Echo Lawrence: Relax. Nobody called it murder. Not yet.

Shot Dunyun: How weird is that? It was like something from the Old Testament: the Killer Bee Picnic, the Mouse Shit Attack, the Plague of Fleas, and the Deadly Spider Hat. The next Thanksgiving dinner, with seven oldsters dead, the rest of that generation stayed home. The oldest Caseys turned over the adult table to their middle-aged kids. Siege ended. Baton passed.

12–The Food

Echo Lawrence (Party Crasher): To make time stand still—what sand mandalas are to Buddhist monks and embroidery is to Irene Casey—eating pussy was to Rant. He used to wedge his face between my legs and slip his tongue into me. He'd come up on his elbows, smacking his lips, his chin dripping, and Rant would say, "You ate something with cinnamon for breakfast…" He'd lick his lips and roll his eyes, saying, "Not French toast…something else." Rant would snort and gobble, then come up with his eyes shining, saying, "For breakfast, you drank a cup of Constant Comment tea. That's the cinnamon."

From just the smell and taste of me, he'd nail my whole day: tea, whole-wheat toast without butter, plain yogurt, blueberries, a tempeh sandwich, one avocado, a glass of orange juice, and a beet salad.

"And you had an order of fast-food onion rings," he'd say, and smack his lips. "A large order."

I called him "the Pussy Psychic."

Bodie Carlyle (Childhood Friend): In the time it took most folks to sit around a table, say a blessing, pass their food, and eat it, eat a second helping, help themselves to pie and coffee, then drink another cup of coffee and start to clear the dishes, in that same stretch of time, the Casey family might take only one bite. One bite of meatloaf or tuna casserole, and still be chewing it. Not just eating slow, but not talking, not reading books or watching television. Their whole attention was inside their mouth, chewing, tasting, feeling.

Echo Lawrence: Get real. Most guys are keeping score with every lap of their tongue. Every time they come up for air, they're clocking your pleasure. And, lick for lick, you know this had better balance out with the pleasure you give them back. So, lick after lick, you never can relax and get off, not when you know that meter is always running. Every lick an investment in getting licked back.

Even guys who hate bookkeeping and doing their taxes, guys who could only shrug if you asked their savings-account or credit-card balance, they'll compute the exact number of laps their tongue's done around your snatch. And the payback they have coming. The sexual equivalent of clock watchers or bean counters.

That's every guy—except Rant Casey. He'd stick his tongue into you and years could pass. Mountains erode.

Edna Perry (Childhood Neighbor): Christmas dinner in England, when you find a clove in your food, it means you're a villain. Automatic. If you find a little stick of a twig, you're the idiot. No arguing. And if you bite into something and find a rag of cloth fabric, folks will know you're a slut. Imagine that, being branded a slut, right there at Christmas dinner, but Irene Casey swears she read this in a book.

Echo Lawrence: One time, face planted between my legs, Rant surfaced for air, picked a pubic hair off his tongue, and said, "What happened today? Something bad happened…"

I told him to forget it.

He licked me and rolled his eyes, licked again, and said, "A parking ticket? No, something worse…"

I told him to forget it. I said nothing had happened.

Rant licked me again, only slower, dragging his tongue through me from back to front, his breath hot, and he looked up, staring, until I looked down at him. Met his green eyes. He said, "I'm sorry." Rant said, "You lost your job today, didn't you?"

My stupid fucking job I had, selling mobile fucking phones.

Like, he could find out anything with his nose, and from the taste of you. That was Rant Casey. Always right.

And between orgasms, I started to cry.

From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms (Historian): Every family has its scriptures, but most can't articulate them. These are stories people repeat to reinforce their identity: Who they are. Where they came from. Why they behave as they do.

Rant used to say, "Every family is a regular little cult."

Basin Carlyle (Childhood Neighbor): Don't laugh, but in France, Irene says, they bake a metal kind of lucky charm into their dessert cake. Their rule is, the one who bites the charm has to cook the next supper, but folks in France are so cheap they're more likely to swallow the charm. So they won't have to host.

From her reading, Irene says Mexicans bake a Jesus baby doll into their food. Folks in Spain always throw in some loose change. Irene showed me a little brochure for baking fancy cakes, told all about it. The entire history of cakes from around the world.

Irene Casey (Rant's Mother): Near as I recollect, Chet and Buddy didn't start out slow eaters. I trained them that way. It got to be too much, baking a devil's-food cake from scratch and watching Chet and Buddy wolf it down in three bites. Two of them hurrying to choke down one slice, then another, until the cake was nothing left but the dirty plate. Even while they're inhaling my food, they're talking plans about something next, or reading out of a catalogue, or hearing the news on the radio. Always living months into the future. Miles down the road.

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.