The Confessions of Frances Godwin (6 page)

The weather was cold, but not too cold. The hog weighed almost two hundred fifty pounds, a little heavier than usual because we were slaughtering late. It was a Canadian Lacombe gilt that my father favored. Next year we’d slaughter a Berkshire. My uncle’s preference. One hog a year for the two families.

Ma and my aunt Klaudia were cooking pierogis in the kitchen and canning cherries at the same time. I said a few words in Polish to Izabella, the exchange student who was helping her. I didn’t know much Polish, and she answered me in perfect English. She was on the swim team at the high school, so she had to be driven into the YMCA, where the swim team practiced, every morning at five, which was when
the team practiced. Ma didn’t drive and didn’t want to learn, which was very inconvenient out on the farm. She didn’t care. She went shopping with my aunt once a week. My cousin Jerzy loved to drive and my father had bought him a car so he could drive Ma around, but now he lived in Boston. Another cousin, Michal, who lived on the next farm, drove Izabella in to swim practice every morning in the car, a Studebaker. The top looked like the tower of a submarine. He was in love with her. He was big and strong, good looking, too, but too shy to put himself forward.

The cherries were in jars in a pressure cooker on the stove. More jars were being sterilized in a steam bath on the woodstove on the porch. When you opened the kitchen door you could feel the heat.

Paul sat at the table, drinking a glass of warm buttermilk that my mother had forced on him, listening to Aunt Klaudia, who was holding the baby and explaining the difference between hot pack and raw pack. Ma preferred hot pack; Aunt Klaudia preferred raw pack. So they took turns, hot pack one year, raw pack the next, just the way Pa and my uncle took turns with the hogs, Canadian Lacombe gilt one year, Berkshire the next. I sat next to Paul. He offered me some of his buttermilk, but I shook my head.

“If you’d gone to mass yesterday,” Ma said to me, “you’d have heard Father Gordon say it in Latin. Three more weeks and it’s gone.” She cut her throat with her finger.

“The old Tridentine mass,” Paul said. “It goes back a long way.”

“You see,” Ma said, looking at me, “he knows more about it than you do.”

“Father Gordon doesn’t really know Latin anyway,” I said. “He’s just memorized it. Like a parrot.”

“Aren’t you Miss Smarty Pants,” Ma said. “Who hasn’t been to mass for how many years?”

Paul said, “They’ve been preparing for this for a long time now, but I’m afraid they haven’t done a very good job. A lot of misinformation, confusion.”

Ma poured some more warm buttermilk into Paul’s glass. “I know,” she said. “We been getting all these instructions about the responses. We have to say one thing instead of another, ‘The Lord be with you’ instead of ‘
Dominus vobiscum
.’
‘And also with you’ instead of ‘
et cum spiritu tuo
.’”
Aunt Klaudia welcomed the switch to English, but Ma had no stomach for changes in the liturgy.

The buttermilk was a kind of test, though I don’t think Ma realized it. She made all my boyfriends drink warm buttermilk. She couldn’t understand how anyone could drink it cold, right out of the refrigerator. I had to laugh. Paul didn’t like milk in any form. He even put orange juice on his cereal. But he drank the buttermilk.

“I think it’s nice,” my aunt said, “for everybody to know what’s going on. We have to go with the times. Nobody understands Latin anyway. Except Frances. And maybe you, Paul.”

This was the first time one of the women had uttered his name.

“You don’t just throw out the old ways,” Ma said. “Everybody in the world hears the same words. Gets the same blessings. Now they want to change all that.” She paused. “The Pope can go to hell if he wants to, that’s his business—”

“But you’re not serving meat on Friday,” I finished the sentence for her.

“It’s good to suffer a little bit once a week,” Ma said. “To remind you of somebody else’s suffering. Next they’ll be saying it’s okay for the priests to get married.” She crossed herself.

“Eating fish is not suffering,” I said.

