The dogs had rushed directly into the boar’s head and shoulders, unable to get through the oak roots to his rear and flanks. A second dog flew, ripped and blooded, out into the murky water. The two remaining dogs clamped down on the hog’s right ear and jowl.
“Shoot it, Francis . . . ’Fore he hurts another ’en,” Thomas Jennings shouted as JJ crossed between his father and the primal struggle, between hunter and hunted.
“Move, boy, move. I ain’t got no clear shot.”
JJ grabbed up the second wounded dog and moved farther out into the slough.
The boar turned his head to the right, toward the two dogs tormenting it from that side. Francis shot. The bullet passed just along the left jaw bone and entered the animal between the top of his shoulder blade and the bottom of his neck, into the animals vitals. It dropped straight down into the muck between the roots of the ancient oak.
They rounded up the mules, which was no small feat. Then they built a travois for the two wounded dogs.
“Papa,” Francis told the older Jennings, “head on back with these dogs. See can Mama clean ’em up, sew ’em up, maybe. And, tell Fat Back to send a couple a hands and another mule. Tell ’im send a singletree and some trace chain, tell ’em. We gotta drag this hog outta here.”
“Can I go with ’im?” JJ asked. “Maybe ride on ahead? Tell Mama, tell folks at the store we got ’im . . . Got that boar?”
“No,” his father answered. “It ain’t seemly to go braggin’ about things. Folks ‘ll know soon enough. Anyway, me and Earl be needin’ help to pull ’im out from between them roots, clean and dress ’im. We gonna cook this devil and eat him.”
“And a wagon, Papa? Somehow we gotta git im in a wagon. He’s way too heavy to load on a mule.”
Fat Back had dry hickory wood burning in the bottom of the pit before the hunters emerged from the woods.
“Thought you was gonna soak ’im overnight,” Francis said as the hunting party arrived in the mule yard and dismounted.
“Yes, sur, Mr. Francis. Gone soak ’im all night. Gone keep this here fire goin’ the same, all night. Want a good bed a coals.”
“Take a lot of cookin’. That’s a tough ole hog.” Francis eyed the big black man, a grin in his voice.
“We got a lotta time,” Fat Back said.
“We be needin’ a hickory pole, a straight one, big as my arm,” he told the field hands. “Take a big pole to hold that boar hog up off the ground, offa that fire.”
They scrubbed the carcass, rubbed it down with salt, lowered it into the empty and cleaned horse trough. They heated water in a ten-gallon black wash pot, added what herbs were available: four oranges from the shelves of the trading post store, hard apple cider and onions—there were plenty of onions. Torie had scrounged up a whole mess of hot peppers. The cooks chopped up everything really fine, to make the flavors go further. Then they poured the mix into the horse trough. They added cool water to cover the barrel chest and shoulders of the animal. Francis sent to Churchill for two kegs of beer.
Fat Back didn’t leave the mule barn for the next thirty-six hours or more, supervising the marinating, a word he had never heard, would never in his life in south Mississippi hear. Supervised the cooking.
“Rake them coals out from the middle,” he might say. “Gittin’ too hot.”
Or, to a field hand, or JJ, or even Francis or Mr. Otis, if they happened to be there. “Need to add some more firewood, some a that water soaked hickory.”
They turned the pig hourly, rotating the thigh sized spit resting on the Y shaped poles at either ends of the fire pit.
In the first light of day Francis asked, “How much longer?”
“He ’bout ready, Mr. Francis. Grease ain’t drippin’ no more. We gon’ build up the fire a bit, crackle up that skin. Then we ready.”
Francis left the mule barn, the pit and glowing bed of coals, walked off toward the trading post.
Otis Butterbaugh brought peanuts.
“Thought I might set up a pot and boil ’em,” he told Torie.
Torie stopped what she was doing, eyed him down the bridge of her nose. “You’re gonna sell peanuts at my store?”
Otis laughed. “Give ’em away. For the fellows that come by for checkers or pitchin’ horseshoes. A thing Francis might do if he was to think about it.”
