Gap Creek (11 page)

Soon as we eat our grits and gravy and Mr. Pendergast eat his
poached egg, he took his rifle out to the hogpen. He had laid down scalding boards by the washpot the day before.

“Be easier to shoot the hog by the scalding boards,” Ma Richards said.

“If you know how to lead a filthy hog you’re welcome to do it,” Mr. Pendergast said.

There was a frost that made the grass white as shavings of coconut. I had put on a coat and gloves. My breath smoked in the first light of dawn. Puddles had a paper of ice on them. In the cold, still air you didn’t smell the stink of the hogpen till you got close beside it. Ma Richards stayed back in the kitchen.

I didn’t look while Mr. Pendergast shot the hog in the head. Instead, I started a fire under the washpot and piled on wood to make it hot. I carried several buckets from the spring and filled the pot. And I sharpened two butcher knives, and two paring knives for the scraping. A small thin blade is always better for scraping the hair of a hog.

A shot cracked in the first light and when I got to the pen Mr. Pendergast was tying a string to one leg of the hog laying on its side. He had slit the throat and dark blood was pooling on the mud. There was nothing for me to do but wade into the filth and tie another rope to the other hind leg.

It took both me and Mr. Pendergast pulling on the ropes to drag the hog over the froze ground to the scalding boards. The way a hog is soft and quivery it spreads on the ground and is hard to drag. The water in the pot was beginning to boil and send a column of steam up into the sky. There was no wind, and the steam and smoke rose straight up into the air. I dipped a bucket into the water and splashed it over the hog. The carcass spread out its fat on the boards, and the water smoked wherever it splashed and spilled onto the ground.

After I had scalded one side and scraped it clean we rolled the
hog over. The body shook like jelly, and the eye stared blue in the first sunlight. I dumped several more buckets of water on the hide and bent over to shave away the hair that was left. I always hated the stink of hog bristles and scalded skin. It’s a stench of half-boiled flesh and wet hairs. I scraped and cleaned the knife on the corner of a board, and scraped some more. Mr. Pendergast stood by the fire and watched. I seen that by “helping” he had meant for me to do the work. He seemed so short of breath, maybe there wasn’t much else he could do.

Now after a hog is scraped comes the real work. What goes before is just the start. With the hog scalded down and shaved, I took a butcher knife and slit the shanks of the back feet so there was room between the bones and the tendons. Then we drug the hog over to a pole leaning in the forks of an apple tree. I fitted a gambrel stick over the pole and stuck the sharpened ends through the slits in the hog’s hind legs. It took both me and Mr. Pendergast to push the gambrel stick up the pole, sliding wood on wood until the hog was hanging off the ground. Then I tied the gambrel stick to the fork of the tree, and it was time to get to work.

Taking a sharpened butcher knife, I drove it into the fat of the hog’s belly, but not too deep. I didn’t want to cut any of the guts inside. I’d always hated butchering hogs, and here I was married and doing it again. Slicing through the skin and fat I brought the blade right down the hog from one end of the belly to the other. And then with the axe I chopped through the breastbone. Hot guts started falling out, and I had to push them back until we got the tub underneath. Then with my sleeves rolled up I raked the smoking guts into the tub, the slick coils of entrails, intestines like blisters and bubbles of manure with big worms inside, as well as liver, heart, lungs, stomach. I took the axe and finished splitting the chest bone and then raked out the rest of the innards.

It took both me and Mr. Pendergast to lug the tub into the garden
to bury the guts. They had a sickening smell of blood and manure. I had blood up to my elbows.

“Never seen a woman work like you,” Mr. Pendergast said.

“Work ain’t nothing but work,” I said.

NOW THE NEXT job was to cut off the head. I knowed Hank liked fried hog brains, so I meant to save the brains. I took the butcher knife and carved off the head down to the spine, and then I chopped through the bones with the axe. The head was so heavy I could just barely carry it over to the wash table. The skull would have to be cracked later.

The sun was high over the ridge and making everything gold by the time I started carving up the carcass. First I had to cut off the shoulders, which you can leave whole, like hams, and put in the smokehouse. Next you have to section the belly and back into middlings and loins. With the axe I hacked through ribs and backbone. Bits of fat and blood and bones splattered on my clothes.

