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The morning dawned like any other Fourth of July in southwestern Colorado - hot, clear, and ever more sultry as the day wore on. My Dad was out in his shop by the time the sun broke away from the mountain tops in the east, enjoying the rare day off to work on a few projects that brewed around in his mind, trying to find opportunity for completion. It was the first and only day off he had been given in many months by the coal mining outfit for which he worked and another was not likely until perhaps Thanksgiving. A good deal of hammering was going on when Mother stepped out the back door with a message.
"Harold, your Mother's on the phone!" she hollered.
"What's she want?" Dad paused his hammering long enough to hear her
response.
"I don't know, but it sounds pretty important by the tone of her
voice." The screen door slammed shut. Dad put down his tools and shuffled toward the house. Mother was holding the phone out to him when he got to the living room.
"Hello," he said, dread already weakening his resolve to make the
conversation pass quickly.
"Harold, your Dad's decided to butcher today," Grandma ratcheted in
his ear. "He took his rifle out a few minutes ago to shoot that boar out in the hogpen. Can you come and help us? I don't think he can drag it to the water by himself."
"Do you realize this is the hottest day of the year, Mom?" None of us overlooked the anger in Dad's voice as we milled around the room, not wanting to miss the drama.
"I know, Harold, but you know your Dad when he sets his mind to
something. I tried to tell him. Are you coming up, then?"
We saw the muscles on Dad's jaw clench a few times and his eyes snap
with fury.
"I guess there ain't much choice here, is there?" he spat.
"Thanks, son. We'll give you and Dorothy some of the meat. I'll see
you in a little bit." She hung up the phone quickly, not wanting to extend the opportunity for Dad to change his mind. Mother was only a little less happy than Dad at having her day reorganized for her.
"Come on, Dorothy. Load up the kids and let's get up there. I'm sure
Dad's already killed that goddamned hog."
We children were excited by an unexpected visit to Redvale. The fact
that Grandpa had left to kill a pig and was dragging it toward a scalding tub of water only added to our intrigue. All during the fifteen-mile drive, Dad cussed. He berated his father for choosing the worst day of the year to slaughter a hog. He berated the number of flies that would interfere with such an overwhelming task in the dead heat of summer. He explained to no one in particular how he would've been more than willing to help his parents in the fall, had they just waited until a more practical time, "but hell no, they've got to go and shoot the damn pig now, all the way across from where it needs to be. Sometimes I don't know what my Father's thinking these days."
The temperature inside the cab of that old '63 GMC pickup did little
to calm my father's wrath. Even with both windows down, the breeze at fifty miles per hour did little more than furnish us with some hot air blown across our sweaty faces. My brother Jimmy and I scrunched up between our parents on the vinyl seat and provided one half a lap each for our little sister to sit. Mother held little John, then only two. The year was 1970. I was eleven, Jimmy thirteen, and Judy six. Jimmy and I smirked at each other, to hear our Father take Grandpa to task for shooting his own hog. Dad talked about Grandpa's age what a problem it was getting to be. I knew Grandpa was seventy years old, or would be
that December, because he was born in 1900. That always made it easy to calculate his age.
Fury drove that pickup down the road, and in no time, we were rounding the corner where our grandparents' farmstead came into view. When we pulled into
the driveway next to Grandpa's white house, Dad slammed the gearshift into first and whacked the keys to kill the engine, all in one fluid motion with bailing out of the pickup. Jimmy and I scrambled out behind him, not wanting to miss the big showdown. Sure enough, Dad began to chew Grandpa's butt when he found him. He expected to find him on his way to the boiling vat of water, but instead, spotted him running out in the field where the hogs
were penned. We all gravitated toward the field, where we could see Grandpa staggering along with rifle across his forearm. Grandpa's boots were unlaced and flopping on the outsides of his overalls. Under his Big Smith's he wore a flannel shirt. Over his overalls he wore an old dark blue jacket He topped this off, of course, with a leather round-brimmed hat shoved down onto his hoary head.
As we approached the gate, we heard the pig screaming. It was in the
far opposite corner of the field, bleeding profusely from its neck, mouth and ears.