He pulled his wagon into the shade of three pin oaks just to the east of the store, unloaded a black cast iron pot and a croaker sack of peanuts. JJ fetched stove wood and fat pine splinters from the pile stacked against the horse barn. By seven-thirty, they had water boiling, poured in some rock salt. They added the sack of peanuts sometime before eight o’clock. Then Otis pulled the burning wood away from the pot, pushed the coals up snug.
“We wanta keep that water simmerin’,” he said to nobody in particular. “Don’t want it boiling away. Cook ’em slow.” He laid a shaped oak plank across the top of the pot, holding in most of the steam.
By ten the word had gotten out in the community.
Big doings down at the trading post. Food and stuff. Mr. Francis even got some beer brought in!
By sometime shortly after mid-morning the first of the horseshoe pitchers arrived. It wasn’t until some minutes later that anyone paid attention to the goings-on in the side yard.
“Hey, Mister Otis,” somebody called across the way, “you smokin’ out the local crop a mosquitoes? That pig has done been cooked.”
“Boilin’ peanuts.” He pushed the straw hat up from the brow of his head, wiped away the sweat. “You fellows might want some later on.”
“They ready?” another horseshoe pitcher asked. “Ain’t had none yet this year.”
“Not yet, boys,” Otis told them. “Gotta cook ’em slow.”
From time to time he added half a bucket of water, checked the goobers, tasted them for saltiness, added a little when needed.
At a little after eleven, late morning, Otis told JJ, “Git us a ax handle, somethin’ to lift this pot, carry it around front.”
The boy came back with a single-tree. They ran it through the handle of the pot, lifted, dumped out the excess water and moved it to the corner of the veranda in the shade. Otis ladled out a small pile of the streaming peanuts onto the plank table.
“Alright, lads,” he called out, “fresh goobers here. Fresh outta the pot.” A plume of steam rose from the mound.
“It’s too damn hot to be eatin’ them things, Mr. Otis,” one of the younger players said from across the narrow dirt road.
The clank of iron horseshoes on iron pins resumed. Also, the sound of pitched iron onto the packed sand of the pits. No ching of iron against iron. “Go home,” the shouts of derision came, the horse-laughs.
Cletus McWilliams, newly arrived on the scene, lumbered down off his buggy seat, squinted from his vantage point out in the open sun toward the shaded veranda. “Is them peanuts, Otis? Smells like peanuts.”
“Fresh boiled, an’ we ain’t had no takers yet. Boys say it’s too hot.”
Cletus gathered up a handful, shook them back and forth across his palm, scattering the heat of the freshly boiled nuts against the calloused skin, cooling them to some degree in the warm mid-day air. He thumbed open a shell, popped the three exposed legumes into his mouth.
“Boys ain’t old enough to know about simple pleasure,” he told Otis. “Think it’s all about girls or winnin’ some kind of a game.” He shelled open up another mouthful, moved across the veranda toward the open door into the little general store.
“Now, don’t let them young bucks git into that beer ’till late in the day,” Francis told Earl and Fat Back.
“I done put the fear a-God in ’em, Mr. Francis,” Fat Back said, brandished an oak and wrought iron single-tree.
They all, the two black men and Francis Jennings, laug
hed.
“I see what you mean,” Francis said. Then he added, “We’ll cut you off a hind-quarter and a shoulder. Send it down later.”
“Shorely would like to have some a them ribs, Mr. Francis,” Earl said.
Francis laughed. “I’ll see you git some.” He turned, walked up the gentle rise from the barns toward the house and the trading post.
By noon there was a crowd. All of Cut Bank had come out. They moved the cooked hog to just off the veranda, set on a hastily built plank table, with the keg of beer on the shaded end of the veranda.
“Has this food been blessed?” the young preacher asked.
“No,” Papa Thomas said. “Would you do the honors, reverend.”
“Let’s read some verses from the gospel of St. Matthew,” the preacher said, opened his bible.
There was an uneasy silence.
“When Jesus heard it, He departed from there by boat to a deserted place by Himself. But when the multitudes heard it, they followed Him on foot from the cities.
