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McAdams' Blue Cheese Mine

Written by Terry Howard

 

Grantville, late summer 1635

James Lamont, formerly of MacKay's company, looked at the curb and sidewalk outside the grocery store with a grimace and swallowed. Step up, or walk thirty feet to the driveway, then thirty more back to the door?

"Okay, James," he muttered to himself, "Set y'cane. Now brace y'self, lift y' good leg and 'get-er-done.' The pain isna' as bad as all that." James clamped his jaw tight, closed his eyes, climbed the curb to the sidewalk. Then he stood there for half a minute before he dared to open his mouth. "Okay. I'm lyin'. Yon pain is as bad as all that. But, t'doctor says ye hav' to walk for it t'get better." When he could open his eyes he limped into the grocery store.

"That wasna as bad as last time," James tried to convince himself. It hurt like hell to walk. It also hurt just to sit. The pain woke him up unless he got so drunk he passed out. Then when he woke up the hangover competed with the pain in his hip and leg. Still, better to take a walk and endure the agony rather than stay home and put up with the pain and the boredom.

Not that he found the grocery store all that interesting. James usually bought bread and the little meat he ate, already cooked at the open-air market in the park near the swimming pool, because he didn't have to walk as far. He'd been told the market started before the Ring of Fire as a "farmer's market," and some up-timers still called it that. Now, though, a bit of anything might sell there, from garden produce to hot food—James favored the dumplings off one of the carts—to any used clothes someone wanted to sell.

The butcher filled the back wall of the grocery; produce the left, and the bakery the right. The front of the grocery store held the check-out counters. The center was split between aisles of shelves and the service counter, with its barrels, and bags of the bulk goods. Customers' purchases were measured, weighed or counted out into the containers they brought with them, or they bought a container off a shelf.

Boredom turned his thoughts to his home in Scotland—which he hadn't seen in years—and the beauty of the moors in the springtime. Then his thoughts turned to his grandame's table. He'd buried her before he left home, but his mind could still smell the bread baking on her hearth. This left him craving the tastes of home. The grocery store held the answer to one of those cravings.

James stood in front of the bulk food counter and looked at the memory which called to him like the sirens of Greek mythology, and caused him to hobble, slowly, on three legs, through the streets of Grantville trying to avoid the curbs on the sidewalks as he crossed town to fetch a small bit of food that he really could not afford.

Under a glass dome, behind the sliding glass door of a refrigerator in the bulk foods section, sat the remaining half of a four-inch-tall ten-inch-circumference, mostly pale ivory-white, round of cheese. It was flecked with points of blue and labeled "bleu cheese." It only seemed like the grocer wanted its weight in gold. It was brought up from France by courier. The price guaranteed that it only sold in small quantities. There wasn't a lot of it and the store didn't have it all the time. It was a true blue instead of the blue-green James grew up with, but it was as close to the cheese aged in the caves in the Pentland hills of Lanarkshire as anything he'd found since he left Scotland.

In short, he came to the grocer's to buy a taste of home, a memory, comfort food.

"Johann, giv' me a dollar's worth of that outrageously expensive cheese," James said, pointing at it even though he didn't have to, because Johann knew exactly what he was going to ask for and how much of it he was going to buy. Johann cut the small wedge from the round and wrapped it in the waxed paper James gave him. He hoped he could wipe off this sheet of waxed paper, iron it flat with a drip or two of new wax and reuse it one more time before he had to buy a new sheet. The electric iron and ironing board that came with the house was a wonderfully useful thing, but when the paper got a hole in it there wasn't much you could do. The cheese went in the basket along with half a loaf of rye bread and a jar of pickled cucumbers.

One of James' housemates, Lukas, worked blowing glass into the molds for those jars; the shop that produced them worked year 'round, and sold everything they made to the new canning plant. He'd told James, "Herr Gruber, the plant's owner, thinks that when people start redeeming the deposit on the jars and the canning company starts reusing them the shop will slow down. So far, though, there aren't very many jars being redeemed. So we are working twelve hour days at least to harvest time. I guess a lot of the jars are going out of town or being used for other things."

