Cold Quiet Country (11 page)

Then he told me to be ready for blood and guts come sunrise.

“Slaughtering hogs,” he said, “is an all-day event.”

I didn’t mind. I’d worked with a dozen farmers outside Monroe and if there’s one thing consistent about farmers it’s that they don’t buy meat from the butcher. Harvesting animals is part of agriculture, and if you’re apprenticed long enough, you’ll see chickens with their tiny necks slit, and cattle, and hogs, and more steaming gut piles than you’d thought populated the earth, until you stop and think that every one of us has a mess of guts, and part of the game is to prevent them from winding up steaming on the ground. I nodded at Burt. “I better get my rest, then.”

“Hold up a minute. I want to talk to you on the porch.”

Gwen looked at me and I stared at the wall. Finally she said, “Gale?”

I looked.

“You don’t want any apple dumplins?”

“Didn’t know you made any.”

She fetched cereal bowls full of dumplins and warm milk sprinkled with cinnamon and a touch of nutmeg—I asked later that night—and Burt and I retired to the front porch. The moon was out and the air was brisk.

“You staying warm at night?” Burt said.

“I just bury myself in hay.”

I couldn’t see too well, but it looked like he nodded. I spooned a bite of apple.

“I’ll tell Missus Haudesert to give you a blanket.”

He sounded unprepared to move the conversation where he wanted it to go. I was ready to jump up and run, or fight him, or defend myself. I didn’t know which because I didn’t know exactly what he knew. Guinevere had been out a half-dozen times to the barn. Burt would have his way and she’d come out and cry on me. It made it hard to sit in the man’s kitchen and eat his apple dumplings. Made it hard to sit on his porch and thank him for offering to scare up a blanket.

“I’d appreciate that,” I said.

“I’ll just be out with it,” Burt said. “I’ve talked with you at least a dozen times on this very porch about a man doin’ his duty by his country, and you never let on any interest. The militia needs soldiers. Cal and Jordan are joining up, and you’re a year older’n them.”

I exhaled and downed a bite of dumplin’g “You think the militia would have my sort? I don’t have much to offer. Don’t even have my own rifle.”

“You got your willingness to serve!” he said, and backed it up with a slap to my shoulder. “I speak from the highest authority, and I know they’d have you. We’re fittin’ to put on a recruitin’ drive. Damned if it don’t look like the End Times is nigh, Commie shit going on, this country.” He nodded toward his neighbor a mile away. “Give me the gold standard and a fair market price for a bushel of corn, and leave my goddamn guns alone.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, you’ve heard all that before. I’ll take you to the next meet and get you enlisted, and you can go with me and the boys after that.”

I chewed more dumplings.

I thought about the militia that night, waiting on Gwen. I’d go, only to keep Burt happy. A man knows his principles, it don’t matter what folk he consorts with. Some of it sounded interesting enough—who doesn’t hate the Commies? Who doesn’t like the smell of a rifle and the punch line to a good country joke? Like Burt said, “The difference between men and women is that women want a hundred things from one man and men want one thing from a hundred women.”

A fellow can listen to anything, even if it turns his stomach, so long as his principles get the final word.

Next morning Burt and I ate eggs and drank coffee. Burt looked rough and told Gwen to brew the coffee strong enough to float a railroad spike. Gwen had a bruise on her neck. She’d told me about it, snuggled up with me just six hours before. Told me how he always liked to cover her throat with his hand.

Things like that made me think in terms of finding a billy club and spreading his brains on the kitchen table. I got so mad when Gwen told me about it, she had to hold me back. No sane person can think about a girl enduring that sort of torment, but she was afraid of changing things, and it was easy to cling to the thought that someday he’d stop on his own if he loved her like he said. I told her love is what you do, not what you say, and I’d rather have no love than that of a godforsaken pervert.

She was quiet.

I drank Burt Haudesert’s coffee and ate his eggs. Sat at his table and grinned when he made smart-assed quips. We finished breakfast and headed to the pasture behind the barn. Burt had a dozen hogs, and he’d been fattening them on grain for a month. Before that they ran free over a couple acres of swamp closest the road, where they scavenged on tubers and acorns. It didn’t hurt them so long as they went back on potato peels and grain for their last month.

