Evel Knievel Days

E
VERYONE KNOWS THAT THE
A
NCIENT
Egyptians mummified their dead. But not everyone knows about the demon god Ammit—the demon god who guarded the Egyptian gateway to paradise. Ammit, the Eater of Hearts. Ammit, the Devourer of Souls. Part crocodile, part lion, part hippopotamus.

If an Egyptian priest mummified your body three thousand years ago, then he carved out your intestines and your lungs and your stomach and your liver. He put each organ in a limestone pot and stacked these pots beside your sarcophagus, beside a copy of your family’s
Book of the Dead
—the book of spells and stories and illustrations and recipes that was your inheritance. Then he painted your body with resin, inside and out, as a preservative. Then he wrapped you in linen. But he left your heart in place.

The Egyptians believed that your heart was the repository of your soul. It needed to be preserved intact, so that your soul and your body could transform into
akh
, the part of you that was eternal, that rose up and joined the stars in the night sky. But in order to rise,
your heart had to be nearly weightless. And what made your heart heavy? Sin. So when a person came to Ammit, she weighed your heart against a feather. If you’d lived a good life, then your heart would be light—light as a feather.

But if you’d sinned, then Ammit would eat your heart. She would devour it whole and you’d spend eternity there, with her, in torment. Which, of course, brings up the question: How would she season it? The answer, of course, is: Any way she wanted to. And so I have to wonder, what would
my
heart be like on her scale? Would it float up? Or would it sink down and spend eternity in a burning darkness? This is a concern for me. Because let’s face it, if Ammit is eating raw human heart flesh—then the catering in her realm is probably subpar.

If you live long enough with your mother, you will learn to cook.

—John Hawkes,
The Lime Twig

E
GYPTIAN COOKING IS FOLK MAGIC
. Not magic in the sense of dematerializing doves or sawing beautiful ladies in half. But magic in the deeper sense of the thing—in the raw joy of what magic once was, hundreds of years ago, thousands of years ago: a surprise, a shock, an astonishment. A lesson about the invisible. A lesson about belief. I remember this from my childhood: the image of my mother, Amy Clark-Saqr, cooking late into the night for a catering gig, cooking, in a nearly empty house, enough food to feed a hundred people the next afternoon. A feast—but not for her. Saqr Catering. Butte’s Finest Middle Eastern Cuisine Since 1990.

Mulukhiyya:
A silky saline broth distilled from the leaves of the jute plant. It fills the air with the smell of garlic and onion and boiling jute leaves and sizzling olive oil. It was her most popular dish. She’d make it by the gallon, standing at the stove, holding the long wooden spoon that was so familiar to me. Its wood had been worn thin and smooth, and its entire body bore black scorch marks from the flames of our gas stovetop. If she were mummified and entombed
in a sarcophagus, I had no doubt, my mother would request that this spoon be buried with her. Without it, she wouldn’t be able to navigate the kitchens of the afterlife.

But every scrap of folk magic is counterbalanced with a curse. Here in America especially. And so, my family, we also had a curse. Copper was the curse of my family. This wasn’t always true. A hundred and fifty years ago—before Montana was a state, before the railroads came clattering west from Chicago, before the Great Northern cut through the Rockies at Marias Pass and connected the mineral wealth of Butte to the booming factories of the Midwest—copper made my family rich.

My great-great-grandfather, William Andrews Clark, was a miner. He dug millions of dollars’ worth of copper from the hills surrounding Butte. He was a copper king, a second-generation Irish immigrant turned vest-wearing frontier industrialist. By the time he died, his fortune amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars. But he’d started out, in 1863, making $2.50 a day in a silver mine in Colorado.

William Andrews Clark also had, without doubt, a spectacular mustache. A mustache that perched on his face like the head of a broom. Like an ornamental shrub. Like the tail of a groundhog. Looking at his mustache, I often wondered how he smoked a cigar without lighting himself on fire.

Mustache or no mustache, most of the major inventions of nineteenth-century America required copper wires. Morse’s telegraph, Bell’s telephone, Edison’s incandescent lamp: They all needed pure, refined, conductive metals. And so by 1890 Butte was exporting thirty million dollars’ worth of copper every year. Just like copper
made the fortune of William Andrews Clark, it also made the fortune of this little city in Montana.

While the inhabitants of Butte used to call it “The Richest Hill on Earth,” they also called it “The Perch of the Devil.” Nitroglycerine, dynamite, pneumatic drilling: The thunder of explosives rolled down from the mine shafts all day long. Arsenic and sulfur and cadmium poured from the mouths of the Anaconda smelters. If cows grazed in Butte, their teeth turned a soft gold color.

At the museum where I worked, I often told tourists about the early settlers near the Anaconda mine. There was so much arsenic in the drinking water that Butte’s residents grew dependent on it. Without the arsenic, they’d get headaches and nausea and splintering stomach cramps. Copper made them rich, but it also poisoned them.

That’s where my story starts. With an invisible genetic heritage, with a mutation of the ATP7B gene, with an
autosomal recessive genetic disorder
called Wilson’s disease. Both of my maternal grandparents were carriers. And so my mother’s body could never properly absorb copper. Without medication, copper would build up in her soft tissues, in her liver and her kidneys and her eyes and her brain. She took an army of pastel pharmaceuticals daily; she swallowed a rainbow of cuprimine and cyprine and zinc acetate. Children raised in evangelical households can quote Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. I know whole sections of
The Merck Manual
by heart.

There were some other aspects of my childhood that were perhaps unusual. Occasionally, my mother would forget a pill and spend a day in bed. Or I’d come home and find her sitting on the roof. “What,” I’d yell, “are you doing up there?” She’d answer: “Nothing,
darling,” her voice as soft and gentle as the coo of a dove. Or: “I’m counting the stars.” Or: “I think I can see Idaho from here.”

I’d race inside to sort through the medication and determine what she was missing. Then I’d shimmy out onto the roof, carrying a glass of water and a tiny green tablet. Two hours later, she’d be downstairs, cooking or reading a book in front of the fireplace.

The list of foods my mother couldn’t eat was a long one: shellfish, mushrooms, nuts, chocolate, dried fruit, dried peas, dried beans, bran, avocados. But her longings, her longings were persistent. “Just one Twix,” she’d say, staring at the candy aisle in Safeway. “Please. It won’t kill me, I promise.” I’d push the cart forward, nine years old and barely tall enough to reach the handle, my mother trailing behind me, begging for a 3 Musketeers.

This did create some problems for a caterer (as you might imagine). Not only was I her custodian, I was also her chief taster—a fact that she reinforced with a frequent and impressive ardor. She’d knock on the doors of friends’ houses, or track me down at the park, or appear in the second inning of my Little League baseball games. Once, when I was in eleventh grade, she had me summoned to the principal’s office. “We’re very sorry, son,” Principal Gordon said. “But your great-uncle has passed away. Your mother’s outside waiting to take you home.” Certainly she was, sitting behind the wheel of our big white Saqr Catering van. I skulked in through the passenger’s-side door, staring at the carpet as we made our way off of school grounds and into traffic.

“You’re unbelievable,” I said. “No one else’s mother acts like this.”

She looked straight ahead, her face expressionless, her hands on
the wheel. For a moment—even though I didn’t have a great-uncle—I was worried.

“It’s the
shuk shuka
,” she finally said. “It’s just not right. I can feel it.”