What the Seasoning Knows

We met at a diner in Memphis that McCarthy picked because it served nothing he considered worth eating. “The food’s not the point,” he said when I asked why we were sitting under fluorescent tubes at ten in the morning, looking at a menu that offered nine variations of the same scrambled egg. “The point is this is where a man like your cook would have worked. Not a restaurant. A place.” He said the word place like it was a theological category.

O’Connor was late. She came in carrying a paper sack that turned out to hold a jar of muscadine preserves, which she set on the table between us without explanation. She looked at the menu, looked at McCarthy, and said, “You chose this on purpose.”

“I chose it because it smells right.”

“It smells like grease and ammonia.”

“That’s what I said.”

I had my notebook open and my coffee getting cold and I was already behind. I had wanted to start with the premise — the cook, the bone, the camp beneath the overpass — but they were looking at each other the way two people look at each other when they’ve already started an argument in a language I don’t speak.

“The cook,” I said. “I want to talk about the cook.”

“So talk,” McCarthy said.

“He’s a man who knows food. Professionally knows it. And he’s eating a bone he found behind a barbecue joint, and he can taste everything about how it was prepared — the rub, the wood, the timing — and that knowledge is what makes it unbearable. A civilian gnawing a bone is just hungry. This man is performing an autopsy on his own humiliation.”

O’Connor picked up a sugar packet and turned it over in her fingers. “The trouble with that,” she said, “is you’ve already decided what the bone means. You’ve assigned it. The bone means humiliation, the cook’s expertise means irony, and the reader sits back and admires how neatly you’ve arranged the furniture.”

“That’s not—”

“It is, though. You’re describing a symbol, not a scene. The bone has to be a bone first. It has to taste like something. The reader has to want to eat it before they can understand why eating it is terrible.”

McCarthy nodded, which surprised me. I’d expected him to push back on her, but instead he leaned forward and said, “She’s right. But not for the reason she thinks.” O’Connor’s mouth tightened. “The bone isn’t a symbol of anything. The bone is a fact. A man is eating a bone in the dark. That’s all it is. You don’t need to load it up with meaning because the meaning is already in the physical act. The jaw working. The tendon between the teeth. The grease on his fingers. If you write that well enough, you don’t need to tell anyone what it means.”

“But you do need to know why it matters,” O’Connor said. “A man eating a bone could be anyone. You’re telling me Suttree eats bones too — all those river rats and drunks and half-drowned creatures in your books eat whatever they find and you write it like Genesis, like the first man tearing meat from the first animal. Fine. But this man is not the first man. He’s a particular man with a particular skill, and that particularity is where the story lives. Not in the act of eating but in the knowledge of what he’s eating.”

“That’s what I said. The rub, the wood—”

“No, you said it was unbearable. You announced the emotion. Don’t announce the emotion.”

I wrote that down. Don’t announce the emotion. She was watching me write it, and I felt like a student caught taking notes on the wrong thing, but she didn’t correct me.

McCarthy ordered black coffee and a side of white toast. O’Connor ordered nothing. I already had my cold coffee and the sense that I was failing.

“The camp,” McCarthy said. “Tell me about the camp.”

“Under an overpass. South Memphis, maybe. A tent camp — tarps, pallets, some actual tents. Maybe fifteen, twenty people. It’s not the worst place in the world. There’s a social structure. People look out for their corners.”

“You’re describing it from the outside,” he said. “Like a reporter. What does it sound like at three in the morning?”

I didn’t know.

“Traffic overhead. The highway never stops. But the pitch of it changes depending on the weather — dry night it’s a hiss, wet night it’s a roar, and the water comes off the overpass edges in ropes when it rains hard. The concrete sweats. The ground is packed clay that turns to mud in a straight line where the drainage runs. You have to know where the line is or you wake up in three inches of water.”

“You’ve been to these places,” I said, not quite a question.