I wound up working at a butcher shop later, only for a couple months, but long enough to know the way Burt slaughtered was different than the way a professional got it done. Burt liked the butchery of it, and that was different from a man who did it for a living.

Burt and I set up a tripod of four-inch oak poles with a pulley at the top and another on the ground with all the ropes attached beforehand. The pulley on the ground was fixed to a short two-by-four, and I saw right off that the intent was to suspend a hog by his hind legs. One leg of the tripod had a wheelbarrow-sized wheel affixed at the bottom, and that was a puzzle.

The success of the operation hinged on having the shortest time between killing the hog to getting him trussed and hanging with all that blood running out his neck.

Nearby, Burt had a fifty-five gallon drum set up on an iron platform. I spent the first half hour filling it with buckets of water while Burt built and stoked a fire underneath. He dumped in a small bucket of hardwood ash and stirred it around. “Lye,” he said, then set up a table on sawhorses and loaded it with tools of the trade. Bell scrapers for cleaning hair and scurf. A thermometer, a hacksaw. A .22 pistol. To the side was a blue plastic swimming pool.

Burt led me to the stalls and winked. “You got to pick the right hog to start with. You pick a gilt, she can’t be in heat. Meat’ll taste rank. And if you pick a barrow, you want him gelded. And healed from it. Leave nuts on a boar, meat’ll be so rank a dog’ll lick his ass to rid the taste. You’re looking for a hog maybe, two hundred fifty pound. This girl’s about right.”

It was easy getting the first hog out by the tripod. Put a rope around her shoulders and kind of guide her along. Burt took the pistol and cocked it beside the table. “Draw an X between her eyes and ears, and aim for the middle.”

He demonstrated with a grease pencil.

Pap!

Just like that, she stood there, dazed, half her brains scrambled. Blinked. Dropped to her knees and sighed.

“Now you stick her,” Burt said. He slipped a six-inch knife from a sheath at his hip and shoved the hog to her side, grabbed a leg, felt for her breastbone, and thrust the blade into her neck. He sliced deep and long, severing everything in between, then did the same on the other side. “Bleeding out makes sure the meat ain’t tainted,” he said, and showed me his red hand.

We stood beside her a few minutes while she finished dying and the blood flow slowed to a dribble.

“Stick that thermometer in the vat, there. See what it says.”

“Hundred twenty.”

“Shit.”

“What?”

“Hundred fifty’s better. We’ll give her an extra couple of minutes on the tripod.” He knelt at her hind and slit her between hoof and hock. “Grab that truss.”

I supplied it, and he worked the nails into the slits. Together we drew the rope through the pulleys and when the hog was suspended, he wrapped the rope around a notched tie-off on one of the tripod’s legs. More blood flowed from the hog’s neck. Again we waited. I looked to the house and then out at the field where Jordan was turning the soil for winter.

“Wish you was out there?”

“No.”

“Come on. Grab a leg.”

We each stooped to a different tripod leg, and the point of having a wheel on the third became apparent. We dragged the whole contraption real slow until the hog was next to the vat of hot water. Burt hoisted her higher and I pushed her over the tub as Burt lowered her in. He looked at his watch. “Four minutes. We don’t want to cook her, do we?”

After the minutes counted off he raised her back legs a foot out of the water. “See if you can pull off any hair.”

I did, and he raised her the rest of the way out. With the hog hanging and dripping water, he said, “This is the fun part. One of them. We got to get her on the table.”

I bear-hugged her body but couldn’t keep her from landing in the dirt. Burt unfixed her legs and joined me, and together we wrestled her to the makeshift table. He gave me a bell scraper and said, “Start at the feet. They cool the fastest. Hold it like so.”

He demonstrated, holding the scraper like a chisel and dragging it across the hair. “Don’t go so deep you take off the skin. Lotta lard under there we don’t want to waste.”

I took a tool and worked the legs. The hair was already cool, but under she was hot, and there was no escaping the fact this was an animal that a few minutes ago was looking forward to a happy day. We worked and worked. I got a blister on my hand. Finally the hog was mostly white, and I saw Burt scraping in a circular motion, digging out the worst of the scurf and dirt. I did it too, and he nodded. He took a bale hook and pulled off her toes and then rubbed her down with a bristle brush.

