Horse of a Different Color: Reminiscences of a Kansas Drover

by Ralph Moody

  That afternoon and evening Nick rendered shortening while I processed the second beef, then weighed out and ground meat for four one-hundred-pound batches of sausage. Worried as I’d been about getting rid of fatback if we used heavy hogs, Nick needed all we had for shortening, so I had to use largely sidemeat for pork fat in the sausage. For each batch I weighed the salt and seasoning carefully and mixed it with the meat before grinding, but held back the bread and water for the second grinding, to be made just before the sausage was sold.

  We quit at nine o’clock, to get our cleaning done and be in bed by ten, but were back on the job by four Saturday morning. Soon after sunrise George Miner came over with Jack at his heels. I told Nick I’d be busy with the shipping till evening, and that he was to go ahead with the rendering until he had six hundred pounds of shortening, even though he had to use partly leaf lard to make up the weight.

  In little more than an hour, and with only a few arm or whistle signals from George, Jack rounded up every hog on the place and brought them into the sorting pens. Until then I had no idea what tremendous growth they’d made in the twenty-three days since their diet had been changed from silted alfalfa pasturage to all the corn they could hold. As near as George and I could estimate, the whole herd had gained about a third in weight; the smallest shoats taking on about twenty-five pounds apiece, and some of the biggest sows nearly a hundred.

  If I’d shipped two days earlier, I’d have sent every one of those heavyweights to market, but considering the way shortening and sausage had sold to the farm trade I thought best to hold onto them, and George agreed with me. We cut out and turned back to pasture all hogs weighing under 210 pounds or over 285, together with any others that showed a blemish, were too fat for their length, or too runty for their age. By noon we’d culled them down to four pens of sixty hogs each; one lot weighing between 210 and 235 pounds, two that scaled between 235 and 260, and the fourth from 260 to 285. Allowing for a ten-pound shipping shrinkage, those divisions would hit the three highest priced grades squarely on the button.

  Hauling fat hogs more than a few miles on a hot July day is hazardous business, but exercise, excitement, or crowding will overheat and kill them more quickly than hot sunshine. We loaded no wagon until they had all arrived, then assigned each man his place in line—those with the slowest horses at the front, and those with the fastest at the rear. With no more than an occasional word or signal from George, old Jack did the loading all by himself, and no hog tried to turn back, squealed, or took a hurried step. One after another the wagons were backed up to the loading chute; eight or nine hogs waddled aboard like portly commuters getting onto a streetcar, the tailgate was closed, and the wagon pulled away. In less than an hour all twenty-eight wagons were on the road to Oberlin, and they arrived well before train time without a single casualty.

  Getting the hogs off the wagons and into the cars was no more difficult than loading them at home had been. I’d had one of the farmers from whom I bought nubbins take a load to Oberlin, divide it between the four decks of my cars, and see that the watering troughs in the shipping pens were filled. As wagons were backed to the chutes the thirsty hogs unloaded themselves, drank their fill, and with a little urging by old Jack trudged up the ramps and aboard the cars.

  As soon as the bills of lading had been made out I wired my Omaha agent, giving him the car numbers. I asked him to wire me the results of the sale, to send a check for $4600 to the receiver of the Cedar Bluffs bank, and the balance of the net receipts to the Farmers National. I didn’t wait for the train to pull out, but drove George and old Jack home, and was back in my white coat and apron by six o’clock.

  Nick had completed rendering thirty buckets of shortening, processed the hogs he’d slaughtered the previous evening, and packed all the by-products. We stopped only to wolf down a cold supper, then set to work cutting steaks, chops, and cutlets. Since I was charging my farm trade twenty cents a pound it seemed only fair that they should have the best cuts, so we sorted out the center-cut pork chops and the sirloin, porterhouse, T-bone, and rib steaks. In packing cutlets for the railroad order we cut the ham and shoulder slices into roughly three pieces to the pound. Anything smaller, or that was more than a third bone, we threw into the sausage scraps. We didn’t cut the steaks to any particular size, but trimmed away any excessive fat or bone, stripped out the heavy sinews, and threw aside for stew or hamburger any pieces that weren’t cut reasonably straight across the grain of the meat. To make up the full two hundred pounds that had been ordered, we used mostly chuck and neck, then filled out with the poorer cuts from the rumps and rounds.

