PEACH PIE ON BADSTREET by Matthew Gavin Frank
Don’t say a word about the fuzz, or any of the soft coverings that evoke delicacy, and other things babyish. Here, the peaches we use in our pies are mutants, and sometimes these mutants flower. This does nothing to make them juicier, does, in fact, make them less palatable. Here, desirability lies in plainness, rather than ornamentation, and the sort of skin that reminds us of our own, before we became these awful adults.
* * *
Your mother has started grafting desirable cultivars onto dwarfing rootstock. This makes for little peaches, their flavor concentrated like bouillon cubes. You catch your father scoffing at their size, flexing his own biceps in the garden, finally happy to compare his own body to the state’s natural, and famous, forms.
* * *
You wonder about the point when that which has been cultivated becomes natural. In the kitchen, sifting, your mother mutters to herself, She walks in beauty, like the night . . .
* * *
Here, the flour is all-purpose, and the pearl tapioca is instant. The two flow together like pyroclasm. Your mother chews her fingernails to their beds, stops just short of the blood. Her secret is the peach vinegar in the crust, the ooze of the tapioca that binds the peaches (each one severed into 12 even crescents, she insists), to the lemon juice, the vanilla, the sugar. When the peaches release their juice, she says, the tapioca will catch its run, freeze it into position. The tapioca will stop the peaches.
* * *
In the living room, your father watches a documentary on Pompeii. When he’s about to switch the channel back to the wrestling matches, it’s the image of one ashen hand arrested on its way to his lover’s ashen breast, that stops him.
* * *
There’s a volcanism in this pie, your mother believes. Something of the lahar, of disaster narrowly averted. It’s the tapioca, she says, that contains the bursting of the peaches, that allows our state both its explosion, and restraint.
* * *
In the peach pie are both the fire, and its extinguisher.
* * *
Her crust is a lattice. In this way, a single strip of dough can be a shroud, even as it’s buried.
* * *
Your father keeps his Army knife on the coffee table, next to the bowl of boiled peanuts. He often calls Vietnam, “Georgia without the Peaches.” Your mother bakes, she says, to remind him again that he’s home.
* * *
In 1924, Georgia allowed for the formation of Peach County, the last in the state to be incorporated, a county that self-defines as “the heart of central Georgia.” Your mother wonders: What’s the difference between the heart of central Georgia, and the heart of all of Georgia? When she finds out that they also self-define as the “Peach Capital of the World,” she rolls her eyes, thinks of China and Iran, and the Romans who originally named the fruit, persica, from the Latin, malum persicum, or “Persian apple.” She tells your father, I know more about goddamn peaches . . . but he’s in televised Italy, staring at a petrified dog kicking its legs at the sky.
* * *
If the heart is middle, the heart is mediocre. Your mother knows, peach pies cook best at the heart of the oven, where the heat is most evenly distributed.
* * *
Your mother flips on the oven light, stares at the juice bubbling, but not boiling over, noosed in the thickening tapioca pearls. She thinks of the fuzzed and the fuzzless varieties, the nature, here, of breeding. She sighs and lets the oven go dark again. Before your father takes up the remote, he decides the dog is a golden retriever.
* * *
You watch wrestling with your father. His favorite triple tag-team, the Georgia-based Fabulous Freebirds, take to the ring, led by Michael “P.S.” Hays, his long Barbie-blonde locks whipping, your father says, like the peach trees of Peach County in a tore-oh-nah-doe, and you know, because your father told you, that the “P.S.” stands for “Pure Sexy,” a designation that he himself tries to evoke for you on the couch by flexing his biceps again, trying and failing to get his pectorals to quiver beneath his baby blue Georgia Bulldogs T‑shirt, the flesh of his face reddening, as if moving dangerously close to his own pit.
* * *
Even from the living room, you can hear the peaches screaming in the oven. This is the last step, your mother says, before their ultimate softening.
