The Cold Room
The locker was always ten degrees colder than it needed to be, and Clay stood in the middle of it like he owned the frost on the hooks.
Our hog hung split and quartered on the rail behind him, pale and clean under the one bulb. It had hung that way every November of my life.
Harlan at the counter had the wrapping paper ready and the grease pencil behind his ear.
“We’ll take both hams on the Webb ticket,” Clay said. He did not look at me. He looked at Harlan.
I thought I had misheard him. We split everything down the middle. The way our father split it, the way his father split it before him.
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One ham to Clay, one ham to me. Shoulders halved. Bacon halved. The sausage ground and divided into two gray pecks of paper.
“Both of them go on my ticket,” Clay said again, louder, like I was slow. “And the sausage.”
Harlan’s grease pencil stopped over the paper. He looked at me, then at my brother, then at the floor drain between his boots.
“Clay,” I said. My voice came out smaller than I wanted it. “That’s my ham. That’s always been my ham.”
“Verna, be reasonable.” He turned to me then, finally. His face had that patient look he used on the bank and on his wife and on anybody he had already decided against.
“You’re one person. You live alone. What does a single woman need with twenty pounds of ham and a peck of sausage.”
He said it gentle, which was worse. “It’ll go to freezer burn in your garage and you know it. I’ve got Dana and three kids. I’ve got a table to feed.”
I stood there in my barn coat with the cold climbing up through the concrete into my boots. I could not find one word to put in front of him. Forty-four years old, and I stood there like a scolded girl.
“It’ll spoil on you,” he said, gentler still, because he thought he had won. “I’m doing you a favor, is all.”
Harlan wrote it on the Webb ticket. Both hams. The sausage. He did not meet my eye again, and I did not blame him.
You do not get between family at the locker. Everybody in the county knows that.