The Bones of Plenty (42 page)

“Well, you’re looking fine, Mr. Shepard,” he said loudly.

Rose moved to leave but he said, “Oh, no, no, no, no. Just slide back an inch and let me take a little listen here.” He planted the stethoscope against Will’s chest for a few seconds, nonchalantly, as though he already knew exactly what Will’s personal heartbeat was going to sound like.

He took the plugs out of his ears and let the stethoscope ride around his neck like a medal on a ribbon. Will thought that nobody but a doctor could look quite so sure of himself, quite so eminently and appropriately placed in the world, with the badge of his position so modestly displayed as part of his working attire. The doctor could play negligently with the end that had received the secret, desperately important sounds, as Murdoch did now, holding the little black cup in one hand and plopping it into the palm of the other. He tapped it with an irregular beat that made a man wonder if the doctor was imitating the rhythm he had just listened to.

“How’s the bellyache?” he asked.

“About the same,” Will said.

“Well, you’re in fine shape. Wonderful physique for a man your age. We’ll take your picture now, and see what we can see.”

Will was awakened the next morning so he could be put back to sleep again. He was dizzily aware of being lifted from his bed to a wagon, of the wall of white-shrouded masked people around him, of Rose momentarily in their midst, of a supine levitation in an elevator, of the white people lifting him again, of the narrow cold slab, of the jolly sounds of Dr. Murdoch. He wanted to tell Murdoch just to forget it all—that he understood the laws, that he knew it was too late. But the black rubber mask came down like a vulture to clutch at the bones of his cheeks, steadying his skull with its claws in order to pluck out the delicacies of his fainting eyes. “Just breathe deeply, now,” they said into his ear. “Just a few deep breaths and you’ll be all right.”

A wind had come in the night and herded before it a multiplying flock of brilliant clouds that clambered up and up into the steep heights of the sky. Their shadows moving over the stubble seemed too thick and black to be cast by such shining white things so far away.

Lucy was walking home under the shadows, thinking of all the people who would be at her house today when she got there and how they would laugh and joke as they worked. To make the three miles seem shorter, she would fix her eyes on a distant marker—a mailbox or a big rock or an extra high fence post—and never look down at the gravel crunching so sluggishly beneath her till she reached the marker. Whenever she remembered, she would recite her 8’s aloud to the empty road.

Somebody inside the kitchen had to move a chair before Lucy could get through the door. It was Mr. Egger. “Well, here’s
Lucy!”
he cried. He always teased her and she never knew how to answer him. He was running the big meat press he had brought with him. He and the grinder seemed to go together. They both had but a single arm to crank round and round. He let go of the crank and reached across his chest, across the space where his sleeve was folded back and pinned to his shoulder, and grabbed her wrist.

“Here!” he exclaimed. “Here’s a hand I found. It’ll give us just what we need to finish off this first pan. Umm num num! I bet it’ll be the best-eating sausage of the bunch—but we’ll have to watch out for the fingernails.”

She stood looking down at his hand on her wrist, while the women in the kitchen laughed at what he was saying. It made her shiver to have him yanking her hand around right in the space of air where his own other arm should have been.

Her mother saved her. “You run and change into your overalls, now, Lucy, the way I told you to, and then go down and tell the men to bring up some more sausage meat.” She made it sound as though it was Lucy, not Mr. Egger, who was to blame because Lucy was dallying in the messy kitchen when she ought to have been taking off her good school clothes. Lucy had begun to understand that it was always polite to blame yourself or your family instead of your company.

On her way to the barn she had to squeeze past Mr. Egger again, who was waiting for more meat to grind. He wasn’t much good at most heavy butchering chores, which took two hands, so the only thing he did outside with the men was a thing which required only one finger—one very accurate and sensitive finger. He supervised while they filled the great steel barrel with water from a caldron steaming over an outdoor wood fire. When the barrel was ready for the pig, he ran his finger through the water—once, twice—if he couldn’t stand to do it the third time, the water was too hot—thrice—if he could just stand it, the water was just right. But if he could do it a fourth time, the water was too cold. “Watch out, now,” he would say. “She’s still too hot in there—you’ll set the hair on that pig! Give her a minute to cool off or else fetch me a bucket of cold water.” He would motion to the man pouring the water, making him stop after a quart or so, and stir a ladle back and forth in the drum a couple of times. Then he’d test it again. Or if he could stand it to put his finger in the fourth time he’d begin to fuss and worry.

“For God’s sake bring some boiling water! Shake a leg there! If those women haven’t got you some boiling water up there to the house, tell ’em they can come shave this critter themselves!”

If the water couldn’t be brought up to the temperature that seemed exactly right to him, and the men decided to go ahead and scald the hog anyway, he’d tuck his wet hand into his pocket and predict the troubles they were going to have. “All right, do it your own way, do it your own way! I tell you it’s too cold. You’re gonna set the hair on that pig.”

When the water was just right, half the hair came off as they sloshed the pig up and down in it. Then the rest of the hair sloughed off easily with long strokes of the big knives. When the water was wrong, every single hair had to be cut off at its root.

It had been a perfect day for butchering—cold and dry. It was a very big pig, and they had had to use the block and tackle in order to scald it and get it up for bleeding. Against the side of the barn they had made a table of boards placed across two small barrels. The table held what amounted to nearly half of the pig—the same pig that had squealed to Lucy last night for the food he could not have. Now he was a baffling, monstrous, three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle.