“And when Jesus went out He saw a great multitude; and He was moved with compassion for them, and healed their sick. When it was evening, His disciples came to Him, saying, ‘This is a deserted place, and the hour is already late. Send the multitudes away, that they may go into the villages and buy themselves food.’
“But Jesus said to them, ‘They do not need to go away. You give them something to eat.’
“And they said to Him, ‘We have here only five loaves and two fish.’
“He said, ‘Bring them here to Me.’ Then He commanded the multitudes to sit down on the grass. And He took the five loaves and the two fish, and looking up to heaven, He blessed and broke and gave the loaves to the disciples; and the disciples gave to the multitudes.
“So they all ate and were filled, and they took up twelve baskets full of the fragments that remained. Now those who had eaten were about five thousand men, besides women and children.”
After the prayer, Francis carved the roasted pig, slicing off slabs of ham and shoulder. A ring of people three deep circled the table. Food seemed to materialize from wagons and buggies, from canvas sacks hooked over saddle horns. Roasted potatoes, pots of cooked greens, corn bread, whole baked yams, and a cauldron of baked beans.
“I’ve had beef jerky was easier to chew,” Otis Butterbaugh announced to the gathered crowd. He held a carrot sized chunk of pork shoulder in his left hand and filled his mug from the keg. He glanced to be sure the young preacher wasn’t watching too closely.
There were pies, a pound cake with the requisite pound each of butter and sugar, and a dozen fresh eggs. The four cups of flour seemed almost superfluous.
“We better cook us up another batcha these peanuts,” Mr. Otis told JJ in the deepening afternoon. There was a steady line of takers for boiled peanuts.
When the second round was dumped onto the plank floor, Torie, standing in the doorway, straw broom in hand, asked, “All right, now, who’s gonna sweep up these hulls?”
There was no shortage of volunteers.
Earl’s seventy-seven-year-old mama, from down on The Row, said, “Toughest meat I ever et.” She stripped another thumb sized piece off the hanging hind quarter, worked it into her nearly toothless mouth.
They would eat pit roasted pork for the better part of a week.
The citizens of Cut Bank drifted away. There were cows to milk, animals to feed, babies and small children to put to bed. Some few stayed deep into the afternoon, the coming evening.
Around several bonfires, flasks of whiskey turned up, warmth against the night chill. There was only one fight that needed breaking up. And, it not over a woman, but quail hunting. Torie and Francis sat on the veranda some hundred and a half yards from the trading post, the bonfires, the last hangers-on. Him smoking a last pipe of the day, her wrapped in a wool knit shawl.
“Should you maybe go down and send ’em home?” she asked. “The children will never sleep with this noise. And tomorrow’s Sunday . . . Church.”
“Day like today, they don’t wanta let go. Didn’t nobody plan it. It just happened,” he said, not really addressing his wife’s comment. “Jus’ happened. Fellers wanta hold onto it long as they can. Kinda like a kid at Christmas, watchin’ the sun go down. Wanta reach out with their fingers, catch the sunset. Don’t wanta let go.”
He drew deep on the pipe, savoring the strong, sweet taste of the Prince Albert tobacco. “Still, I’ll go walk among ’em.”
Torie watched him across the dark expanse between the house and the fires burning in the wagon road opposite the entrance to the trading post. Across the dark she watched him go to each group, each bonfire, watched him clasp someone’s shoulder, reach out and touch an elbow. There was the occasional sound of laughter across the distance. She knew he did not say to them, Go home, it’s late. She heard, at least imagined she heard, him say, See you boys in church tomorrow.
She stood, waited for him at the top step. Watching him come back across the darkness toward her, toward the house, seeing him silhouetted against the distant firelight. She knew that he would want her tonight, that they would make love.
Torie went down the four steps, met him a dozen feet out on the walkway. She saw him reach for her, felt him reach his hand under the shawl, trace his fingers from the back of her shoulder down to her hip.
