The Hams I Carried Down the Road

Down Every Road

The Pruitts were next. Russ already knew, because he had helped me butcher, but Donna did not.

When I handed her a ham she tried three times to pay me and I would not take it. Finally she just held it and cried in her kitchen doorway. Her mother used to cure hams in Orange County, she said, and she had not smelled hickory like that in thirty years.

Then the Lintons. The young couple with the new baby and the farm payment that I knew to the dollar was eating them alive, because I did their books.

I will not tell you what I know about their books. I will tell you that a cured ham is a lot of meals for people counting meals.

The husband, Kyle, met me on the step. When he understood what I was holding, he had to turn his face to the yard a second before he could say thank you like a man.

Then the Deckers. Ray and Patty, who farmed the two hundred acres across from our back lot and had five kids and never a spare minute.

Patty came to the door with flour to her wrists and a baby on her hip and two more hanging off her apron. When I held up the ham she set the baby down on the floor to take it with both hands.

“Ray’s been laid off at the plant since September,” she said, low, so the kids would not hear. “I been stretching a chuck roast three ways. You don’t know what this is.”

I did know. I did their books too. I just said the hickory would carry a pot of beans a long way, and she laughed and wiped her eyes on her shoulder because her hands were full.

Then old widower Paul Sanford. He lived alone with his dogs at the bend and had not, I think, been handed a wrapped thing by a human being in a year.

He kept me on his porch forty minutes telling me about his late wife’s pickled corn. He showed me the jars she canned her last summer, still on the cellar shelf, that he could not bring himself to open or throw out.

Once you give a lonely man a ham, he does not want you to leave. I stood in the cold and let him talk, because the ham was never the whole of what I came to give.

And the last house, down at the hard road, was the parsonage. Young Pastor Dale and his wife lived there. I gave them the sixth ham.

The wife, Brenda, held it. “Verna, this is the kind of thing I stand up and talk about on Sunday,” she said. “And here it is walking down the road in a garden cart.”

The cart was empty. The snow had quit. I turned around and walked back up our road toward home in the blue end of the afternoon.

I went past six porches, and every one of them had a light on now. I thought I could smell, or imagined I could smell, the first of them already in a skillet.