The Hams I Carried Down the Road

What We Raised Together

We raised that hog the way we raised all of them. Which is to say together, out of the same feed barrel, in the lot behind the barn our grandfather built in 1951.

Clay fed in the morning before he drove to his insurance office in Paoli. I fed at night. The hog did not know whose it was. It knew the sound of the gate and the scrape of the scoop.

There was nothing on paper. There never had been. A hog you raise with your brother on the family place is not a thing with a deed or a bill of sale.

You cannot take a handshake and forty years of custom down to the sheriff and ask him to weigh it on his scale. I knew that before I ever left the parking lot.

So I did not call anybody. There was nobody to call. That was the part that sat in my chest the whole drive home, heavier than any ham.

There was no wrong I could prove. There was only a brother who had decided my share was not mine. And a county full of people who would nod and say family is family and let it lie.

Our father had been three years in the ground that November. He was the one who kept it even between us. He stood in that cold room every year and said one and one, Clay and Verna, down the line, and meant it.

With him gone, Clay had started keeping score. The score always came out in his favor.

I am not going to pretend I cried in the truck. I did not. I was too busy saying all the things I should have said to the windshield. The windshield did not answer.

But by the time I turned up our lane, with the bare sycamores black against a sky the color of a nickel, I had stopped arguing. I had started counting hogs.

Because here is the thing Clay forgot. I had three hogs of my own in the back lot. Barrows I had fed since April on spoiled apples from the Hoffmans and spent grain from the little brewery in town.

I had raised them to sell. The money was supposed to carry me through January and February, when nobody wants their books done and the propane bill comes due.

Three hogs. Six hams. I stood at the lot fence that evening in the dark and counted them by the sound of them.

What does a single woman need. As if a woman alone was a smaller kind of person, with a smaller kind of life, who should be grateful for scraps and quiet about it.

I went in and got the old blue ledger out of the bottom of the pie safe. Not a bookkeeping ledger. My father’s. The one he kept recipes and weather and birthdays in, in pencil, in that square hand of his.

I turned to the back where the curing notes were. The page was there, soft as cloth from handling. At the top it said in his pencil: Brine, the way Dad did it.

Dad being Grandpa Sten. My father’s father, ninety-one that fall. He lived in the front bedroom of Clay’s house, because that is where the old people on our road went. To the son with the big house, whether the son deserved them or not.

I could read most of it. Salt. Brown sugar. But the measures were rubbed to ghosts. And the bottom line, the important one, I could not make out at all.

So the next morning I drove to my brother’s house to see a ninety-one-year-old man. Which is a thing I should not have had to sneak to do.