"He squealed the damn thing," Dad said into the air, but we snatched
up his words as if they were meant for us. Neither Jimmy nor I knew what squealing meant, but figured it had to do with the noise the pig was making. As Dad slipped through the gate, he began trotting toward Grandpa, especially when he saw the pig charging in the general direction of his father. Grandpa tried to raise the rifle, get another shot at the noisy beast, but the pig brushed past the old man, causing him to stagger backward. Dad arrived
just in time to steady the old man, plucking the rifle from his gnarled fingers and setting off to pursue the enraged porker zigzagging across the field toward us children safely behind the gate. With the expertise and steadiness of a man in his prime, my father drew a bead on the boar as it swirled around and began to charge straight at him. The rifle shot
reverberated across the valley, diffusing in the cedars at the base of the mountains beyond the pasture. The pig dropped instantly, his head bouncing on his front hooves that dug up two rivulets in the grass as the back of the pig continued a moment longer.
Grandpa came swishing up beside his son, his boot leather flapping
against the legs of his overalls. Both men stood there looking at the hog, thankfully reposed in silence after the bullet penetrated its brain. And then the fury that Father put aside while he tried to keep the pig from running over Grandpa found its voice.
"What the hell are you thinking?" my father yelled. "You should know
not to slaughter on July 4th the hottest damned day of the year! You knew this was my only day off in a hell of a long time, too, didn't you?"
Grandpa continued to look at the pig. He shrugged and said, "I thought he was big enough to butcher."
From the fence row, we heard the exchange, and then we saw Grandma
push through the gate to bring Dad a jaw hook, which Dad proceeded to thread through the pig's jowl behind the jawbone. With the handhold in place, Dad began dragging the pig toward the gate. Grandpa rushed toward father and tried to help with the dragging, but Father would have none of it. Halfway to the vat, however, Grandpa rallied again and wrestled the hook out of his son's hands. Dad allowed him this measure of pride.
Dad took advantage of his respite to pick up the scolding where he
left off. Grandpa continued lugging the animal in weak advances, ignoring his son with
the convenience of more pressing work to be done. He dragged the animal toward the area set up for slaughter, grunting, tugging, listening to his son's blistering remarks. Once they got the animal over to the tall posts built high in the air, they inserted the hooks through the ligature running down the back of each hind leg and began hoisting him skyward with the
rusted pulley suspended from the cross pole above them.
Jimmy and I moved closer to inspect the dead hog. The first thing we
wanted to find, of course, were the bullet holes. We knew that hogs were always shot in the head, so that's where we focused. Sure enough, there was one neat .22 hole above one eye. That would be Dad's shot. Jimmy nodded at me and me at him to verify that a shot like that would kill the pig instantly.
But we knew there was another hole, the one where Grandpa squealed the hog. We found this hole in the neck on the underside of its body. That would account for why the hog was acting crazy, bleeding out every natural and man-made orifice on his body, and squealing in high-pitched that only the sure aim of my father could silence.
One side of his hide showed evidence that the animal had been dragged a great distance, fueling Dad's assertion that Grandpa had been foolish to shoot the hog so far from the processing area. Nearby, a huge fire stoked the steam in a metal water trough where the hog would be dipped. Dad had made the trough the year before by cutting a huge water tank in half lengthwise. Dunking a pig in boiling water was necessary not only for cleaning, but to scald off the sparse hair that stuck out in stiff sprigs all over the carcass. Dad, being the nifty welder that he was, had also designed some iron tongs, which allowed the men to pry the hog out of the water and up onto the table, where the next step of the processing could begin.
After the animal had been dipped, the slaughtering crew Grandma and
Mom and the two men set about to scrape the hide with knives. The bristly hair was easy to scrape from the hide, and soon that part of the chore was over.
For a couple of farm kids, this event was a most dramatic spectacle.
Dad was so busy by now that he didn't have time to cuss, but the dark look had not left his face, nor did it until several hours later. Sweat beaded up and ran in streams down his face, the back of his neck, and his arms. Circles of perspiration dampened his shirt and increased in size as work progressed.
Flies determined to drill into the drops of sweat on the exposed areas of his body dive bombed all around my father, causing his jaw to clench into tight bunches as he smashed at the moisture on his face with the fabric on his upper arms.
Mom stood toe to toe with the others, helping Grandma and persevering to the end of the tense work party without the many complaints that Dad interjected.
