Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Vol. 24, No. 4. Whole No. 131, October 1954

Banquet and a Half by Lee Hays

It is a long thirteen years since we first started writing the editorial comments which serve as forewords (and sometimes as afterwords) to most of the stories published in EQMM; and to the best of our recollection we have never consciously repeated ourselves. But, in one sense, a rule is only as good as its exceptions, and now we are deliberately going to make an exception and repeat, word for word, the beginning of our preface to Lee Hays’s “On the Banks of the Ohio,” which appeared in the March 1949 issue of EQMM. Yes, it has taken us more than five years to pull a second story out of Mr. Hays — but we think you are going to agree it was worth waiting for.

“Lee Hays [our original introduction began] has spent most of his 35 years collecting, singing, and writing American folk music, and delving into the fascinating mysteries of American folklore. He has sung on a few radio shows and in some folk music concerts, including one at Town Hall, New York City. He has worked with the leading figures in the field — Burl Ives, Josh White, and others. It is a medium which, unfortunately, does not pay off too well; as a result, Lee Hays has had to explore other channels to piece together a bare living. One of those bypaths is uniting, and we predict that one of these days the bypath will become Lee Hays’s main road. Right now he is devoting almost full time to giving ‘a local habitation and a name’ to ideas which have been shaping themselves in his head since that day, long ago, when he first began to think for himself... This man, Lee Hays, is a big fellow — make no mistake about that. Potentially, he has the stuff of great talent. You will be hearing from him, more and more, and in the voice of truth.”

Now, after five years, you are hearing from him, and while Lee Hays’s second story is only a short-short in length, it virtually fulfills the predictions we made for him in 1949. This is definitely not a big build-up for a little story. “Banquet and a Half” is a story of great power, yet it is tender, subtle, understanding, evocative, and packs enormous sociological implications. It is, to quote the author himself, a tale “of human need, of human misery, of unsung little people in trouble”...

Two young fellows named Jim and Buddy sat together one day and talked about a strange thing that was happening to them.

“It’s a mystery to me,” said Jim, who was skinny and seventeen.

Buddy, eighteen and skirtnier than Jim, said, “It don’t seem real to me. I never had a thing like this happen.”

The mystery was that a man had come to Jim and Buddy and said, “You boys don’t look like you’re getting enough to eat. Now, you name anything you want to eat and I guarantee to get it and bring it to you.”

The boys did not answer right away but they looked at the man and their faces showed plain disbelief, and some fear.

“I mean it,” the man said. “As much of it as you want. You boys can have a banquet and a half, and I’ll take pleasure in watching you eat it.”

Jim and Buddy looked at each other, wondering. They were two boys from deep in cotton country and they had never had any such favor done them, by anyone. Unexpected generosity was a mystery and it was frightening.

But the man had promised.

Food.

Jim and Buddy had big appetites. They had not yet stopped growing but never yet had they got enough food to tamp down the hungry pain in their bellies. In their part of the world people were said to live on the “three m’s” — meat, meal, and molasses. But Jim could remember his father saying, “Seems more like two m’s to me, I ain’t had a piece of meat in so long.”

Not since the fall, perhaps, when there was cotton-picking money to spend on salt pork and baloney and such.

One time company came to Jim’s house. His mother said, “You folks stay to supper. We have a plenty.”

Jim’s father said, “Plenty? Why, we got a thousand things to eat, and every one of them is beans!”

When Jim was born his mother said, “We got another man.” His father said, “We got another mouth to feed.” They lived on a plantation and the bossman said, “We got another plowhand,” and promised Jim’s folks another three acres to tend, when the boy was seven or eight and old enough to work.

The boy was picking cotton when he was six. Many a day he would come in from the fields, trudging along beside his father and sisters, and find nothing on the table but biscuits and thickening gravy. Flour and grease and water make thickening gravy and it is flavored with salt and much black pepper to make it taste like food.

Jim spoke often of these things to Buddy. The older boy said, “It was always just the same at my house.” He could remember one fine summer when a gallon jar of prepared mustard sat on the table. Jim could recall the time his mother set out a jar of fiery hot peppers.

Thinking of food made them hungrier. The man’s offer worried them. Why did he come to them now, when all their lives they had been hungry and had eaten food fit for hogs, and no one had ever offered better?

The man had promised to come back and write down everything they wanted. “I don’t believe it,” Buddy said.

Jim said, “I hope he does come back. I’d sure hate to make up a long list of good things to eat, and wait on it, and hope on it, and then never get any of it.”

Buddy said with anger, “I don’t want anything to do with it!”

“Me neither,” Jim agreed, but reluctantly.