Bringing Lula Home
Martina Boone
A shingle flew off the decrepit roof in the last gasps of hot, wet post-hurricane wind and grazed my temple before landing on the debris-strewn lawn. Wasn’t enough the damned house and its smothering Spanish moss was sucking the life out of my body and slowly leaving me a wrinkled husk like every other resident in Watson’s Creek, South Carolina. Now it was going to go ahead and kill me outright.
Rubbing the scrape on my head, I edged around a fallen branch from an ancient oak. Then I turned back to survey Watson’s Landing for other damage. On the bright side, the house’s two-story columns with their peeling white paint didn’t seem to sag any more than usual, and the wide front steps hadn’t completely collapsed. On the other hand, it was early yet. The river could still rise in the wake of the hurricane. It was too much to hope it would rise high enough to wash the house straight down the creek and out to sea. No, if my luck held, the water would come just high enough to bring half the town’s well-meaning citizens out here to sandbag and eat through two months of grocery money in cucumber and cream cheese sandwiches.
Watson’s Landing had survived malaria, yellow fever, British tariffs, the decline of Carolina indigo, Union shelling, and nine generations of spendthrift Watsons. It was long overdue for someone to put it out of its misery. That might as well be me as anyone—I didn’t have a clue what else to sell to keep it standing. What I really wanted was to pack up my easel and brushes, run down the long, oak-lined drive, and keep on running. Which might at least have the added benefit of finally overshadowing the thirty-year-old Scandal. The night Mama’s twin sister Lula had crept out in the dead hours with a suitcase full of antique silver and a driving itch to get out of town was still the talk of Watson’s Creek.
More power to Lula. I couldn’t run.
All I could do was scowl at the decaying landscape through a haze of humidity that left the air almost as blue as the indigo wash I worked into my paintings. Behind me, the front door opened with a groan of protest.
“You make sure there aren’t any branches down in Great-Granny Brantley’s roses, now,” Mama called, peering out at me from the top of the steps before she opened the door even wider and let herself slump against the jamb. “After that you come right back inside here and call Joe Beaufort to check the roof.”
“I can look for myself,” I said.
“Don’t you so much as think of climbing up on that roof, Ginnie Mae Watson Pinckney. It isn’t seemly, and the last thing this fami
ly needs is another tragedy, and me with palpitations already from the stress and the storm. You stay right here where I can see you.”
Squelching around the house in my battered old waxed jacket, sundress, and polka dotted Wellington boots, I ignored her, that being the only way I could cling to sanity. I was twenty-five and trapped in a time warp.
I rounded the corner, and my feet tripped to a stop. The shock and humidity stole all the remaining air from my lungs. While the storm had done relatively little to the front of the house, along the side here it had knocked the gazebo down. Splintered white slats of wood lay scattered all over the lawn along with the tattered shrouds of Spanish moss.
The gazebo we could live without. I couldn’t say the same for the fifty-odd shingles that also dotted the ground instead of the roof where they might have done some good keeping out the rain.
Frowning at the roofline, I heaved a sigh of mingled outrage and relief. At least this took away my reason for climbing up there. I could calculate the cost from right down here: way too much. I’d be better off expending my energy carrying buckets and plastic sheeting up to the attics. Unless I could figure out a way to pay Chandler Construction’s extortionary prices, the roof would have to keep on leaking.
Kicking a cypress branch aside a little harder than perhaps absolutely necessary, I turned and went back inside. There I discovered the phone lines were still down, the electricity was still out, and Mama was standing helpless in the pantry with a lighted candle and a whole-new-roof’s worth of Watson pearls around her neck trying to figure out what to make for dinner.
“How are you doing, Mama?” I studied her face for signs of an imminent breakdown. “You holding up?”
She looked up at me with a vague frown and drew her sweater tighter around thin shoulders. “I’d be better if this wind would stop knocking branches against the windows and making my heart jump. Lord, I’ll never get used to storms.”
“Why don’t you let me fix you a sandwich,” I said, drawing her back out of the pantry and taking the candle from her. “There’s leftover chicken in the fridge we need to eat since we don’t know when they’ll get the electricity back.”
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