“You had to love the pope,” Aunt Klaudia said. “The old pope. Pope John.”

“He was a nice man,” Ma said, “but he made a lot of problems for everybody.”

“He started Vatican Two,” I said.

“Vatican Two,” she said. “What about Vatican One? Tell me what was Vatican One? Does anybody remember Vatican One?”

“That was more than a hundred years ago,” Paul said.

“You see, Franny,” Ma said (again), “your husband knows more than you do, and he’s not even a Catholic.”

“Ma, he just looked up all this stuff in the
Columbia Encyclopedia
to impress you.”

“Well, it’s nice that he went to all that trouble.”

Baby Stella started to cry. “See, Ma,” I said, “you’re upsetting the baby.”

Pa got out a bottle of potato schnapps. “Here,” he said, “rub a little of this on her gums.”

“Put that away,” Ma said. “Give her to me, I’ll change her diapers.”

“Ma, sit, sit. I’ll change her. Where’s the diaper bag?”

“It’s on the couch,” Ma said, picking up the baby and going off into the living room, which was right off the kitchen. I could hear her singing in Polish, a song that she used to sing to me. I could remember the words, but not what they meant:

A la la Kotki dwa

Szary bury oby dwa

la la Tatusiu

Tru la lu la lu

When my uncle, who’d gone into town to get a new rope for the block and tackle, returned, Pa got out the bottle of schnapps again. It was part of the drill.

The pierogis were cooling on a tray on top of the stove, where the dog, an old Norwegian elkhound, couldn’t get at them.

Either my uncle was growing a beard or he just hadn’t shaved for several days. “So you’re the new husband,” he said, looking at Paul. His voice was raspy. “The new helper.” He looked at me. “And this is the baby.” Ma was standing in the doorway to the living room, baby Stella over her shoulder.

The conversation, which had been awkward, turned to food—always safe. My uncle ate a pierogi. “You buy these at the A and P?”

“Get away with you.”

“Klaudia buys them frozen, don’t you?”

“One time I try, that’s all. You going to kill that hog or we should go home.”

Pa filled three shot glasses and handed one to my uncle and one to Paul. This was another test, not as difficult as the warm buttermilk.

“Na zdrowie!”
my uncle said.
To health!

“
Na zdrowie
!” Pa said.

“
Na zdrowie
!” Paul said.

And then they tossed back the shots.

We’d managed to avoid the question that was on everyone’s mind. At least on Ma’s mind.
Is this a valid marriage? And, what attitude should we take toward it? And, is there any point in talking about it to Father Gordon at Saint Clement’s?

But I knew that the question was already moot.

Paul and Pa and my uncle went out to slaughter the hog. It was an important occasion. Time for man talk. It was a mystery. Pa would have something to say to Paul. Threaten him? Probably not. That was my mother’s department. Probably tell him that he’d better take good care of me. I see them stop. Facing each other. I can almost hear their voices. But not quite. But I can see that they’re laughing.

“So. This new husband of yours,” my aunt said. “He looking after you?”

“I don’t need anyone to look after me.”

My mother put her fingers under her eyes and pulled. It made her look like my grandmother, who used to wear a red ribbon as protection against the evil eye. I thought
I
might need a red ribbon before the day was over.

“I heard he does all the cooking.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“At Pete’s market.”

“Why’d you go to Pete’s?”

“They had lingonberries on sale.”

“You didn’t call me?” Ma said.

I watched through the window as my uncle threaded the new rope through the block and tackle and attached it to the pulleys. Paul and Pa and my cousin Michal—who was in love with Izabella—had gone to get the hog, which they would hang from a tree limb. A fifty-five-gallon oil drum full of boiling water sat on a piece of cattle panel laid over a charcoal fire. I could see the men talking. Paul was doing fine so far. He knew how to talk to my parents, not saying too much, but not bashful either. He was wearing a flannel shirt. Old. Just right for the occasion. I’d never seen it before. He’d been talking to our neighbor on Chambers Street, Willie, who ran the M&W Meat Market downtown, getting some tips on slaughtering. This was the sort of thing he loved, the sort of thing he thought of as “real life.”

