It is well established that the details of family stories have a way of expanding and diminishing as the generations pass them along. With that in mind, here is a holiday story my people tell involving death and fruitcake.
My great-grandfather was Joseph Henry Walker and he lived in Laurel. He owned a wholesale grocery store, was a good businessman and worked hard, but in 1943 he suffered a series of strokes that left him recovering at home.
One day that fall, faced with an abundance of time to fill, he decided to bake the family a fine, old-fashioned fruitcake for Christmas. So Mr. Walker — as his descendants refer to him — dug out his mother’s recipe, drove over to his grocery store, gathered the best ingredients, went home and began.
He was no cook, so what followed was an event — and quite the production.
Mr. Walker spent hours at the kitchen counter, chopping candied fruits and raisins and nuts. Then he mixed the batter, poured it up and set it all in the oven. Everyone sat around waiting. Several hours later, Mr. Walker pulled his creation from the heat and gently sat it in a metal tin. Before sealing it shut, he took a bottle of whiskey and drizzled a fair amount over the top. Then, not finished, he soaked a pillow case with whiskey and put the tin containing the cake inside, wrapping it all up tight.
Mr. Walker then announced he was hiding the cake. This was a holiday creation, he explained, and it would be sliced for the first time on Christmas Day.
He told his wife and two daughters to go to the other side of the house. With everyone out of sight, he hid the cake where no one would find it.
Roughly a month later, on Nov. 19, 1943, at the age of 56, Mr. Walker dropped dead.
A sad Christmas came and went, and no one in the two-story brick home along Fourth Avenue thought of that fruitcake, hidden somewhere deep inside.
Three years later, my great-grandmother, on a whim, decided the kitchen needed cleaning. She told Lula, the maid, to spend all the time it took to make every nook and cranny spotless. So Lula did, and several hours later she went and found my great-grandmother.
“Mrs. Walker,” she said softly, “I don’t want to upset you, but I just found Mr. Walker’s fruitcake.”
He had hidden it in the depths of a crowded, little-used cabinet, and they took it into the kitchen and pried open the tin.
The whiskey, by all accounts, had preserved the thing beautifully. It was the finest fruitcake ever made.
Family from not only Laurel, but from out near Pachuta and Shubuta, too, were summoned for a slice. And everyone came, and there they sat, eating Mr. Walker’s fruitcake and crying.
I don’t particularly like fruitcake, but wish I had the recipe.
William Browning is managing editor of The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
William Browning was managing editor for The Dispatch until June 2016.
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