The leather folder held seventeen recipes, and after the last one Amos told the whole household to flop the book shut and go eat. But the folder was never the whole of the man, and tucked flat against the back cover, held in by an old boot lace, was a sheaf of loose pages that didn’t hold a single recipe. They’re dated, one line apiece at the top, the way a man writes when he’s too tired for decoration. Diary pages. Amos kept no ledger and owed nobody an account of himself, so these little entries are about as close as he ever came to writing his own history down.
This one is dated Friday, June 12, 1903, and the page is smudged at the corner with something that could be grease or could be blood, and Amos never bothered to say which.
Friday, June 12, 1903
Butcherin day. The old red cow’s been dry two seasons and gone lame in the back leg, so this morning comes and she aint worth her own hay no more. Me and the two oldest boys got her down and done it clean and fast, the way it ought to be, and that’s the easy part. The work aint the killin. The work is what comes after, and it fills the whole day and most of the yard.
Amos’s note in the margin, scratched with the pencil he kept behind his ear: “a cow is a good neighbor right up till you need her on the table, and then she turns into a cartload of work with four legs and a hide.”
We hung her from the big oak limb where the wind gets through, skinned her down while she was still warm, and cut her apart in the order the old man taught me, fore the flies found the money. Martha and the girls took over the renderin, the tallow pot goin since noon, and the youngest ones been pullin the stringy stuff off the fat for cracklins all afternoon. By dark the smokehouse is full and the salt barrel’s got the hams and the shoulders, and there’s a bucket of fresh liver Martha’ll fix tomorrow with onions, which is the one cut we don’t salt on account of it aint made to wait.
Amos, lower on the page, after the day was mostly done: “a man that’s scared to put down a cow he raised aint farmin, he’s keepin pets. and a pet don’t feed six young’uns through no hard winter.”
I’ll stink of it for a week no matter how many times I wash, and the dogs been underfoot all day and will be again at first light. But the smokehouse door shuts now with meat behind it, and a man can set with the back door open on a June night and not study so hard on January. Martha says the Lord’s good to give a body a cow now and again. I told her the Lord’s good, but a sharp knife and a cool morning’s what turned her into supper.