I went outside with my camera to take a picture as Paul and Pa led the hog up from the sty, the pen, like the heifer in the Keats poem. The sty, which was next to the barn where the driveway forks, was always kept clean. Pigs are clean. The hog had his own toilet area in one corner and a wallow in another. My uncle tested the water three times. Flicked the water off.

The three men and Michal stood around the drum, talking, my uncle holding onto the rope around the hog. Pa handed his pistol to Paul. A long-barrel Colt .38 that I’d learned to shoot with, over Ma’s loud objections.

After some more discussion Paul placed the pistol at the hog’s ear. The hog knew something was going on and wouldn’t stand still. You have to be careful.

I took a picture and the hog looked up at me. Paul pulled the trigger. I took another picture. The hog went down slowly. Good for Paul. I’d seen it take as many as three shots. The body convulsed on the way down. I looked away as my uncle slit its throat. Then I took another picture as they tied the back legs together. It took all four of them to drag the hog up to the tree by the back porch and hoist it up with the block and tackle over a sturdy limb. Pa put a clean pail under the hog to catch the blood. For blood sausage. My uncle cut it open, and Michal was elected to pull the guts out and bury them so the dog wouldn’t get at them.

And then we all went into the kitchen. The men washed up and drank more schnapps. Paul had blood on his flannel shirt. It took half an hour for the hog to bleed out. The men drank more schnapps.

The hardest part was getting the hog from the tree into the drum of hot water. My uncle cut the head off. I did not take a picture of this, but I took one of the men carrying the hog, on a pole, and maneuvering it into the drum. It was hard to raise it up high enough. Paul put his arms around the hog and lifted. They got it over the edge and down into the hot water. Tail first. Headless. The open neck on top. They left it in for about half a minute. Just enough to scald it, not cook it, and then they flipped it over, almost knocking the drum over, for another twenty seconds, and then they hung it in the barn, legs spread.

I went back inside and made myself comfortable in the kitchen while the men skinned the hog. It took a long time. I washed up some dishes while Ma held baby Stella, and Izabella and Aunt Klaudia put the cherry jars on the porch to cool. Ma had run the soapy dish water so hot I had to grab each dish or glass and set it on the counter to cool before I could dry it.

The men came back in, ate a plate of pierogis, drank more schnapps. I could see that the day had been a success, and the women could see it, too. Paul had passed the buttermilk test (though Ma never realized that it was a test), and the schnapps test, and the slaughtering test.

But what about me? I was being tested too, though I wasn’t sure exactly what the questions were. There was baby Stella, who had incipient diaper rash. Hmmm. Not good. Ma wasn’t happy with my plan to teach Latin at the high school the following fall instead of staying home with Stella. But she liked the fact that Stella would have to come out here during the day.

“Ma,” I said, “why don’t you learn how to drive? That would make everything so much simpler.”

“Are you sure you want your mother driving out on the highway?” This from Aunt Klaudia.

“It’s just Blackburn Road over to Kruger Road and into town. One right turn and one left turn at the stop light on Old Thirty-four.”

Ma threw up her hands. She said something in Polish to my aunt. Keeping an eye on Izabella and on Cousin Michal.

“They’re in love,” Aunt Klaudia said aloud, nodding at the young people. “Your ma’s worried.”

I nodded.

“What do you know now that they don’t know?” my aunt went on.

“The woman cries before the wedding,” my uncle said, interrupting, “the man after.”

My aunt turned to Paul: “What about you?”

“No tears yet,” he said, and I could see he was enjoying himself.

I started to make noises about getting Stella home. It was late afternoon. The hog would have to cool for a couple hours before sectioning. But Ma told me to sit still. She put an uncut loaf of bread on the table cloth and a strip of white cloth. And a bottle of wine.