While Papa prayed for his papa in heaven, the country, the President, and for their dinner to nourish their bodies to His service, Jamie stared longingly into the plate of fried chicken. He couldn’t wait to sink his teeth into the crackling skin, for the grease to coat his lips, and the Cajun seasoning to burn his tongue.
They usually only ate dishes like this on special occasions; flaky beignets with powdered sugar for when he and his little brother, Oliver, did good on a test, seafood gumbo with pieces of crawfish and whole shrimp for Momma’s birthday, and étouffée for Christmas dinner. She would stand at the stove for what felt like hours, browning the butter and flour, whisking and whisking until Jamie was sure her arm would fall off. All the neighborhood ladies would talk about her roux to him like they were gossiping, their hands cupped over their mouths. Have you tasted Kathlene’s roux? Darkest roux in all of Lafayette Parish. But he knew they weren’t really gossiping. Gossiping was a sin.
Jamie liked to watch his momma cook, and over the past few years, she had been teaching him. He wasn’t a baby anymore, like when he had started learning in third grade. Even though he was still afraid of frying, leaving that to Momma to lower the chicken legs into the vat of popping oil, he could do pretty much anything else. He had been afraid of knives and the fiery heat of the oven against his cheeks when he opened the door to check the edges of a pot pie. The thing about cooking was it was all about color, like paints in a palette or the leaves on the trees when they changed from summer to fall. That’s how you knew it was going to be real good.
*
Jamie knew where their dinners came from, even though the knowledge gave him a strange feeling in his chest. When Papa wasn’t at the oil field, he was out hunting to put meat on the table. He shot quail and ducks. The freezer in the garage was full of venison from the buck he shot last October. A few times, he had even brought home a gator and sold its skin to a backyard tanner just up the road.
It wasn’t two days before that fried chicken dinner that he told Jamie it was ‘bout time he started heading out to hunt with him. He didn’t have to spell out whose jobs were whose. Jamie could tell what his papa thought about him by the way he looked at him. “Take that off,” he’d say when Jamie wore his momma’s apron as he lowered potatoes into a boiling pot of water.
Besides that, he was small and weak. The jacket of his school uniform hung around his shoulders. He was always picked last in gym. He needed to bury his face in a blanket during the sad parts of movies. He was afraid he wouldn’t make it through football tryouts the next year without serious damage, and he could imagine his papa’s disappointed face on the sideline.
They walked through the soupy fields, Jamie’s boots getting stuck in the mud as he scrambled to keep up with his papa, who had told him gun safety means walking in a straight line, side by side with your hunting partner. He didn’t want to be holding a gun that felt as tall as him. He didn’t want to practice in the backyard, shooting the empty cans of beer and beans. He didn’t want the purple bruises on his shoulder from the recoil or to hear the ringing in his ears that lasted for days.
But he wanted his papa to be proud of him.
So, he lined up his sight, pointed it at the speckled bird with red around its eye, and fired. He smelled sulfur as he watched it drop from the sky into the field. He felt a snap in his chest like he had been the one to take a bullet.
As if by instinct, Jamie ran as fast as he could from the field and into the bayou, where the tree cover was enough to protect him from himself and all the feelings he shouldn’t be having. He should have been a man now. He should have been able to keep his tears in until he was far away from everyone else, especially his papa.
The water was slow and lazy and green, reflecting the fuzzy moss across its mirror-like surface. He watched a distorted version of himself; little ripples making his puffy eyes look funny like a Saturday morning cartoon character.
Not much time passed before he realized he wasn’t alone. Not just in the presence of something else, but stalked, surrounded. Annoying mosquitoes buzzed in his ear. A bird fluttered in the tree, reminding him of what he had done. He could see something moving just below the surface of the murky water, and he hoped to God it wasn’t a gator coming to snap him up in its powerful jaws.
Of course, he knew the bayou was alive, but this was something else. He wanted his momma. He wanted to go home.
Just as he was about to head back to the house, there was a soft sound and a slow arc moving from rock to rock. There were bullfrogs everywhere, and they were singing to him from somewhere deep within.
He saw them everywhere he looked, the little eggs floating in clusters on the surface of the water, the weird transitory forms like tadpoles with legs kicking in the water like they couldn’t wait to get out, and the big old bullfrogs that looked like they could take out Missy, the family’s tubby beagle.
He had to hold one, so he did. He scooped up one of the frogs and dangled it at an arm’s length, watching its legs push and flex against the air like it was swimming. He was so enamored by the critter; by the translucence of its eyes, the sheen of its skin, the way its throat puffed up with air; that he didn’t hear his papa calling his name. He appeared out of nowhere. No feet suctioning in the mud. No marsh plants crushed underfoot. Jamie wiped any residual tears off his face, frog still in hand, smearing mud with the back of his wrists.
“I’m sorry,” Jamie said. His papa was carrying the dead pheasant by its feet, and its floppy neck swung with the light breeze. He sniffed a little and heard snot suck back into his skull.
His papa didn’t respond for a while as he surveyed the area. The pond. The rocks and under the brush. The giant bullfrog quivering in Jamie’s hands.
“There’s nothin’ to be sorry for, son. Nothin’ at all,” he said. He looked almost proud. The lightest flicker of a smile passed across his mouth for just a second.
Jamie breathed a sigh of relief.
*
Jamie calmed his fidgeting at the dinner table before straightening his back, bowing his head, closing his eyes, and clasping his hands. It was time to grow up. It was time to be the man his family needed him to be, the kind of man that made his papa proud; the kind that stood for God and country, the kind who could shoot a bird out of the sky and watch it plummet to the earth without flinching or crying or running away.
“Amen,” Papa said.
The family echoed.
His momma tucked long waves of hair behind her ears before gingerly placing her napkin on her lap. Oliver dug in, chewing huge mouthfuls of buttery potatoes, a little piece of corn stuck to his cheek. Though Jamie took his time, observing, trying not to appear to be too greedy, he was finally able to bite into that chicken leg and let his teeth break through the crisp batter and into the juicy meat.
“How’s it tasting, son?” His papa asked and chuckled slightly.
Jamie nodded in approval, though he thought it was odd he’d asked. It was usually his momma who asked about the cooking in that way women do when they know their food is good, where they’re clearly fishing for a compliment.
As Jamie let the flavor of smoky paprika, the sharp bite of cayenne, and the slight savory burn of the onion and garlic powder flood his mouth and heart and soul, he knew why this chicken leg was called comfort food. This gave him something that the plain cottage cheese and pieces of peach or celery sticks that his grandma ate to stay skinny could never provide.
All was well until Oliver let out a sharp yelp and spit a light brown ball of breading, meat, and saliva onto his plate.
“It’s moving!” he cried. “I think it’s still alive.”
He thought back to the plate of meat that his momma had kept covered with a thin kitchen towel until it was time to drop them into the oil. He observed them on the plate; elongated and strange; a different shape than any chicken leg he had ever seen. He imagined his papa’s smile as he held the giant bullfrog in the middle of the bayou, where human footsteps didn’t make a sound. And that’s when Jamie could feel it too; the heartbeat of fast-twitch muscles, squirming and flailing and writhing across his tongue and cheeks.
Growing up, Aimee Brooks had trouble telling the difference between a frog and a turtle. When she was three, she had a pet fish and another dubious creature. She does not remember if it was a turtle named “Frog” or a frog named “Turtle.”