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 Tuesday, December 8, 1903, and the ink is shaky in places, the way a man’s hand goes when he’s been gripping a rope in the cold half the day.
Tuesday, December 8, 1903
Hog killin day. The frost had settled two nights in a row and the ground held it, so this morning come cold and clean, the kind of weather a pig hangs good in. We raised the two shoats since spring, corn and slop and the leavings off the table, and now they’re fattened to where a man can’t hardly tell where one jaw ends and the other begins. The cold aint a misery today. The cold is the weather you pray for, cause warm pork is a battle you aint winnin.
Amos, in the margin, before the work started: “a man’s got to love a pig twice. once when you slop him and once when you hang him up, and you best be honest about both.”
We scalded em in the big iron kettle and scraped em clean down to the hide, and it took all of us, the boys and the girls both, cause a wet hog’s slicker than a greased axle and twice as likely to get away from you. Then the cuttin come, and the women took over the lard, the biggest pot all day and the smell of it rollin out across the yard till the dogs set starin at the door like it owed em money. By dark we got the hams and the shoulders salted, the sausage ground and hung, and a crock of lard so white it looks like snow somebody promised you in July.
Amos, lower down, after the last of it was put away: “you can trust a man that raises his own meat and knows what it ate. and you can’t trust nobody else’s account of a long winter.”
Martha says we’ll be eatin off this cold spell straight through till spring, and she’ll fry the cracklins tomorrow with cornbread. I told her a bucket of cracklins and a crock of lard aint much to look at, but it’s the difference between a full smokehouse and a man studyin his hungry young’uns in February. The dogs’ll sleep good tonight. So’ll I, if the smell of renderin lets me.
