Garrett and his men made the adobes and hauled the lumber for the new home. Garrett wasn’t always a sheriff.

Years ago, on a raucous weekend at El Farol, I met Lou Diamond Phillips and Emilio Estevez. They were in Santa Fe filming Young Guns. Phillips had just fallen from a horse doing his own stunts, and his arm was in a sling. Estevez sat at the next table. We struck up a conversation about the Pecos Valley, the range wars, and if he thought he knew enough about Sheriff Garrett to play Billy. He shrugged. I asked, “What did he do before he was a lawman and killed The Kid?”

Calmly, and without hesitation, he answered, “He had a wagon business.”

I replied. “I’ll watch the movie, and you are now an honorary New Mexican.”

I imagine that my great-great grandfather and Garret had coffee at my table. My ancestor’s new teenage bride might have sloshed coffee on his leather chaps from the black enamel pot. The men talked about the river, the new gristmill being built nearby, and the price the U.S. Army was paying for the cattle they would drive to Ft. Sumner to feed the Native Americans interred at Bosque Redondo.

The kitchen would have been cool and dimly lit. The windows were small and the walls were thick. I can hear a dozen young cowboys, all of them brothers, wash at the pump outside the door, joking, shoving each other, and ducking their tallness to avoid the low doorframe. Spurs jangle and scrape, sometimes marring the table legs in a cog-wheel pattern. I run my hands along those punched-out patterns, and smell the horse and sweat along with the salt pork the blonde and lovely Julia has browned to add to the bottomless pot of frijoles on the wood stove.

Its next move was also by wagon, to the new house on the high plains further north. Eden Valley, they called it. The wood floor must have been reinforced to hold the table and all the mismatched high-backed chairs. The menfolk were cattlemen, not carpenters, and when a chair slat broke they most likely repaired it with bailing wire and horseshoe nails. The table collected layers of kitchen grease in the intricate geometric carvings along its edge. Sand filtered in through the cracks in the walls. Pat Garrett was off hunting outlaws by then.

With so many children, the family built a schoolhouse and hired a young schoolteacher. She arrived in a stagecoach from Uvalde. Tall and blonde, articulate and strict, she boarded with the Corns. How did my great-grandfather win her hand? Was there much competition among all those wild cowboy brothers? The teacher got the table as a wedding present.

She was fastidious. Her crisp white blouses, fastened at the neck with her grandmother’s cameo brooch, and the scrubbed and combed bevy of six little boys in the tintype photos attest to that. My grandfather and his brothers returned from sheep camp and roundups to delicious and hearty meals. The oak table witnessed statehood when my grandfather was five years old.

My grandparents married in 1928. The table was their wedding present. Grandma scrubbed and smoothed the wood with a steel brush and sandpaper. A fresh coat of varnish made it look new in the sparsely furnished ranch kitchen. She sat there, reading and smoking, while the beans cooked and a sponge cake, light as air, baked. Though a newlywed, she was no stranger to cooking for a small army of extended family. She was one of eleven children.

They bought a ranch, and the table moved west a few miles, where it resided on the sod floor of a low-slung house made from the flat limestone rocks that covered the hillsides. Some of the stones were dotted with fossilized clams and trilobites, evidence that there had once been an ocean where my grandparents now prayed daily for rain to quench the thirsty sections on which they subsisted. Grandma painted the table yellow, a bright touch in the dark house. She sewed matching gingham curtains for the two lopsided windows at each end. My mother sat on a thick wooden chopping block placed in a yellow chair as Grandma taught her to write her A-B-C’s.

They built a bigger house next door. My grandmother painted the table red and sewed curtains with little Mexican hats along the hems. Mama sat on the side next to the ice box, and her baby brother played in his high chair. Grandpa hung his hat on the hook by the back door, and swore every time he banged his shin on the crossbar underneath as he sat down. I wonder if he did that when he was a boy. Did fathers always have to sit at the head of the table? Grandpa’s solution was a saw. He scraped his chair back, and interrupted Grandma’s roasted lamb dinner to cut the damned thing off. The legs were a little crooked after that, but like Grandpa, strong and steady.

The ranch was twenty-six miles from town. No electricity except from a gasoline generator that ran only for the radio after supper, and no telephone except a hand-cranked system that the ranchers rigged themselves. They strung wire for miles and miles on the tops of cedar fence posts so they could communicate with each other. The nearest neighbor was eight or ten miles away, reachable only by rutted un-graded tracks or horseback.

About a dozen ranch wives started the Long Distance Club. They would gather a few times a year, have a meal, admire each other’s home-decorated kitchens, do a little sewing project together, and enjoy having another live woman to talk to. My grandmother was a genius at turning nothing into something. She embroidered delicate flowers on feed sack towels; stenciled colorful designs onto walls and canisters. Burlap wool sacks, stitched with bright colored yarn, became living room curtains. No stick of furniture escaped her paint brush, especially the oak table. When Grandma hosted the Long Distance Club, she painted the table navy blue.

I was a child when my grandmother bought a “new” table. This one was round and smooth. Oil-based enamel from the color-of-the-latest-Ladies’ Home Journal had gone out of fashion. The blue table was hauled to the second ranch house at Brown Lake. No one lived in the house, but at roundup time, the brothers and cousins and their hands gathered there for a few days of work and tall tales. My grandmother pulled the table out to its majestic length, threw on an oilcloth printed with little flowers, I set at least a dozen places with chipped plates and mis-matched cutlery, filled jelly glasses with rainwater ice and gallons of brewed tea. Lamb roast and all the trimmings were in the oven by daybreak, and Grandma unfolded her bread cloth. It was time to make rolls. She dusted the cloth with flour, scalded milk, and performed magic. Her rolls are a family legend. Each one of us has her recipe, but I know she held something back. We’ve never been able to duplicate the light, fragrant buns that kept coming to the table. I think people came to help at my grandparents’ work days because they wanted Grandma’s cooking.

They sold the ranches to my uncle and his wife. The table moved to town, where, once again, my grandmother gave it yet another reincarnation. Weeks of paint remover, sand paper, brought the table to its original color. The oak grain was beautiful. Then in her seventies, my grandmother had developed painful distorting arthritis in her hands. She used awls and nutpicks to scrape and dig at the many layers of red, yellow and blue paint. Did I see a little green spot when I waxed the table last month? She brushed on a coat or two of varnish, and the top shone. Below, the carved legs still bore the evidence of their multiple paint colors.

In 1984, my husband finished his medical training, and we moved our family to Roswell. My elated grandparents brought us the ranch table as a housewarming gift. Ourchildren have added their scratches and drops of paint to its surface. We have enjoyed thirty Thanksgiving dinners and birthday parties, many of them with four generations seated around it. There’s a high chair in the nearby corner; we have a grandchild. He’s the seventh generation to eat at the table since 1879. How many came before? How many yet to come?

I think I’ll just sand the top, add a new coat or polyurethane, and keep the many-colored legs just the way they are. The next generation can add its own touch of color.