  It was eleven o’clock before we finished, and midnight by the time we’d scrubbed up and gone to bed. At three-thirty Nick woke me by rattling the stove lids as he cooked breakfast. By four o’clock we were back on the job, the Ford engine that powered the grinder and saw backfiring in its indignation at being put to work so early. From our trimming we’d accumulated enough scraps for another hundred-pound batch of sausage, so I decided to make it—partly to teach Nick the formula, but more in hope that Effie might scare up more sausage business.

  I had Nick weigh the various ingredients, mix the seasoning with the meat, grind it together to distribute the flavor, then add the water-soaked bread and regrind the batch with our finest cutting disk. While he added soaked bread and reground the batches I’d started the night before, I washed and dried tin pans, filled them with sausage, weighed and wrapped orders for the farm trade, and packed them away in the icebox. The last hundred pounds of sausage we packed in a tub for the railroad order, and by seven thirty I was on my way to Danbury.

  I felt rather guilty about having held out all the best steaks and chops for my farm trade, and for having butchered mostly heavyweight sows when I’d told Mr. Donovan I planned to use bacon hogs. I got all over the guilty feeling two minutes after reaching the railroad camp. Mr. Donovan had gone back to Omaha, but Tim came to inspect the meat—and almost gloated over it. As he jabbed a finger into one piece after another he called to the head cook, “Come take a look at the meat we’ve got here. It’s that tender you can poke a finger clean through it, and trimmed as good as you’d find at the best market.”

  When I unloaded the tub of sausage he turned the paper back and said, “So that’s the sa’sage the boss was doin’ all the talkin’ about!” He scooped up a couple of ounces, sniffed it, and told the cook, “B’dad, there’s a tasty smell about it. Fry up a bit and let’s see what it’s like.”

  He turned to me, pointed a thumb toward the next car, and said, “Take the lard yonder to the head baker. Get his tomorrow’s order, and I’ll have mine ready when you come back.”

  The baker was new on the job and didn’t know how much shortening to order, so I told him I’d bring plenty every morning and leave as many full buckets as he had empty ones to return. When I went back to the kitchen Tim was as enthusiastic about the sausage as Mr. Donovan had been. His order for the next morning—and for most of the days until Thanksgiving—was for two hundred pounds of steak and one hundred and fifty pounds each of sausage and pork cutlets.

  While I was making the delivery Nick finished grinding the hamburger, cutting stew beef, and scrubbing the refrigerator shelves and floor. Weighing and wrapping orders, cleaning equipment, washing utensils, and scrubbing the cutting room tables, sink, and floor kept us busy until nine forty five. Toward the end of the cleaning Nick watched the clock nervously, and the moment we finished he asked, “Okay, boss, I slaughter now?”

  Thereafter he did his slaughtering between six and eight o’clock on weekday evenings, and from nine thirty Sunday mornings until the last customer had gone in the afternoon. Of the hundreds who came to the place, I doubt that more than two or three—except the men who helped us with our first two days of building—ever caught a glimpse of him. Most people spoke of him as The Eyetalian, but George called him The Prairie Dog, for a prairie dog dives into his hole at sight of a stranger. If we were alone Nick wou
ld work at the rendering vat or help me round up hogs, but if anyone turned in at the driveway he’d duck for cover. The cutting room was his burrow, but the slaughterhouse—completely hidden from the road, the dooryard, and the house—became his sanctuary.

  That Sunday morning we rounded up a couple of hogs and a heifer for butchering, and I’d just changed into a clean white coat when customers began driving into the dooryard. From then on there was no letup. Fully a third of those who came had phoned in no order and were from surrounding townships. A good many were on their way to or from church, but others had probably come out of curiosity. By ten thirty the shop was so crowded that I could barely get through to the refrigerator.