They sat thinking for a long time, and Buddy let Jim have an occasional puff of a “Bull” Durham cigarette.

Presently Buddy said, “What are you studying about?”

Eagerly Jim said, “Buddy, we ain’t got a thing to do anyhow, so why don’t we study up something to tell the man? If he does come back.”

“All right,” Buddy said promptly. “Buffalo fish. A big fat buffalo with the grease just popping out all over.”

“You had buffalo before,” Jim objected. “Why don’t you study up something you never tasted? I mean like a roast leg of lamb or oranges or a malted milk—”

“Buffalo,” Buddy said.

So the two studied and dreamed about all the food they would name to the man, if he ever came back.

Buddy knew why he wanted buffalo fish. Less than a year ago he had gone to a church social along the river bottoms and there had stuffed himself on sweet potatoes and fresh buffalo. Across the table from him was a pretty little girl. Buddy kept looking at her all afternoon, thinking how good it would be to have her all by his side. Sure enough it worked out the way he hoped, and they went walking along the river side. She let Buddy hold her hand as they walked. They came to a grove of pecan trees and Buddy picked up a pocketful and cracked pecans in his fist for the girl to eat.

“I never held a girl’s hand,” Jim complained, when Buddy was telling him about it, “let alone anything else.”

Buddy couldn’t brag about much of anything else either. He and the girl had not said much. They just walked along holding hands and in the early evening light they could hear the people singing, back at the picnic.

Oh death! Oh death! Spare me over to another year!

The way the music sounded over the river waters, it might have been angels singing over people who knew they had to die but didn’t want to. But Buddy told Jim it was the prettiest singing he had ever heard.

All these remembered things made Buddy insist on naming buffalo fish and sweet potatoes, at the head of the list.

Now the reason why Jim thought of roast leg of lamb and oranges and a malted milk was simply that he had never tasted any of these things before.

“I looked in a book,” he said, and by book he meant magazine, “and they had a roast leg of lamb in there that looked so pretty it made me almost taste it.”

Buddy said, “I bought me an orange once.”

As to the malted milk, Jim said he had once talked to a fellow who had actually had one. This fellow got it by working a couple of hours in a drug store in town and he said it was the best tasting thing he had ever had.

Buddy said, “I used to go to town and look at all the billboards on the road, selling good things to eat. And the store windows full of things nobody ever heard of. Seems to me some people don’t do anything but eat.”

Their list grew longer. It was such a fine list that they actually got to believing that the man would return.

When he did come back, with pencil and paper, he didn’t get a chance to say one word before Buddy was rattling off in one breath things like buffalo fish and sweet potatoes, cornbread, biscuits, store bread and butter, pork chops, fried hominy. The man had to ask him to slow down.

Jim took more time in telling the man what he wanted, savoring the name of each dish as he spoke it. Roast leg of lamb, chicken a la king, baked beans, fried peach pie. Then he wanted a whole head of lettuce, some bell peppers, and a dill pickle out of a barrel.

Jim wanted a lobster, remembering the name though not certain what it was. The man said he doubted whether he could find a lobster in the whole state and suggested a can of tuna fish instead. Jim said that would be fine.

When the man went away Jim said, “What are we going to do with all that?”

“Eat it down to the plate,” Buddy said, “and then sop the plate with store bread.”

It was late at night when the man returned. Other men were with him, pushing a small steam table on wheels. To the boys it looked huge, loaded with pots and dishes full of food, the smells of which made them dizzy with hunger.

They could not eat.

For all those men stood watching them, and making jokes. One of the men was a reporter. The man gave him the long list of dishes. “I didn’t actually get everything on the list,” the man said. “No leg of lamb to be had, for one thing. I didn’t even try to get some of the things. But they’ll have plenty.”

The table looked smaller to Buddy, now. The man had not brought everything, but Buddy observed that the reporter copied the original list, as it stood, without checking it against the actual dishes on the table.

The men went away, tired of their jokes, leaving the table for the boys.

After a while Jim said, “You got your buffalo fish, anyhow.”

“A man can go all his life wanting something and then he gets it and don’t want it,” Buddy said.

“I want it all right,” Jim said, “and I aim to eat it!” He reached for a piece of fish. “Eat some, Buddy,” he pleaded.

“No,” Buddy said. “No sir, I wouldn’t touch it!”

He shook his head.

“Please, Buddy!”

“No,” Buddy said, turning away. “You go ahead if you want to. I won’t touch it. I been hungry all my whole life and tomorrow morning I’m going to sit down and die hungry!

Jim was looking at the piece of buffalo fish in his hand but when he heard the way Buddy said the word hungry he reached through the bars of the death cell and put the fish back on the plate.