Book Review : The Queen of Homemakers Meets a Nice Dogcatcher

Walking Across Egypt by Clyde Edgerton (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill: $14.95)

Mattie Rigsbee, 78, lives alone in her family home. Her children are a disappointment to her: Neither has married; neither intends to. Her daughter, Elaine, is a militant feminist, and her son, Robert, too dull to discuss. Mattie has a sister--a pretty good gal. They go coffin shopping together and get the giggles. But Mattie’s real life revolves around her home and her church.

The dramas of her home are several: Will Alora, her chunky next-door neighbor, who--along with her dim husband, Finner--pokes her nose into everyone else’s business, ever find out that after Mattie finishes eating her lunch-for-one, she sits down to watch a soap opera before she does the dishes? (Actually, maybe there aren’t several dramas! Maybe that’s about it.)

Stuck in a Chair

There is the time, of course, when Mattie takes the seats off her chairs and sends them off to be re-covered. She forgets the seats are missing, sits down in a chair and gets stuck for hours, but that’s just a one-time thing. The sad fact is, nothing much has happened lately to Mattie: She’s been living her life on hold, caught between the inevitable truth that at 78 she must be “slowing down” and the equally unarguable truth that she’s not slowing down at all.

She is the very queen of homemakers. Any and every event becomes an opportunity for Mattie to fix a meat loaf and cream potatoes and butter beans. She’s an ace cook. Her home is a loving trap set for any passing stranger. She desperately needs someone to keep her company and help her eat all this amazing food.

The reason that the church is so much a part of Mattie’s life is that her soul belongs to God. No big deal, it just does. Every night, after she’s coaxed some guest in to polish off four or five courses, set off with three or four kinds of pickles and chowchow to boot, she restores her home to spotlessness, sits at the piano and sings hymns. She knows she has a friend in Jesus.

Obviously, “Walking Across Egypt” is a book that teeters on the very edge of terminal cuteness, but the longer you read it, the dearer it gets. Mattie is so brave (and resigned) in her loneliness that you have to like her.

Moreover, you can’t help but address yourself to the larger questions here: What kind of a dumb world is this anyway, where a mom can work and work and only come out with two kids who are irreligious, can’t cook and won’t get married? What kind of a world is this that lets a woman with such amazing domestic gifts just sit by herself in her own little house? What ever happened to cooking, come to think of it; not spa cuisine, or ethnic experiments, or Pritikin diets, but “peas and corn, creamed potatoes, pork chops, a pickle plate, string beans, sliced tomatoes, biscuits . . . beef stew, turnip salet, potato salad,” and all at the same meal? Why has all our American “progress” lead us to old-folks homes, feminists who disdain meat loaf, a godless society and “the chicken filet at Hardee’s”?

Because of the kind of book this is, things are bound to get better. Dogcatcher Lamar, who has sawed Mattie out of the chair where she got stuck, keeps coming back to the house for biscuits, gravy, and a few kind words. (Her grown children are scandalized by the raffish types who keep happening by their mother’s house.) One day Lamar mentions his little brother, Wesley Benfield, just a kid in his teens who’s landed in the Young Men’s Rehabilitation Center. Wesley’s folks are off some place; he never had a real home. . . .

Wesley is a skuzzy sort. He needs a haircut and a bath; his teeth are falling. No one has ever taught him to say grace, or how to use a napkin. When Mattie visits him in the YMRC, to give him a slab of pie and a chunk of cake, he’s dazed by the experience. The food is the most wonderful he’s ever tasted. Surely this dear old lady must be his long-lost grandma.

A Peaceful Afternoon

After a series of dizzying events, Wesley and Lamar end up with Alora and Finner, Robert and Elaine, and a couple of stray policemen, over at Mattie’s house, eating a marvelous meal, spending a peaceful afternoon, going back for seconds and thirds, watching TV. Things could turn out very badly --since Wesley has, in fact, escaped the Rehab Center, a slave to that cake, but you know things aren’t going to. You know things will be perfect.

How did Mattie first meet Lamar, that ever-hungry dogcatcher? A puppy had come around the house, and Mattie, sure that she was “slowing down,” had sought professional help. “You know it takes more than feeding to keep a dog,” she had told her own sluggish son back on Page 4. “I got as much business keeping a dog as I got walking across Egypt. I don’t even know why I’m talking about it.”

But this is a book where even the dogs get a happy ending. And Clyde Edgerton has taken the liberty of writing his own hymn, “Walking Across Egypt,” and setting it to music at the end of this story, in case any of his readers still feel blue. This book is as restful and as reassuring as a Sunday morning spent at home with a mother who loves you. I’d buy several, to give to sick friends.