The gray bristles were strewn on the ground where they had been rinsed off the table and slopped out of the scalding drum. Around the corner of the barn the stupendous innards sprawled out in swollen convolutions, seemingly ready to burst despite the pig’s last hours of starvation. The veins on the organs were red, blue, even green. Lucy was always amazed at how brightly colored an animal was on the inside. The pig’s blood was clotted along the several arcs which had jetted from the warm slit throat before the pressure lessened and the stream poured into the tub beneath the fat face. Even if his pieces of meat and insides
could
be put back together, what could be done about the pieces of his blood?

His narrow, flat lower jaw gaped away from the round, gristled snout, and above the snout, exactly centered between the two short rows of hoary closed eyelashes, was the rust-colored spot. Her father never missed with his rifle, no matter how an animal bucked and plunged. It was hard to shoot a pig that squarely, but it was also embarrassing to make a pig squeal. Even some of the best shooters sometimes had to shoot an animal two or three times, but her father never did. “They just lose their nerve,” he would say to her mother. Lucy studied the rust-colored spot. It bothered her because it seemed to her there was something about it that she did not understand.

The pig would be dodging, taking little runs this way and that, trying to elude the men who had dragged him from his pen and stood about him in a circle. He would pause, at bay, swing his head to look toward her father, and know nothing more. He would not even hear the shot. The sudden rust-colored spot would appear in his forehead and then the men would hurry to string the wires through the tendons of the quivering hind legs and hoist the carcass up with the block and tackle. Then came the knife sticking deeply through the inches of white fat, the numberless capillaries tracing their shocked red lines in the whiteness, then the eruption from the jugular itself. But about all this the pig would know nothing.

Then, after the bleeding, the lowering into the scalding barrel, the scraping on the table, the return to the hook on the block, the long incision down the belly all the way from tail to throat, the deft slices to free the membranes of the stomach and intestines from the chops and bacon which housed them, and finally the whole severed digestive system bouncing out into an empty tub or on the ground. Thus were the parts of paramount interest to the pig dispensed with, while the parts of paramount interest to the men were subjected to a complex further division.

The men flensed away the fat, so pure white between the rim of hide and the red meat. They tossed the chunks of fat into the rendering pot and then they began cutting and sawing to separate the picnic shoulders from the spareribs and the spareribs from the ham roasts, and the ham roasts from the hams. Then they cut Boston butts, pork steaks, loin roasts, and several kinds of chops. When they had divided one half of the hog into all these pieces and more, they did the same with the other half. And the beginning of that puzzle made of all the pieces of muscle and blood and fat and bone and hair was the original riddle—the perplexing rust-colored spot. What exactly did the bullet do when it made the spot?

There was a full bucket of small pieces standing on the ground by the table. The pieces were inferior morsels to be ground by Mr. Egger into much smaller pieces.

“Is this the sausage meat?” Lucy asked. Her father nodded.

She took the pail into the kitchen and Mr. Egger said, “By golly, now I’ve got me a helper prit-near as good as another arm. You feed it in, Lucy, and then I won’t have to quit cranking all the time. Set right over here.”

She dipped her hand into the bucket and dropped some chunks into the wide mouth of the meat press, letting them fall several inches from her fingertips.

“Push ’em down there a little,” Mr. Egger said. “It grabs hold better that way.”

She pushed with one index finger and jerked her hand back when she felt the meat pulled from below. He laughed and laughed while he cranked and cranked. He certainly acted as though he would think it was funny to grind off her finger. If people who scared you and teased you did it because they liked you, as her mother was always saying, then it would be better if a lot of people didn’t like you. Especially when
you
did not like
them.
This way a person like Mr. Egger would make you jump in a fright and then he would laugh and
you
were supposed to laugh, too, because everybody was watching. If only your family wasn’t too poor, you could buy your own meat press and then perhaps Mr. Egger would not have to bring
his
and he would stay at home on your butchering day.

Rachel rushed from one job to another on butchering day, trying to make sure that each job was done to suit her. She always did the final scraping of the casings herself. They were nothing more than a flimsy, translucent pile in the bottom of an enamel pan now, but they represented a lot of work. The men did the first part of the job; they squeezed out the last of the contents and sent the casings up to her empty but still the color of what they had held. Then they had to be scraped and scraped till they were pressed absolutely clean, and then put to soak in warm water and then scraped again. She herself couldn’t see a bit of difference between sausages simply fried in patties and sausages stuffed into casings. Either way they had to be canned, anyhow. But George liked them in casings, so that was the way she did them.

She gently inserted a fork handle through the center of the pile and lifted up the membranes and then let them slide off like a twisted line of writing. They were ready for the sausages.

The men brought up the brutal head, reposing on the base of its neck in the wash tub, the snout pointing defiantly up at her. The head contained a great deal of good meat which had to be salvaged. George was always after her to make head cheese, but that was where she drew the line. She used the cheeks, jowls, and tongue in the sausage and discarded the rest.

Besides the pans full of sausage there were other pans. One held the liver. Lucy hated liver, but she would have to eat what they didn’t put in the sausage because it was so good for her.

In another pan lay the huge heart, letting the last of its blood into the red water around it. Considering the chicken, turkey, steer, and hog hearts she had seen, Lucy always wondered what made people think a valentine looked like a heart.

They doled out the stronger meat of the ground-up organs to the several pans, kneaded the sausage once more, inserted a finer blade in the meat press, and commenced the work of stuffing the pig’s intestines with its own minced body. Lucy knew there must be some significance in such an operation—using the innards that digested the corn and slop as containers for the meat that the corn and slop had produced. She had somewhat the same feeling about this that she had about the rusty hole between the eyes in the head. There was too much to understand. What happened when a person died?