  Fortunately, George and Irene Miner came over when I was so swamped I hardly knew which way to turn. Irene was good at figures, her writing looked like a schoolteacher’s and she knew everybody within twenty miles of Cedar Bluffs. When George saw the mess I was in he sent her to write charge slips for me, then called to the crowd, “Let’s get outside and give the boy a chance to work. He can take care of you twice as fast if there’s only two or three in here at a time.”

  With room to work, and the meat all cut and processed, I had no difficulty in taking care of the trade. If some of the folks were skeptical when they came, they got over it by the time George had shown them through the refrigerator and cutting room. Buckets and pans proved as popular with the women who hadn’t placed orders as with those who had. I sold every spare pan of sausage and cracklings, every bucket of shortening and by-products, and could have sold double the number if I’d had them.

  Although Effie had set my Sunday hours as being from ten to one, they didn’t work out that way. It was past three o’clock when my last customer drove away, and there was then nothing left in the icebox except five hundred pounds of steaks, cutlets, and sausage that I’d held back for filling the railroad order next morning. I’d had dozens of compliments on the cleanliness of the shop, and everyone had been happy with the quality of the meat, the prices, and the charge accounts. Before leaving, nearly every man told me he’d have a hog, a calf, a cow, or a load of corn to turn in on his bill whenever I wanted it.

  Nick and I hadn’t eaten since three-thirty that morning, so when George and Irene left I started a fire and put a kettle of potatoes on to boil. After I’d washed up I put on a pot of coffee and whacked up a big batch of biscuits. While they were baking I set the big iron skillet on to get smoking hot, picked out the two biggest steaks in the icebox, laid them on the skillet to broil, and shouted for Nick to come and get it.

  The pork and beef he’d dressed that forenoon wouldn’t be chilled enough for cutting with the saw before morning, but we needed shortening for delivery with the railroad order. To have it cooled out and ready, Nick rendered that afternoon, stripping the leaf and fatback from the pork carcasses and suet from the beef. It was a one-man job, so I washed the dishes, posted the charge slips in the ledger, and brought the books up to date.

  During the whole day I hadn’t taken in a nickel, but the charge slips for the farm trade totaled $217.85, the railroad delivery had amounted to $112.50, the meat still in the icebox was worth $52.50, and the two cowhides would bring the total up to $390. As near as I could figure, the seven hogs we’d butchered had cost $90, the heifers $70, pans and buckets $11, ice $16, and bread, seasoning, etc., $3, leaving a profit of $200 before allowing for Nick’s wages or investment writeoff. I had sense enough to know I’d never have another day so profitable, and that I’d probably lose 3 or 4 percent on my charge accounts. But I was reasonably sure that I hadn’t set my prices too low, and that the venture wouldn’t end in failure.

  Effie always scolded at me for working too hard, but my roughest times were those when I had no work to do. Since the Wilsons left I’d been too busy to be lonely, and had little time for fretting and worrying. But when I finished my book-keeping that Sunday afternoon I was stuck. No meat cutting could be done until the carcasses were thoroughly chilled, and there was nothing I could do to help Nick with the rendering. I got out the little Bible that had been my father’s and tried to read, but couldn’t keep my mind on it. When I found myself thinking about the folks back home I realized that I was lonely, and the one I thought most about was Edna Hudgins.

  Edna’s folks moved to Medford, the Massachusetts city where our family lived, while I was farming with my grandfather in Maine. She went to our church, sang in the choir with my sister Grace, and they became close friends. When I came home on my sixteenth birthday Grace fixed up a date for me, and Edna became my girl. When we were seventeen I asked her if she’d marry me when we were old enough, and she said she would, but our engagement broke up in a quarrel about the ring. It was a quarter-carat blue-white diamond, and it took me more than a year to save the twenty-five dollars that it cost.

  Edna was graduating from high school in the class I’d have been in if I could have gone on from grammar school, and it seemed to me that it would be almost the same as having made the grade myself if my girl were there, wearing my engagement ring. For months I’d saved every penny that wasn’t needed in the family, got the twenty-five dollars together just in time, and bought the ring the day before graduation. That evening I took Edna to choir practice, but didn’t mention the ring until we were on the way back to her house. Then I showed it to her under an arc light at the corner of a little park, slipped it onto her finger, and told her I wanted her to wear it to the graduation exercises. For some reason, she didn’t want to start wearing it until afterward. Having set my heart on it as I had, my feelings were hurt, and I didn’t have any better sense than to tell her that if she didn’t love me enough to wear my ring to the graduation she didn’t love me enough to marry me.