“Look at you,” somebody said behind me. It was Ma Richards, who had brought a dishpan out to the wash table. I thought how easy it would be to swing the axe at her. But I was quick ashamed of such a thought. I had to watch myself, cause I got riled while working hard.

“We’ll need every pan and bucket in the house,” I said.

For the fine work of cutting ribs and tenderloin along the back I got a saw from the barn and sawed up the ribs in sections about four inches long. But instead of sawing up pork chops I sliced out the tenderloin so it could be fried in thin pieces without the bone.

The last job, except for salting the hams and shoulders and bacon, was to separate the fat from the meat underneath. With a paring knife I carved off the streaked bacon we would need for
cooking. And I sliced the fat into sections between six inches wide and a foot long. My hands got so greasy they wouldn’t hardly hold a knife. I heaped up three tubs with chunks of fat.

“I’ll start dicing up the fat as soon as somebody brings it in the kitchen,” Ma Richards said.

“I can’t carry no bucket of fat,” Mr. Pendergast said.

It took both me and Mr. Pendergast to wrestle the tubs and dishpans of fat to the kitchen table. It appeared dark as a cave in the house after the blinding sunlight.

Mr. Pendergast got a box of salt from the smokehouse and we sprinkled down the hams and shoulders and slabs of bacon before we carried them to the shelves of the smokehouse. We crusted the meat on every side with salt. When we was finished I looked at the mess around the scalding boards. The fire was smoldering in the sun and swatches of scraped hair was scattered on the grass. There was blood and bits of fat and skin on the table. Bloody buckets and tubs and knives laid in the grass. I could still smell the guts and scalded skin.

My hands was greasy and bloody. I walked down to the branch and washed up as best I could. It was time to carry the tenderloin and ribs into the house. It was time to render the lard and make sausage. I had been working since before daylight, and it was way past dinnertime.

MA RICHARDS HAD put three canners on the kitchen table, and she had started dicing up the tubs and dishpans of pork fat. “I’d about as soon die as render any more lard,” she said. Her hands was already shiny with grease.

“I can do it myself,” I said.

“Don’t be so proud.” Ma said. “It’ll take us both to finish by dark.”

I was going to tell Ma it wasn’t exactly pride that made me work so hard, but I didn’t. “I’ll fry up some tenderloin and make grits for dinner,” I said. One of the pleasures of hog killing was to have fresh meat. I was hungry. I throwed more wood in the stove and sliced some of the tenderloin into a pan. Then I put on water to boil for grits. Mr. Pendergast wandered into the kitchen. “Ain’t we going to have dinner?” he said.

“Won’t be but a minute,” I said. There was just a little cold coffee in the pot and I throwed it out in the backyard. While the meat was frying and the grits boiling, I ground some more beans on the back porch. I was so tired my arms felt a little numb. I just wanted to set down and rest. It would be only two or three hours before Hank got home and was ready for his supper. But I would be working long past that, rendering the hog fat down into lard.

When you’re tired it’s like all the force in the world works against you. Takes extra effort just to do little things. You feel it takes willpower just to breathe. If Ma Richards said something snide, I didn’t know but what I’d bust into tears.

“They’s streaks in this fat,” Ma Richards said.

“A streak won’t hurt the lard,” Mr. Pendergast said.

“It’s a waste of bacon,” Ma said.

“We’ve got plenty of bacon,” I said.

“It’s a waste; that’s all I’m saying,” Ma said.

“I’ll try to do better next time,” I said, as dry as I could. The tiredness made me slow and calmer than I expected. I turned over the slices of tenderloin and stirred the grits. The coffee started to boil.

“Nothing smells better than fresh tenderloin,” Mr. Pendergast said. The fresh meat, as it crackled and turned brown, smelled sweeter than any pastry. Fresh meat has a perfume of its own. The steam that went up from the pan of tenderloin filled the kitchen with a golden flavor, mixed with fumes of the boiling coffee. The smells made me a little light-headed, and out of myself.

When I cleared a space at the table and put the grits and tenderloin there, Mr. Pendergast brought a chair from the corner and set down. I poured three cups of coffee and put down three plates with knives and forks. Mr. Pendergast helped hisself to a slice of tenderloin. I put butter on the table and set down myself.

“Only heathens eat without asking a blessing,” Ma Richards said.

“You say the blessing,” I said to her. As far as I knowed Mr. Pendergast wasn’t a praying man. At least I had never heard him pray. Some men will pray out loud and some won’t.

