Gap Creek

by Robert Morgan

  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 h
ad 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.”

  “What kind of sugartit?” I said.

  “It was just a rag dipped in milk or dipped in honey we’d let him suck on. I’d soak it in a little chicken broth and let him suck it. That’s what kept him alive. He was the littlest of my younguns, and he growed up to be the biggest man.”

  “I’ve knowed it to happen with dogs,” Mr. Pendergast said. “The runtiest of the litter will grow into the biggest of the pack.”

  “The Lord has his own way of doing things,” Ma said.

  “Hank sure don’t look like a runt,” I said.

  “I spoiled Hank because he was so little,” Ma said. “I fed him better and never made him work hard as the other boys. That’s why he growed up so big.”

  “Hank works hard,” I said.

  “He works hard, but he don’t finish what he starts,” Ma said. “He loses his temper too easy. The hard work is staying with a job till it’s done.”

  I wanted to stand up for Hank, but I didn’t know what to say. Ma Richards had knowed him longer than I had. And I didn’t want to argue while we was eating. “Hank is working mighty hard at the brick kiln,” I said.

  “And we’re working mighty hard at hog killing,” Ma Richards said.

  I don’t know what brought us together in such a fine fellowship unless it was just the tenderloin and grits and coffee, and maybe the work of hog killing. But it was like we formed a special kinship in the kitchen, at the table piled with tubs and dishpans full of pork fat. Maybe it was the tiredness that made me a little light-headed, and the prospect of all the work ahead.

  “If there’s anything better than fresh tenderloin the good Lord kept it for hisself,” Mr. Pendergast said, like it was something he had said before. But like all familiar sayings, it had truth in it.

  “The good Lord made the world so we could earn our joy,” Ma said. “But it’s no guarantee we’ll ever be happy.”

  “There’s no guarantee of anything except we’re going to die,” Mr. Pendergast said.

  “Let’s start rendering lard,” I said.

  • • •

  IT WAS TIME to get to work. The sun was halfway down the sky and Ma had only started dicing up the fat. I carried our plates out to the back porch where I’d wash them later. And then I got a paring knife and sharpened it on the stone Hank kept beside his razor strop.

  You cut up fat by slicing it in slabs. And the slabs you put on a board and slice ten times one way and then ten times the other. That way you end up with little boxes of fat that will cook down quicker than big chunks. With the knife as sharp as I could make it, I started cutting. I drawed the blade through the white jelly flesh again and again. And soon as I had the little pieces cut I scooped them up and dumped them in the canner.

  After the canner was mostly full I set it on the cookstove, which was already hot. Then I throwed more wood in the stove and started cutting up more fat. I figured there would be three full canners to render down. That would give us maybe ten buckets of lard and enough cracklings for crackling bread all winter.

  Now when hog fat begins to heat up the little cubes start to sweat. They get bright with oil drops and glisten as they melt. The oil just melts out of them and the pot steams and bubbles as it comes to a boil. Ain’t nothing dangerous as rendering lard because of all that hot grease on a stove. A pot gets tipped over it will burn you up. If the grease falls in the fire it will explode. You know the saying: The fat is in the fire. Fat’ll flare up like kerosene.

  But the main thing I worried about was getting burned by the grease. For sometimes a canner of rendering lard would spit out a gob and burn you. Or if you knocked the pot it would splash out faster than boiling water and burn you alive. I had been rendering lard every year with Mama and I knowed how uneasy boiling grease was.

  “SET THE CANNER further back on the stove,” Ma Richards said. All the good feeling from the dinner table was gone from her voice.

  “I’ve got to leave room to set the other one on,” I said.

  “You won’t need room if that tips over on you,” Ma snapped. She had changed back to her old self.

  Instead of answering I started carving up more fat at the table. I sliced twenty times this way and twenty times crossways. The fat sliced easy as clotted cream or thick jelly. My left hand was so slick with grease I couldn’t pick up anything but the blocks of fat. I raked the knife across the board harder than I needed to, to show how determined I was to get the job done and ignore Ma.

  There was a little blood on the fat and on the board also, and I hardly noticed when I felt a nip at the end of my middle finger as I held a slab down to slice it. But when I saw the bright blood on the white fat I knowed I’d cut myself. A drop fell from the end of my finger, and then another. “Oh no,” I said.

  “What have you done?” Ma said.

  “Just a nick,” I said.

  “Don’t get blood on the lard fat,” Ma said.

  I grabbed a dishcloth and wiped the grease off my finger. I’d cut a place on the tip about the size of a pinhead. But it kept bleeding bright red drops. I cleaned off the left hand with the cloth and tore a strip from a fresh linen rag. I bound up the finger as best I could to stop the bleeding.

  “That’s what comes of being in a hurry,” Ma said.

  “I’ll have to be more careful,” I said. I wasn’t going to take the time to get mad at Ma, and I wasn’t going to stoop to the level of her snideness. With the bandage on my finger I finished slicing up the second pan of fat and then lugged the heavy canner to the top of the stove. But as I slid the container onto the stovetop I pushed it too far to the right and hit the canner already there. The boiling fat rocked like a wave had been sent through it. I backed away and seen a tongue of boiling lard spit up and over the rim as the wave sloshed on the side of the canner. The flung grease hissed on the stovetop and turned to crackling bubbles and smoke. But there must have been enough grease so that some of it busted into flame, for I seen f
ire on top of the stove. That might not have amounted to nothing, except the rocking and sloshing continued in the canner and the hot oil spit out again and leapt right into the flames. With a whoosh the fire flared on the stovetop. I think it would still have been all right and just burned there sizzling on the metal except a little more grease sloshed out of the pot and the fire caught onto that and followed the splash back into the pot. That was when the fire blazed up in the canner itself. All the hot oil caught at once and the flames jumped to the ceiling, lighting the kitchen.

  “Oh my god,” Ma said.

  I looked around for something to throw on the flames. There wasn’t a blanket or quilt anywhere. There wasn’t anything bigger than a dish towel.

  Now a grease fire is a worse kind of fire than usual. A grease fire hisses and jumps from one spot to another. There was grease all over the stove and all over the kitchen. The flames darted from one spot to another.

  Ma run out to the back porch and got the water bucket. I’d heard that throwing water on boiling grease is the worst thing you can do, and I hollered for her to stop. But she flung the bucket of water right onto the flaming pot. You would think cold water would put a fire out, but the dousing exploded in a hiss and made the boiling lard splash in all directions. The flames followed the leap of the splash. The water just spread the fire. Flames landed on the second canner of fat and on the dishpans full of fat on the table. The whole kitchen seemed to turn to flames before my eyes. The curtains on the wall caught fire, and heat blistered my face.

  “We’ll have to get out,” I yelled to Ma. I pulled her toward the back door. Smoke was already so thick you couldn’t see much but the flames in the kitchen.

  Mr. Pendergast come running in with another bucket of water. I guess he must have been to the spring. “Don’t throw no water,” I hollered. But he flung the water right on the fire, making even more smoke and steam.

  “I’ve got to get my money,” he shouted.

  “What money?” I said. It was so hot I could barely stand in the doorway.