Those jars, full of just about anything edible and ready to eat, were well on their way to pushing all the non-groceries which had filled the store's shelves out the door and turning the grocery store's focus back to convenience foods.

James started the return trip home. Before he made it to the top of the first hill he cursed himself for buying the jar of pickles as pain shot up his back and throbbed in his head in perfect time to the beat of his heart. "Why didn't I wait till I had a ride to the store, or I had someone else to get them for me?"

When he got home James sat at the picnic table in the backyard for a good long while. Finally he went into the kitchen and made a cheese sandwich for lunch, using equal parts of the strong-flavored blue cheese and a soft white cheese sold in the market. It was so mild it was blah, but it was cheap and filling and that was needful if he wanted more than one meal out of the expensive imported bleu. The local soft white was a raw natural cheese with no preservatives added. James once heard a couple of up-timers shopping in the market talking about it.

"What is it? Un-creamed cheese?" One of them asked the one who was buying a ball of it.

"It ain't really cheese yet, it's just sort of half dried curds, but I like it. It is sort of like creamed cheese, but drier." The other up-timer answered. "It's cheaper than the real cheese the dairy makes, but this here sells good and they don't have to wait while it ages."

He covered the cheeses and the bread with the waxed paper, put them in the refrigerator and then headed for the nearest ale house to start his afternoon of drinking. He planned to head home before he got too drunk to walk, and make another cheese sandwich for supper. It was a good thing that a little of the strong tasting cheese went a long way. After supper he would drink enough of whatever he could afford to let him get to sleep for the night.

His supper was delayed.

Three days later, when he got out of the hospital, James went before the judge.

****

"Yes, your honor," the barmaid said. "I can tell you exactly vat happened. The two men here, three days ago sat at a table getting drunk. They ver talking theology and one drunk vas getting loud. James sat at the bar like he usually does. One drunk said something about it being high time Canterbury made the Scottish Presbyterians toe the line. His companion tried to get him to quiet down."

****

"Keep it down, Thomas. This is Grantville. They figure folks have the right to go to hell any which way they want, and the church has no business stopping them."

"They can be as daft as they please. I don't give a damn, as long as they pay us on time. But what we do in England is none of their business. The church is and should be run by the properly appointed authority and not tossed to and fro at the sway of whatever strikes the fancy of a gathering of loud-mouthed fools even if you get fancy and call them a presbytery."

"Thomas, why don't y' listen t' David 'n' shut y'r gab, afore y' get y'self in a world of hurt?" James said, without so much as turning his head to the table.

"Well, if it isn't James Lamont, who can't stay on a horse!" Thomas sneered. "Take your own advice and keep your mouth shut. Someone who knows what they're talking about needs to tell you Scots what to do for your own good. So listen to your betters and shut up."

James finished the dregs of his beer and slid off the stool to leave.

"Well, look at that! Wonder of wonders! Would you believe it? An idiot Scotsman who actually knows how to listen to his betters," Thomas said with a sneer in his slurred speech.

James stopped, turned and looked at Thomas. "Don't y' think you should be taking that back, Thomas?"

"Take it back? When it's nothing but the simple truth? Well, go on. Get your ugly face out of here. If I had a dog that looked like you I'd shave its ass and teach it to walk backwards."

****

"It was like a baseball game. James' stick would have hit Thomas' head like a home run ball, only he slipped." The barmaid laughed.

The judge said "Order, miss. Order."

"Ja," she said. "Anyway, Thomas and his chair fell over onto the floor and Thomas hit his head on the floor hard. David looked at his partner on the floor and sighed. Then he stood up and beat the crap out of James. The police arrived, Thomas and James vere on the floor and David looked like he'd been trampled by a horse. But you know that, Your Honor."

"So there was provocation," the judge said, looking at James. "But provocation is not justification. And if you hadn't lost your balance you could have cracked the man's head wide open and maybe even killed him. You're lucky the charge is simple brawling and not assault with a deadly weapon or even manslaughter. Thirty days or three hundred dollars."