* * *
The other two Fabulous Freebirds are the decidedly unsexy Terry “Bam Bam” Gordy, whose finishing move, The Iron Spike (read: digging his thumb into opponent’s neck-skin/accessory nerve) and oafish bank robber’s sidekick demeanor make him one of your father’s favorite “loves to hate,” and the nondescript everyman Buddy “Jack” Roberts (the “Jack” referencing his adoration of Mr. Daniel’s whiskey). With a mouthful of boiled peanuts, still half-heartedly flexing, your father sings the lyrics of the Freebirds’ entrance song (penned by Hays), Badstreet, USA (Hays’ reference to the rough neighborhood in which he grew up in Atlanta, a city whose peaches your mother deems soulless, bruised from the truck ride over from counties named Bacon and Baker, Coffee and Butts, Early, Long, Liberty, Peach, and Worth), and your father spits peanuts at the screen singing:
Street is a jumping,
tonight there’ll be a brawl.
Old Lady McDuffie she done
give the cops a call.
She might as well call the Army or
the United States Marines,
’cause can’t nobody handle this
Badstreet scene.
And outside, twelve peaches fall from the tree, and your mother, from the kitchen, shouts back at your father, her own mouth clean, about the difference between a clingstone and a freestone, the difference between the kind of flesh that sticks to its pit, or the kind that easily peels away, and your father jabs his finger into your chest, and which one are you, which one are you?
* * *
Somewhere, on another channel, one petrified corpse kisses another, but here, just as the peaches quiet, your father swallows his mouthful, allows his pecs to relax and fall, and on the screen, one beautiful man headlocks another, and it looks as if neither can escape their destiny. As always, he has nothing else to say about sexiness, or purity, beyond his eating of a hot peach pie.
* * *
Which is the beauty that burns our mouths with its sugar, that forces us to exhale even as we swallow, the kind that demands we cool it with our breath?
* * *
Your mother knows: the first artistic representation of the peach was unearthed from the rubble of Herculaneum, Pompeii’s neighbor, following the Vesuvius eruption of 79 A.D. She imagines, in the painting, a clingstone, the flesh holding desperately to its pit in some kind of final embrace, as if the art itself predicted the eruption, as if the ancient drawn peach is somehow responsible for her award-winning pie.
* * *
Peaches open to heat, whether mediocre or not.
* * *
The painting of the peach survives the disaster. The real peach turns to dust. Your mother wonders, which one is at the heart of Georgia; if the pie protects the peach, allows it legacy. Your father would wonder this, but he’s watching Michael “Pure Sexy” Hays slip a razor blade from his trunks. Your father would wonder this, but he’s shouting, Cut his fucking head open!
* * *
In Peach County, less than a year after its incorporation, and over 100 years after the white settlers pushed the Creek Nation off of their hunting lands in order to sow their peaches, local farmer Samuel Henry Rumph, developed a unique variety of peach that he named Elberta, after his wife. Immediately revered by the locals for its sweetness, high content of juice, snappy skin, and culinary adaptability (excellent raw, excellent baked), the Elberta peach soon breached Peach County’s borders, and the remainder of the state claimed it, and renamed the variety after itself.
* * *
Still, the county served as the headquarters for the communal manifestations of “peach fever” such as the Peach Regional Rodeo (a standard rodeo at which peach pie is sold), The Peach Blossom Festival (which, as early as the mid-1920s attracted tourists “from all over the world”), and the Georgia Peach Festival (at which Elberta drowned her sorrows over the mass combing-out of her name with slice after slice of the newly-dubbed Georgia Peach Pie). Your mother wants this original Georgia Peach to be a clingstone, a peach that loves itself, hugs all of its parts together as if in some futile stab at survival. But she knows better. Even as your father howls at the blood on the screen, she knows it was a freestone. She knows: a name can be easily excised, the identity of an entire state imposed on the fruit named for only one woman. In this way, intimacy can be shipped from coast to coast. All it takes is breeding.
* * *
Your mother wonders if the peach takes more than it gives. She takes off her sweater. Her undershirt is baby blue, says Property of the Georgia Lady Bulldogs, in a neat, rainbow arc.