Ma bowed her head and closed her eyes. “Lord, make us thankful,” she said. “Forgive our forgetfulness and unworthiness. Punish our faults, but forgive our sinfulness, for we are all black sinners inside. And forgive the folly of youth, and the foolishness of old age.”

There was no doubt Ma was referring to my youth and folly in her prayer, but you can’t argue with what a body says in a prayer. What they say in prayer is between them and the Lord. I passed the tenderloin to Ma and then took a slice for myself. I had browned the meat till it was gold and crisp on the outside, but white and tender on the inside. The meat was so tender it almost melted when you bit down on it. I put butter on the hot grits and stirred it in. I had warmed some biscuits left over from breakfast in the oven and sliced one of them and put butter on it.

“Nothing’s better than grits and tenderloin,” Mr. Pendergast said. And it was true. The fresh meat went perfect with the taste of grits and butter. I poured a little milk into the coffee and took a sip. The coffee taste was different from the sweetness of the meat and grits and went just right with them.

“This coffee is too strong,” Ma Richards said.

“You can put some milk in it,” Mr. Pendergast said.

Ma stirred butter into her grits and took a bite, but she didn’t say nothing. I thought she kind of grunted with the pleasure of the
taste. She cut off a piece of tenderloin and put it in her mouth, but still she didn’t say nothing.

I took a sip of coffee and felt the brightness of the coffee in my belly and in my veins. The grits and butter and meat and biscuits was making me warm inside. But the coffee made the air in the kitchen seem shiny and cool, and even the buckets of fat looked clean.

“I never got enough tenderloin,” Mr. Pendergast said.

“Tenderloin is better with gravy,” Ma Richards said. But she kept eating the grits with butter.

“Tenderloin is good with anything,” Mr. Pendergast said.

I got another helping of grits and a second slice of meat. It was hard to believe this golden flavor had been the smelly hog just a few hours before. I tried to forget the smell of scalded hair and skin.

“Best hog meat is fattened on acorns,” Mr. Pendergast said. “When hogs run loose they tasted better.”

“I don’t remember tenderloin tasting better than this,” Ma Richards said.

“We could gather acorns and bring them to the hog,” I said.

“It would take a week to pick up a bushel of acorns,” Mr. Pendergast said.

“They used to kill pigeons and feed them to hogs,” Ma Richards said. “Back when there was millions of pigeons come through every year. Of course that was before my time.”

“Before my time too,” Mr. Pendergast said. He had grease on his chin, but he didn’t stop to wipe it off.

I felt like eating was the best thing there was. People eating together felt bound to each other, like it says in the Bible about the breaking of bread.

“I went all the way through the war without any pork to speak of,” Ma Richards said.

“I did too, except that we would steal a hog from a farm we was passing,” Mr. Pendergast said.

“That’s why we didn’t have meat,” Ma said. “The bushwhackers stole our hogs.”

“We wasn’t bushwhackers,” Mr. Pendergast said. “The army had nothing but a little cornmeal to give us.”

Since I was a little girl I’d heard stories about the Confederate War. I wanted to think about something more pleasant. “Times is better now,” I said.

“Times was worse after the war was over,” Ma said. She helped herself to more grits. “When Fate come back from the army and we got married, we didn’t have a dollar between us. We took up housekeeping in the cabin on Painter Mountain without a horse or cow. For a long time I cooked soup in the washpan. We had to borrow Fate’s daddy’s horse just to break a garden. I had to make coffee in the water bucket. And everybody else was near about as poor.”

I had not heard Ma talk so much. It was the sweet tenderloin and grits and coffee making her feel better than herself. Her tongue was loosened and softened.

“For ten years after the war you couldn’t find a nickel,” Ma said. “People traded work and paid each other in kind. I finally got me half a dozen hens and it was their eggs I traded for coffee and sugar. We didn’t have nothing else but what we raised. When Dave come along we still didn’t have a cow. By the time Hank was born the worst was over.”

“Hank said he was born little,” I said.

“Didn’t weigh much more than two pounds,” Ma said. “He come almost two months early. It’s a miracle he ever lived.” She took another slice of tenderloin and a sip of coffee. And she buttered a biscuit. “Nobody expected him to live. I don’t reckon he ever would have except for the sugartit.”