West Elk, I hear, no longer exists—which is too bad. since it was something you had to see to admit its being around. It was one main street with another one crossing it, some cement block stores with high false fronts, a lot of stone age cars, some Indians sitting at the curbs, lots of hay and feed and oil-drilling tools, some trees that had died a long time ago—and of course, Aunt Gussie.
She lived in a big frame house on the outskirts of town, a house out of the General Grant period, all gingerbread trimmings, three stories high, low in the porches, narrow in the hips, but with a good slate roof. There was water from deep wells, and Aunt Gussie had raised cattle and had done very well for herself. Her second husband had also died. (“ She never had any luck with the higher emotions,” Gramp said.)
We drove up past a hound dog nursing ten pups and a brood of Chinese ducks testing a drinking pool made of a section of iron, called a stock tank in West Elk. Aunt Gussie was sealed on the steps of the porch, smoking a cornhusk cigarette, wearing levis long before the fad for blue jean pants). a man's shirt, and the remains of a weather-torn Stetson on her head. She didn't look at all like the fancy, flamboyant character from Paris I remembered.
“ Waaahoo!” she said as she saw us. “ Visitors!” She came over to the car. but she didn't say, “Howdy partner.,” or “ Put it there, strangers.” She just kissed Mama. Gramp. and myself and said, “It's good to see you all. It't been a long time.”
Which shows you how movies let a guy down. She didn't even wear a Colt on her hip or spit chewing tobacco. I had to settle for hand-rolled cornhusk cigarettes (remember, in those days no nice woman smoked in public, and the ads never suggested a lady would ever put tobacco to her lips).
“It's a nice place. West Elk,” said. Mama after we got out of the car and up onto the porch.
Aunt Gussie used some of Gramp's run-together words. “If it weren't that beef took a flop after the war (World War I), I'd be out of here as fast as a sparrow could flick its tail, Paris, that's a nice place, isn't it, Gramp?”
“It's a place,” said Gramp, not wanting to get committed on anything with Aunt Gussie.
“The food,” said Mama, “ the French—they know how to eat.”
“So do I,” I said.
“Come in,” said Aunt Gussie, “ Lsquo and I'll rustle you up some grub.” (That wasn't such bad sounding western talk I figured.)
Inside, the house was cool and neat. On the walls were Aunt Gussie's two pink Matisse nudes and her real good Picassos, purchased years before anybody in this country thought he could paint better than an idiot Chilean. “A lot of meat on those sofas,” Gramp said, but he never really got past Degas and the greener of Lautrec's night scenes.
It would have been a nice lunch, only Aunt Gussie said, “You all coming out here reminds me I'm a cordon blew.”
“Why should it?” said Gramp.
A little boy came in just then, Carrying a big pencil and looking at us. Aunt Gussie patted him on the head. “This is my son, Sandor. The late Mr. Horvath Andrassy was a Hungarian.”
We lowered our eyelids for a moment in memory of Aunt Gussie's late husband. Sandor stuck out his tongue at me and ran his pencil over it. I noticed it left a purple line, and I hoped he would die.
“Shake hands with Cousin Sandor,” Mama said. She was like an Englishman in the jungle, dressing for dinner: you had to make the proper social sounds and gestures with her around. I shook hands, and Sandor tried to throw me with an Indian handlock. I was very polite and only kicked him in the shins,
I must say lunch was a real delight, First a huge tongue came in, smoking hot on a board. Aunt Gussie grew her own tongues, she told us. She had some cattle crossed with buffalo, and their tongues hung and smoked were the best —her private stock. Buffalo tongue Gertrude is something special, and Gramp's journal gives some of its secrets. The tongue is stewed in a deep kettle with onions, cloves, carrots, celery, parsley, bay leaf, peppercorn, and Hungarian paprika. The tongue is removed when tender and skinned; tomato sauce and saffron arc added; and it's baked with truffles and noodles and basted from time to time with a mixture of chicken consomm\eacut\and gelatin. When served, it's sliced thin as paper against the grain.
Aunt Gussie really bad learned something in Paris, besides meeting Hungarians. She had a kind of páté maison, local Oklahoma style; filet of beef-buffalo, pork, and liver; and a soup which she claimed was based on the local pot of the native share croppers, refined by hard work and study—a sort of steaming madrilène, neatly laced with sherry.
Aunt Gussie explained, “I try to keep the American base to my cooking, but I add what it needs from Paris. I must make you my Hunter's Pot. It's Spanish from below the border, but the crop pickers brought it North.”
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