* * *
According to the Georgia Peach Council (operating today out of the University of Georgia’s College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences), in creating a box mounted on casters that held six crates of peaches plus ice, Samuel Rumph “unselfish, disregarding the many prophets of failure, created an attractive peach with good carrying qualities . . . and gave these ideas to the world.” Your father, as if caught, as if skipping, hits the remote’s LAST button again and again, and, as the images on the screen flash from blood to ash, blood to ash, a man’s long blonde hair to a girl’s petrified mouth, a man’s pure sexy crowing to the girl’s silent scream, your father finally gets his left pectoral to bounce against his right, and you wonder about the ideas in his head, afraid that he wants the rest of the world to have them.
* * *
The stuff at the stone will never know the fuzz, the sun, the feel of your mother’s fingers, until the fruit that surrounds it is eviscerated.
* * *
In the addition of the tapioca is a desire to allow these things to gel, to become one decent thing.
* * *
. . . and Lord Byron says, “Give me a sun, I care not how hot, and sherbet, I care not how cool, and my Heaven is as easily made as your Persian’s,” and you swear to God he’s saying something about our peaches, as preservative, you hope, or gateway out of here.
* * *
Blood and ash, blood and ash. The living room begins to smell like peaches. Your father is not okay with his weakening, but he’s fine with idolizing a wrestler who has hair, he says, “like a woman’s.”
* * *
Eulogizing Samuel H. Rumph, the Georgia Peach Council says:
“Some men are remembered because embarking on a public career they connected themselves with great political movements or filled some high office. Others achieve fame through military, or naval exploits, ‘amid the tumult and the shouting and the thunder of the guns.’ Here is one who deserves to be remembered and who will be remembered for the gift he made to his fellow man. One can scarcely ride along the highways and see the beauty of the trees in peach blossom time, or later in the season look upon long rows of them bending under the weight of their luscious fruit, without calling to mind this modest, efficient man who had a vision. His name will ever be associated with that queen of all varieties and the creation of a new industry.”
* * *
Your mother, oven-mitted, bends like the Creeks under the weight of her pie. It’s the tapioca. The fruit who wants to find its earliest name. It’s the cling who wants to be free, and the free who’s starving for intimacy. It’s the fuzz as the ash, and the ash that will allow so many future generations to see us exactly as we are.
* * *
The cooked peach, ever modest, gives its juice to tapioca and crust, though it cares nothing for the relationship between efficiency and flavor.
* * *
Your father cuts his slice down with his Army knife. On its blade, decades-old blood, a little rust, and the hardened syrup of so many former peach pies. In this knife is efficient, if immodest, storytelling.
* * *
Your father falls asleep on the couch. Hays wins. Vesuvius wins. You rise with your mother, careful not to disturb him. You watch the couch cushion slowly rebound from your weight.
* * *
Outside, you stand with her, holding your basket. One tree, she says, does not make an orchard. The light is waning. The sky is the stone. If the sky is the stone, you’re not sure if you’re the flesh, or the peachtree borer, the insect named for the crop that it kills.
* * *
The peachtree borer can eat through bark, eat through ash. The peachtree borer seeks out the wounds, the weakest parts of trunk and fruit. Its wings are clear. We can see through them, the peaches distorted as if in a fun-house mirror. Through the wings of the things that kill us, our fattest fruits are made skinny, and our softest of fuzz predicts its own aging.
* * *
Above you, one drupe huddles against another, evolving: these incredible soft skins, the moth who finds its way in, to fruit. Here, we don’t need to be peeled to be eaten, under a roof to find heat.
* * *
In this wind, you can’t tell if it’s the peaches, her body, or the whole county that’s beating. In this wind, a landlocked county named for peaches can be coast to coast. You reach for the fruit, wait for the fruit to reach back. Your mother uses a butane lighter so she can see the bruises. She sighs. She picks the ones she thinks are the ripest.
Mathew Gavin Frank is the author of The Morrow Plots (Black Lawrence Press, 2013), Barolo (The University of Nebraska Press, 2012), Pot Farm (The University of Nebraska Press, 2012), Warranty in Zulu (Barrow Street Press, 2010), and Sagittarius Agitprop (Black Lawrence Press, 2009). His work has appeared in The New Republic, Epoch, The Iowa Review, Fourth Genre, and Prairie Schooner.