“I’ve been to places like them. The details are different. The fact of them isn’t.” He drank his coffee. “The man living there needs to be competent. Not beaten down. Competent within the situation. He knows where the dry ground is. He knows which church van comes on Tuesday and which one comes on Thursday and which one to avoid because they make you pray first. He’s not performing his suffering. He’s living in a place, same as anyone lives in a place.”

“But he IS suffering,” O’Connor said.

“Of course he’s suffering. But suffering doesn’t walk around announcing itself. That’s your department.”

“My department is grace, and don’t pretend you don’t know the difference.”

The silence after that went on long enough for me to study the pattern on the Formica. McCarthy was looking out the window at the parking lot. O’Connor was looking at him. I don’t think either of them had forgotten I was there, exactly, but I’d become a piece of furniture for a moment — the notebook, the recorder, the younger person who hadn’t earned the right to this particular argument.

“The grandmother,” I said, when the silence had gone from charged to merely heavy. “The evicted grandmother who shows up at the camp.”

“What about her,” O’Connor said, though I could tell she’d been waiting to talk about her.

“She insists she’s only staying one night. She has a specific self-image — she is NOT a person who lives in a tent camp — and the entire night is her defending that self-image against the evidence.”

“Against the cook’s evidence,” O’Connor said. “He’s the one who knows how things are. She’s the one who still believes in how things should be. That’s the collision.”

“That’s every story you’ve ever written,” McCarthy said. It could have been an insult but it wasn’t, quite. More like a professional observation.

“It’s every story anyone’s ever written that’s any good,” she said. “A person believes something false. The world corrects them. What matters is whether they accept the correction or die refusing it.”

“Nobody dies in this story.”

“Somebody always dies. Not physically. But something dies. Something in her has to die by morning. The belief that she’s temporary. The idea that she is passing through. That’s what has to die, and she has to either let it die or clutch it harder.”

“Fine,” McCarthy said. “But here’s where you and I part company.” He pushed his toast away — he’d eaten one piece and left the other untouched, and I noticed O’Connor notice this with what looked like professional interest in the gesture. “You want a moment. You want the moment where she sees herself clearly, even if it destroys her. The peacock spreading its tail, the grandmother reaching out to touch the Misfit, whatever — you want the instant of recognition.”

“It doesn’t have to be a moment. It can be slower than that.”

“But you want it.”

She didn’t deny it.

“I don’t want it,” McCarthy said. “I want the night to end. The sun comes up. The traffic changes pitch. The cook is still there. The grandmother is still there. Nothing has been recognized. Nothing has been resolved. The sun is just up and the day is starting and whatever she believed last night she still believes this morning because people don’t change in one night. They just don’t.”

“Then what’s the point of the story?”

“The point of the story is the bone.”

I waited for him to say more. He didn’t.

“Help me with that,” I said.

“The bone is the story. A man who knows food eating a discarded bone. That’s the whole thing. Everything else — the grandmother, the camp, the conversation — that’s the setting. The bone is the story.”

“I disagree,” O’Connor said. She said it simply, without heat, which was more convincing than heat would have been. “The bone is the occasion. The story is the grandmother’s encounter with a truth she can’t accommodate. You can write a beautiful scene of a man eating a bone in the dark. You can write it so well that people feel their own jaws ache. But if there’s no encounter, no collision, no — I won’t say grace because you’ll roll your eyes—”

“I’ll roll my eyes.”

“—then it’s an exercise. Gorgeous, muscular, and empty.”

McCarthy looked at her for a long time. “Not empty,” he said. “Sufficient.”

“Sufficient is the most damning word in the English language.”

I laughed. I don’t think either of them meant for me to laugh, but it came out anyway, and O’Connor looked at me with something that was almost warmth and said, “You see the problem.”

“I see two problems,” I said. “If I write it his way, it’s all sensation and no story. If I write it your way, the grandmother’s recognition is too neat — it’s an O’Connor story with somebody else’s prose.”

“That’s the meanest thing anyone’s said to me in this diner,” she said. “And the truest.”

“So what do you want?” McCarthy asked me. Not impatiently. Genuinely.