We hoisted her on the tripod again, wheeled her back a few yards, put the plastic swimming pool under her, and Burt split her open. He took off his overcoat and pulled what viscera hadn’t already fallen to the pool, then got clean up inside her. Another mass of bright red fell out, her heart and lungs and all. A picture flashed in my head of him having his way with Gwen and I turned away.

“You sure you wouldn’t rather be off in a field?”

“I’m sure.”

“In a pig’s eye!” He howled at that. “In a pig’s eye!”

Burt let the hog hang while he brought over the truck from the driveway, and we wrapped her in burlap and carried her to the bed, and then Burt drove her to the barn. We hung her from a rafter and, covered in wet hair and sticky blood, went downstairs to the stalls for the next.

The second smelled blood soaking into the ground, feared what she knew, and coaxing her to the tripod, I wondered if even the most brazen man wouldn’t feel like a liar saying “come on, honey, come on, girl.” She was livestock, and killing swine is part of the way things are supposed to be, going back to the deepest reaches of history. But though there was no way she would understand my soothing words or the way I felt saying them, I felt guilt.

That’s where Burt was different.

“C’mon, you stinky fuck,” he said. “You’re going to like this. Yes, ma’am.” Again he winked. “You got to talk nice so they don’t scare. Can’t let ’em flush, or jostle about. That’ll spoil the meat, too.”

* * *

Guinevere visited that night, and I had my new blanket spread over me. I lifted it and she crawled next to me and I closed the blanket over both of us. The hay was sloped like we were on a sofa with our legs stretched out. She put her head in the hollow of my shoulder and her arm across my stomach, and while she sniffled I told her the same soothing things I’d grown accustomed to telling her. Promises I knew I’d keep someday, but not which day.

“I’d like it if you’d marry me,” I said. Her whimpers ceased and I said, “I’ll take you away from here.”

“Where?”

“Somewhere south, where the wind is always warm and the sky is blue, and you can stand on the top of a mountain, yodeling, bare naked, and no one will know.”

“What if someone knew?” she said. We’d been through it before.

“He wouldn’t care. He’d say, ‘You yodel on your hill, and I’ll yodel on mine.’”

And after the dialogue she would kiss my neck.

No more of the strawberry patch. Knowing what I did about her problems, I didn’t want her that way. Well, I did and I didn’t. When she wasn’t with me I got pretty randy in my thinking, but when she snuggled up tight and clung to me like I was the only thing rooted in a shifting world, I didn’t want her sex. I relished the softness of her breast, but mostly I enjoyed when she got her mind off her troubles and started talking about everyday things. How clouds can inspire dreams. How it’d be neat to taste sunshine. She demonstrated optimism that was incongruous with her situation, and I could listen to her for hours. She’d place her temple against mine and it was like thoughts would osmose between us if we only stayed there long enough trying.

Except that night she said, “Are you really going to marry me? And take me away? Because I think I’m coming to pieces.”

“I will,” I said.

I should have spirited her away with nothing but a blanket and a few pounds of salted hog meat.

Gwen leaned against the seat back and closed her eyes. She remembered the bullfrog song. Her mother loaded groceries into the trunk. Gwen recalled the pleasant man in the grocery who had commented that it was a fine day. She remembered him unbidden—saw his face against an azure field—and her heart trilled at the omen.

He would be dead in minutes.

Fay and Gwen had been working since before dawn; being Saturday, her mother had wanted to get all the pears canned. They’d spent the morning sweating jars and sterilizing lids, prepping cinnamon syrup, peeling and slicing pears by the thousands and tens of thousands, it seemed. Now, with a half-dozen paring knife cuts on her fingers and her cuticles stringy with torn skin, Gwen rested her eyes.

The face came to her suddenly, each line resolved, clear. Urgent. The cerulean background glowed and the man’s countenance was unremarkable. He stared like the others had stared. Some part of him knew he was about to die.

Was he already clutching his heart or collapsing with an aneurism? Or was he still squeezing grapefruit? Had his end already begun, or did a subconscious part of him look death in the face?

The bullfrog music grew louder, strong and plaintive, like a ship’s horn in the fog. Gwen looked out the car window to the storefront and saw him at the register inside, reaching into his wallet. She had taken too long to gather her faculties—too long, but she must try.