The Hams I Carried Down the Road

Grandpa Sten

Dana let me in the back, because Clay was at the office. She did it with her eyes down, and I understood she knew about the hams and did not know what to say about them.

I did not make her say anything. She is not a bad woman. She married into the keeping-score.

Grandpa Sten was in his chair by the window with a quilt on his knees and the farm report turned up loud. When he saw me his whole face opened up like a door.

“Verna,” he said. “You come to spring me.”

“I came to steal something, Grandpa.” I pulled the blue ledger out of my coat and sat on the footstool by his chair, close, so he could see.

“I can’t read Dad’s brine. The bottom line’s gone. I’ve got hogs to cure, and I want to do it his way. Your way.”

His hands shook the way old hands do. But they stopped shaking when they touched the page. He held it up to the window light and was quiet a long time.

“Your dad wrote this at my kitchen table,” he said. “He was younger than you are now. We did nine hogs the winter your grandmother was carrying your aunt Ruth.”

“It come an ice storm,” he said, “and we cured every one of them in the dark with the lantern, because the lines was down four days.”

He ran his thumb down the ghost of the measures and told me every one from memory. I wrote them fresh in the margin in my own pencil.

A pound of salt to the gallon. Half that of brown sugar. The molasses, a good slow cup of it. Because, he said, a Sten ham ought to taste a little like the inside of a church at Christmas.

And then the bottom line, the one I could not read. He did not even look at the page for it.

“Turn them,” he said. “Every day you turn them in the barrel, and you push them back under with your own two hands. That’s the line. It ain’t a measure.”