“I want the cook to describe the bone with the precision of someone who once made food like that. I want him to know it was smoked with hickory, not oak, and that whoever made it over-applied the rub and pulled it maybe twenty minutes late. I want that knowledge to sit in his mouth alongside the hunger. I want the grandmother to arrive and immediately begin establishing that she doesn’t belong there, and I want the cook to let her talk — not because he’s patient, but because he doesn’t have the energy to correct someone else’s fiction about themselves. And I want the night to pass. And I want the dawn to come.”

“And then?”

“And then she’s still there. And the bone is finished. And maybe she offers him something from her bag — a package of crackers, half a sandwich, something she brought from the life she’s leaving — and he takes it with the same precision he’d use to plate a dish. And that’s it.”

McCarthy nodded slowly. “That’s closer.”

“That’s not enough,” O’Connor said. “The crackers are a nice image but they’re a substitute for something happening. Something has to break.”

“What if nothing breaks?” I said. “What if the whole point is that she arrives believing this is one night and by dawn she hasn’t been corrected — she’s been absorbed? The camp has simply taken her in. Nobody argued her out of her story. The camp doesn’t argue. It just continues.”

“That’s his ending,” she said, tipping her head toward McCarthy. “The world goes on and people endure. I’ve read that ending. I’ve admired that ending. But it’s not mine.”

“It doesn’t have to be yours.”

“If I’m in this story, some part of it has to be mine.”

There was a long pause. The waitress refilled McCarthy’s coffee without asking. O’Connor opened the jar of muscadine preserves, and the smell — dark, sweet, slightly fermented — cut through the grease and ammonia and I understood suddenly why she’d brought it. Not to eat. To have something in the room that came from ground she knew.

“What if she prays?” I said. “Not a big scene. Not a conversion. Just — she’s lying on whatever she’s lying on, and the cook is asleep or pretending to be, and she folds her hands the way she’s done every night of her life, and she prays the same prayer she always prays, and it’s the same words, but for the first time the words don’t reach the ceiling because there is no ceiling. They go straight up into the overpass and the sound of trucks and the sky beyond that, and she doesn’t stop praying but she knows it’s different now. The prayer is different because the room is different.”

O’Connor unscrewed the lid of the preserves. She put the lid on the table and looked into the jar for a moment, then looked at me.

“That’s not grace,” she said. “But it’s adjacent.”

“Adjacent is what I can manage.”

“Adjacent might be honest.”

McCarthy took the jar from her, looked at it, set it back down. “The cook wouldn’t pray,” he said. “The cook would smell those preserves and know exactly what they were — the grape, the sugar ratio, the processing temperature — and he’d tell her about it without being asked, because that’s what he does. He names things. He identifies. That’s his curse and his competence.”

“So you’d end on preserves?” I said.

“I’d end on morning. I’d end on the light changing on the concrete. I’d end mid-sentence if I could get away with it.”

“You always think you can get away with it,” O’Connor said.

He almost smiled. It was the closest thing to a smile I’d seen from him all morning. “I usually can.”

O’Connor looked at me. “Don’t let him end your story,” she said. “Don’t let me end it either. But for God’s sake, don’t end it with a man explaining muscadine preserves while the sun comes up. That’s a magazine ending. That’s the kind of ending that makes people say ‘beautifully written’ when they mean ‘I felt nothing.’”

“What kind of ending makes people feel something?”

“The kind that costs the writer something. That’s all I know. If it was easy to write, it’ll be easy to forget.”

McCarthy pushed his chair back. I thought he was leaving, but he was just shifting his weight, stretching his legs under the table. He looked old in the fluorescent light, and tired, and absolutely certain about something he wasn’t going to share.

“The bone,” he said again. “Start with the bone. The rest will come or it won’t.”

O’Connor closed the preserves. The lid made a small metallic sound against the glass, and neither of them said anything else for a while, and I sat there with my notebook full of arguments that hadn’t resolved and the smell of muscadine filling the space where the conversation used to be.