The Hams I Carried Down the Road

Then came the smokehouse. The little clay-chinked smokehouse behind the barn that nobody had fired in years. Clay had told me more than once I ought to tear it down for the lumber.

I did not tear it down. I swept the wasp nests out of it and hung my six hams on the old iron hooks. I built a slow fire of hickory and a little applewood in the pit, nothing hot, just a thread of blue smoke.

I kept that smoke alive like a sick lamb for days. I slept in the truck one night with the window cracked, so I could smell if the fire jumped.

I learned the smokehouse the way you learn a person. Where it drew too hard, where a cold draft slipped under the north sill and wanted to kill the smolder.

I fed it green hickory split thin, and a stick of apple when I wanted the smell to go sweet. I banked it down to nothing but a red eye at night and woke it gentle in the morning.

My hands cracked and bled at the knuckles from the cold and the salt. I rubbed them with lard off the rendering and kept on. Nobody told me to. There was nobody left to tell me.

On the first of December I took them down. Six country hams the color of a saddle, firm as a drum, smelling of hickory and molasses and the whole long patience of it.

I hung them from the kitchen rafter on strings and stood under them in the lamplight. I will tell you the plain truth. I had never in my life made a thing so entirely my own.

The Wheelbarrow

I could have sold them. Russ Pruitt alone would have given me good money for two. There was a chef in Bloomington who paid city prices for a real country ham, and I needed the January money the way you need a coat in January.

I sat at the kitchen table with Father’s ledger open and a cup going cold and did the arithmetic. The numbers said sell them. The numbers always say sell them.

But I kept hearing my brother in the cold room. What does a single woman need with all that meat.

He had said it like a woman alone was a small thing. A thing that should take up as little room in the world as it could manage. A thing that should be grateful.

And I thought, I will show this whole road exactly how much a single woman needs. She needs enough to give away. That is how much.

So the next morning, cold and gray, the first snow spitting down, I wrapped all six hams in brown butcher paper and tied them with string. I loaded them into the green garden cart, the little two-wheeled one I hauled mulch in.

I pulled on my barn coat and started down our road on foot, pulling that cart behind me. The hams shifted and knocked soft against each other, like something alive.

Six hams. Six houses on our road, counting from our lane down to the hard road. I knew every family in every one of them. I had done most of their books.

My breath hung in front of me. The cart wheels left two thin lines in the new snow. I did not have one earthly idea what I would say at the first door.