The Hams I Carried Down the Road

“It’s the part nobody writes down, because it ain’t a thing you can weigh. You have to be there every day of it.” He looked at me. “That’s the whole secret of a ham, Verna. Somebody has to care enough to show up.”

I sat on that footstool and wrote turn them every day in my father’s ledger, under my father’s hand. Something in my chest that had been clenched since the locker came loose.

I had to look out the window at the bare garden so the old man would not see my face do what it did.

“Clay took both my hams,” I told the window.

“I know it,” Grandpa Sten said behind me. “He thinks a thing is his if he can carry it off. He’s always been that way.”

“But a ham ain’t the leg, girl. A ham is the caring for it. He can carry off the leg. He can’t carry off the caring.”

He laughed, a dry little sound. “Now go on. You’ve got barrels to fill. And bring me a heel of it when it’s cured. I don’t care whose house I have to eat it in.”

Curing Season

I butchered my three barrows the Tuesday after. Cold enough that your breath hung and the work stayed clean.

Russ Pruitt from the second place down came and helped me stick and scald and scrape, the way neighbors do. He would not take a dime, only a mess of tenderloin and the promise of a pint of sausage.

We worked from dark to dark. Six hams came off those hogs, trimmed close and square. The smallest near fifteen pounds, the biggest closer to twenty.

I laid them in the brine barrels in the cold cellar, Father’s recipe to the letter. A pound of salt to the gallon, the brown sugar, that slow cup of molasses stirred in warm water and cooled before it ever touched the meat.

I weighted them down with a scrubbed crock lid and a creek stone and covered the barrels with cheesecloth.

And every single day, for the better part of six weeks, I went down those cellar steps. I rolled my sleeve up past the elbow and I turned them. I pushed each ham down under the brine with my own two hands.

The brine was so cold it made my wrist ache up to the shoulder. I did it anyway. I did it in the dark some mornings before the coffee, and some nights after.

Grandpa Sten was right. It was not a measure. It was a showing up. By the third week I knew each ham by the feel of it, the way you know the weight of your own child going up the stairs asleep.