Its hide now pink, clean, and hairless, the pig was hoisted skyward
again. Dad split him open down his underside in widening yet careful strokes geared to get to his entrails without piercing any of them. In one final stroke, the hog's innards were now exposed to the world. Jimmy and I gawked at its guts, visually tracing the swirls of intestines as they dipped and wound about each other like swollen serpents nestled in a ribcage. Dad made short work of the gut bundle, cutting it away with the razor sharp butcher
knife until it fell away in one massive blob into a bucket to be fed fresh to the chickens in their pen. Dad said the farm dogs didn't deserve it as much as the chickens since the hens turned around and produced fine eggs after the feeding, but the dogs just produced fleas and piles of dog crap all over the farm.
Of course, some organs would be saved for human consumption the
heart, liver, and kidneys; however, us pioneer folk wouldn't be eating the more "delicate" meat like brains, tongue, or genitals. Whoever had winnowed these menu items from our dining table I wanted to thank in person. They call an animal's privates tripe, sweetbreads, or Rocky Mountain oysters, which hits pretty close to home when we lived among those very majestic buttes. Why would people eat something that had swung between a pig's legs, close
to where it defecates and used for reproduction should the pig not meet up with Grandpa long before it reached that privileged part of its life?
Dad took a handsaw and sliced down through the length of the pig's
spine, reducing the pig to two equal portions still connected at the head. Next, he set about to sever the head across the jowls, leaving the fatty meat intact close to the neck, which Father said made excellent bacon. With the last slice of its chubby neck, the headless, hideless animal was completely subdued.
With the pig halved, the team lowered him from the pulley and removed the hooks from behind his back hamhocks, but when they laid him on a clean piece
of plywood for butchering, a new problem arose. Dad didn't seem quite as attractive a target to attack for the flies as did the fresh meat on the animal, and soon the outside of its carcass turned black with insects. "Go get the spray, Ruby," Grandpa ordered. Grandma scuttled toward the house, returning with a can in her apron pocket. With Dad's mouth
gaping in surprise, Grandma whipped out the can of Raid insect repellent and began spraying the meat to kill the flies. She beamed at how effective the insecticide worked on those summer nuisances.
"We sure appreciate you guys coming up to help," Grandma said as she
picked up a hand saw and set about to separate one chunk of meat from another by hacking through the bone. "You be sure and take some of this pig home with you for your own freezer."
"Naw, that's okay, Mom," Dad refused. He'd lost his appetite for fresh pork long about the time that Grandma marinated it with insecticide. The crew placed the large chunks of meat directly into Grandma and Grandpa's chest freezer so that it could cool before they would later divide the carcass into huge chunks of roasts and ribs, wrapped in white butcher paper and labeled with a black marker.
On the trip home, a much more subdued bunch lounged against each other in the cab of the old GMC as Dad pegged the miles back to Nucla. The evening sun was setting over the LaSalles on the western horizon as Redvale faded from view behind us.
"You know, Dot, I don't recall a time when I've ever been so angry
with my Dad," my father said, his driving hand draped over the steering wheel at the wrist.
"I know, Harold," Mom said with her accommodating tone. John slept in her lap and Judy under her armpit. Jimmy and I sat in our customary positions in the middle of everything. We occupied ourselves like we did every time we were in a vehicle at that time of evening, looking for the glassy eyeballs of deer and coyotes in the fence rows beside the highway.
Yeah, but I was looking at Dad at one point this afternoon as he
stood there trying to help," Dad continued. I straightened my back, knowing that this was going to be important and disappointed that I hadn't foreseen whatever it was that Dad saw Grandpa looking like.
"It was one hundred degrees outside the hottest day of the year." I
didn't wonder how Dad knew that tomorrow wouldn't be even one or two degrees hotter. "He was standing there in a coat, with insulated underwear on, a flannel shirt, boots, and a hat, and he hadn't even broken a sweat. It was then I realized how sick my Dad must be with his diabetes."
"You may be right," Mother offered.
"To him, it wasn't that hot outside," Dad went on.
Suddenly, there was a valid reason for Grandpa's lunacy. And there was a brokenness in my Dad's voice, laced with shame for scolding his father for doing that which he thought was right. It was an important family moment, and we sat back against the seat, thinking about what we'd seen and heard as the middle generation confronted the eccentricities of the oldest generation. Our parents came home without anything to show for the intense work to which they had devoted a day of their lives, but somehow, we felt closer to our grandparents, knowing they were exactly where they should be as the hands of time marked their progress through life.
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