pick at my ankle and decompose in my shoes.
Pigs are smart, and there is a sound that pigs being killed emit and I’ve got the evil rhyme to that particular complaint in my head. Now I live in this little house and do not go to the big house any longer and do not hear it when they put the chisel to their pigs, or smell it when they cut out the chitterlings and scrub the insides, or feel it when they push the pork pieces into the salt. There’s some will do backflips about a bacon breakfast, but I’ve still got teeth enough to get that product stuck between. I’ve still got a tongue to taste the pork blood and eyes to see the red come bubbling up out of the fresh meat when it’s pressed down with a finger or a fork. Lucious Wilson is as close as you can come to a saint on this earth, but I could do without his pigs and the place they give him in my running dream.
At Linus Lancaster’s home in Charlotte County, Kentucky, we ate pork morning, noon, and night. We ate it fresh, we ate it cured, we ate the cracklings, we ate the salty dribblings over our bread. We sat in the yard with pork in our hands, and we pulled it out of our pockets and ate it by the creek. What we didn’t eat we wore. Horace had a hand for turning leather. One Christmas he made me the prettiest pair of boots. You could walk all day in the puddles in those boots and not get wet. Linus Lancaster got a sheath for his knife and Cleome a pair of shoes. Horace had been in a squabble with Zinnia about something or the other, and all she got was a hat chucked out of the scraps. She wouldn’t wear it until Linus Lancaster made her.
The hat was a kind of droopy thing. It didn’t look an inch like my boots or Linus Lancaster’s sheath or Cleome’s shoes. Zinnia said she didn’t want to wear those old pork flaps and spit when she said it but Linus Lancaster put her in the shed for three days and three nights, and when she came out she walked straight over to Linus Lancaster and took it from him and put it on. There were rats in the shed. There was a chain at the back and that’s where Zinnia was. It was a heavy chain. It had thirty-seven and a half heavy links. Cleome cried when Zinnia was in the shed, until my husband hit her with his riding crop and said he would build another shed next to the one Zinnia was in and fill it to the top with rats and throw her into it and then build another one even bigger and with even more rats and toss her into that one next, and then he would take the keys to her shackles and drop them down the well and then she could cry all she liked.
“Down the well, you hear me?” he said.
Cleome came to me after this fine speech as I stood in my pretty boots and asked me would I tell Linus Lancaster to let her sister out. Horace came with her and said he had been at fault for making her that ugly hat. It had been a mean trick, and he was sorry. We could all of us hear Zinnia in the shed. She sang in that private way as she sat in there. Some of them were the songs Linus Lancaster liked to sing, only when she sang them it was like old earth sprinkling through the air.
“She’s just in there, she’s not far off, wait a spell,” I told them.
Linus Lancaster liked us all to take a turn at the killing. He said if we were all going to eat pig and wear pig finery then we all ought to kill it. Those of us who ate the most ought to kill the most. That was me and it was Linus Lancaster. The years went by and we ate and ate, and so we killed and killed. In the early times we killed with the chisel or the axe when they weren’t looking and later with Linus Lancaster’s rifle. The rifle wasn’t much, and you had to be better at it than I was to do much more than set a pig off its feed. So you had