****

"Hey, I thought you were in jail for another week," Lukas greeted James when he got home.

"The sheriff got tired of feedin' me and threw me out early," James said. He looked in the fridge, "Damn."

"What's the problem?" Lukas asked.

"That bleu cheese I had left has gyane all hairy wi' mold," James said, unwrapping his wax-paper bundle. He hadn't had a lot of bleu cheese to begin with, so he had little hope of trimming off the mold and saving some. He'd left the white cheese on the same bread, in the same wrapper. The blue mold in the cheese had invaded and clearly conquered the bread, and sent streaks of color running through the soft white cheese.

"I'm surprised someone didn't throw it out," James said as he trimmed the fuzz off of what was left of the white cheese.

"Hey, it wasn't smelling too bad. It was on your shelf in the fridge, your rent was paid and we knew you'd be back." The house had three rooms, a bathroom and a kitchen with a small laundry utility room off the kitchen. After the bunk beds, there wasn't space in the room James rented for a chair. There was a book case, a mirror and a small built in closet. The house plans called his room a nursery and there were walk-in closets in town that were bigger. Lukas and his wife rented the bedroom and a family of five rented the living room. The refrigerator had three shelves.

"One good thing about bein' in jail," James said, "I saved on groceries for three weeks. Another good thing is, now I've nae need t' replace the walking stick I broke."

"You're getting around a lot better then?"

"Aye. Listen, do you know if they've any bleu cheese left at t' grocer's?"

"Nein, they sold the last of it over two weeks ago."

James tasted a little bit of the saved cheese, then he had a bit more and put the rest, about a quarter of a cup, back in the fridge.

"I'm headin' down t' market," James told Lukas. "Can I be gettn' you anything?"

"A half dozen potatoes, if I can pay you come payday."

"Anything else?" James asked. Lukas had done the same for him on occasion. Disability pay from the army while he recovered was tight.

****

Down at the market the cheese seller said, "Hey, James, no cane?"

"Nae, I'm gettin' about a whole lot better. Sell me a cheese."

"Sure. Half or quarter?" It was cheap. The people who bought it mostly bought enough for today, and maybe for tomorrow, a little now and a little later.

"No, a whole one." James said.

The cheese seller raised an eyebrow and looked the over the basket of mostly softball sized heads of cheese for a small one.

"Nae, a bigger one please."

"Well, you're coming up in the world now, aren't you?" the cheese man said, putting the first one back for a middling-sized sphere. "Or did you find yourself a girlfriend?"

He weighed the cheese and James paid without answering.

The baker asked the same question, "Half or quarter?"

James never bought more bread than that because that was all he could eat before it went stale. There was no reason to eat stale bread when you could buy more the next day.

"A quarter loaf. Do you have any day-old rye?" The day-old bread was cheaper.

"You want a quarter loaf of day-old?"

"No. I want a quarter of fresh to eat today. I want a half loaf of day-old for something I want to try."

Half of the new cheese and the day-old rye went to the back of the shelf with the last of the salvaged cheese all wrapped up together in waxed paper. James was hoping he could make his own bleu cheese. After all, it worked once. It seemed like it should work again.

****

The reason the jail let him out early was so he could keep an appointment with the army's doctor. The letter telling him to come in caught up with him in jail and he asked for a furlough. Instead they let him out and told him not to come back.

"What do you mean you can't use me? The doctor declared me fit for service."

"Yes, he did, and if I had an opening I'd put you on. But we had to fill it while you were off for six months and right now the roster is full. I'll move you to the top of the waiting list," the quartermaster's clerk told him.

"You mean I've got to live on the injured list stipend until you have an opening?"

"Of course not. The doctor said you were fit, so you're off the sick roll. The stipend is over."

"How am I supposed to pay the rent and buy groceries?"

The clerk scribbled a note. "Go see this man and he can probably find you a job."

****

Since he could stand to sit for eight hours, but wasn't up to hard labor, James ended up as the night clerk at the Holiday Lodge. It hardly paid a living, and it sure didn't ...