  I could never remember who said what after that, except that Edna told me not to get the idea that ring was a slave bracelet, stripped it off her finger, and held it out toward me. That was before I’d learned to control my temper, and it was the best lesson I ever had. I snatched the ring and threw it as hard as I could toward a shrubbery patch, then walked her home and left without either of us saying another word.

  Next morning I was up before sunrise, and crawled through that shrubbery on my hands and knees for more than three hours, but I didn’t find the ring. I wasn’t man enough to go and tell her how ashamed and sorry I was for having made a fool of myself, so she wasn’t my girl when I went away to work in the munitions plant during the war. But I didn’t want any other girl. When I came home after the armistice it was discovered that I had diabetes and might live only six months, so it would have been senseless for me to try patching up our engagement then. I went to see her, though, before starting West. We didn’t mention love or our engagement, or that I might not live very long, but we were both a bit chokey when I left.

  In the nearly three years I’d been away I’d never written to Edna, nor she to me, but I couldn’t get her out of my mind that evening. After trying to read but losing my place half a dozen times, I went to my trunk, got out paper and envelope, and wrote her a long letter. I’d never told the family about my losses, but had written often about being in the livestock trading business. I knew Grace would have told Edna of it, so started my letter by telling about the hogs I’d shipped on Saturday, of the flood having washed out the railroad, and that I’d been fortunate enough to get the meat contract for the reconstruction job. I wrote a couple of pages about fixing up the place to handle the meat business, and ended by telling her my health was so much improved that I was no longer on a diet—but not that I’d quit it without my doctor’s knowledge.

  When Nick finished the rendering we went to bed, but it was a long while before I could go to sleep, and most of that time I was building or tearing down air castles. Since I’d started eating three square meals of meat, potatoes, and biscuits a day I’d been able to work as hard and as many hours a day without tiring as any man I knew, including Nick. And even though I was deep in debt I was far from licked, for I’d made nearly two hundred d
ollars in that one day.

  As I lay there in the dark I almost convinced myself that I was cured of diabetes, and that I’d not only be out of debt before the railroad contract was completed, but would have made back what I’d lost on the last stock Bob and I had fed. By that time land and livestock values should have become stable, so I’d buy the place and go back into the feeding business. I’d also continue my butcher business with the farmers and keep on with my livestock trading and shipping. That should make me one of the most prosperous men in Beaver Valley. I’d build a big house on the place, with an inside bathroom, and buy the best diamond ring in Kansas City. Then I’d go back to Medford and tell Edna how ashamed I was of myself for the way I’d acted, and ask her to forgive me and be my wife.

  It was a beautiful air castle, but ordinary common sense made me tear it down. Every doctor I’d been to had told me there was no cure for diabetes. Even though I’d managed to outlive the specialists’ prediction by a couple of years, I could never have a wife and family. Then too, the fabulous profits were no more than a pipe dream. I’d made a huge profit that day only because—with Effie’s help and by throwing in a few tin pans and buckets—I’d unloaded every scrap of leftovers from the railroad contract on my neighbors. When the hot weather was past the farmers would do their own butchering, as they’d always done, and without a market for my leftovers I’d do well to break even on the railroad contract. As for the hogs on their way to market, I’d be lucky if they made five hundred dollars.

  I have no idea how long I lay awake, but by four thirty Nick and I were at work in the cutting room, and at half past seven I left with the railroad order. Tim was still enthusiastic about the quality of the meat, gave me the same five-hundred-pound order for the next morning, and the baker had four empty shortening buckets to be replaced with full ones. On my way home Effie yoo-hooed from the doorway of the telephone office. As I braked to a squealing stop she called, “Telegram for you. The station agent over to Oberlin phoned it not more’n five minutes ago. It sure sounds like good news.”