Rant: The Oral History of Buster Casey

The only exception was any food the two of them put on the table. Anytime Chet shot a goose, we sat there, everyone talking up how good it tasted. Or if Buddy caught a string of trout, again, the family spent all night eating it. 'Course, there's bones in a trout. In a goose, you figure to look out for steel shot. There's a price to pay if you don't pay attention to the food you're chewing. You get a fish bone in your throat and choke to death, or a sharp bone stabbed through the roof of your mouth. Or you split a back tooth, biting down on bird shot.

From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: Scripture in the Casey household decrees, "The secret ingredient to anything tasty is something that's going to hurt."

It's not as if she intended to hurt people. Irene only booby-trapped food because she cared too much. If she didn't give a damn, she'd serve them frozen dinners and call the matter settled.

Basin Carlyle: Don't you forget. The most I saw the Caseys was over church. Seeing them on Sundays at service and after, at the potluck suppers over by the grange hall.

The secret ingredient that made folks really taste Irene's peach cobbler was sneaking in some cherry pits. Could about break your jawbone by accident. The secret of her apple brown Betty was mixing in plenty of sharp slivers of walnut shell.

When you ate her tuna casserole, you didn't talk or flip through a National Geographic. Your eyes and ears stayed inside your mouth. Your whole world kept inside your mouth, feeling and careful for the little balled-up tinfoils Irene Casey would hide in the tuna parts. A side effect of eating slow was, you naturally, genuinely tasted, and the food tasted better. Could be other ladies were better cooks, but you'd never notice.

Shot Dunyun (Party Crasher): Rant's father used to go, "If something looks like a true accident, can't nobody be mad at you."

Irene Casey: Men do have the tendency to rush, always pushing to get a job done.

Echo Lawrence: Here's a single girl's secret—the reason you eat dinner with a man on a first date is so you know how he's going to fuck you. A slob who gobbles down the meal, never looks at a bite, you know not to crawl into bed with that guy.

Bodie Carlyle: Mrs. Casey baked birthday cakes that made you blush out of shame for your own lazy ma. Sometimes, a chocolate-cake locomotive pulling a steam train with one boxcar made of cherry cake and one boxcar made of vanilla, then flatcars and tanker cars, all different flavors, until they ended with a maple-flavor cake caboose. It's good luck, folks say, finding the toothpick stuck inside a cake. But you don't bother tasting her cake and you'd be tasting pine splinters and blood.

Logan Elliot (Childhood Friend): Truth was, if you didn't chew her food, then her food chewed you.

Irene Casey: The way I figure, as long as food tastes better than it hurts, you're going to keep eating. As long as you're more enjoying than you are suffering.

Basin Carlyle: Potlucks over by the grange hall, you'd expect them to be a social event with folks talking and catching up. Don't hate me for saying it, but anytime Irene brung her chicken bake or three-bean salad, instead of socializing, folks would be too busy picking trash out of their mouths. Her cooking was decent, but it replaced a mess of good gossip. Instead of folks harping on who blacked the eye of his wife, or who was stepping out on her husband, by the end of every potluck, you'd have maybe just a little pile of real trash next to each plate. A trash heap of pits and stones and paper clips. Whole cloves, sharp as thumbtacks.

Edna Perry: Come Christmas, foreign folks have a tradition of baking a cake with a itty-bitty Baby Jesus hid inside. Folks say the person who finds the Christ child will be special blessed in the next year. Just a little plastic baby-doll toy. But Irene Casey used to fold into her batter as much scoops of Baby Jesus as she did flour and sugar. Put a Christ child in every bite. Could be she only wanted more folks to feel lucky, but it never looked right, folks burping up whole packs and litters of naked pink plastic Saviours. Birthing those wet babies out their lips. Big tooth marks bit down and gnawed on our Saviour's smiling face. Christmas potluck at the grange, and folks sitting at long tables with red crepe-paper decorations and those spit-covered Christ babies coughed up everywhere, it never looked all that holy.