The Hams I Carried Down the Road

What Came Back

I did not do it to get anything back. I want that understood. I did it to take up room in the world.

But the road did not know that, or did not care. And the road answered me the only way a road like ours knows how.

Edith Hoffman sent Merle’s nephew up our lane two days later with a dried-apple pie, still warm in a tea towel. The note in Edith’s big shaky hand said we have not laughed at our table like that in a year God bless you.

Donna Pruitt brought a loaf of bread every Friday after that, all winter. She just set it inside my kitchen door with a holler and left.

She did it until I had to start giving the heels to the chickens. I never once told her to stop.

The Lintons could not send food. They did not have it to send. So Kyle came up on a Saturday with his chainsaw.

He bucked and split a whole dead ash that had been leaning over my chicken run since August, a thing I had dreaded all fall. He stacked it against the smokehouse and would not take coffee even, just touched his cap and drove off.

Paul Sanford started coming to my church. I do not know how else to say it. A man who had not darkened a door since he buried his wife started showing up in the third pew on the left in a pressed shirt.

He told Pastor Dale it was on account of a ham. Pastor Dale told me. I had to go sit in my truck in the church lot a while over that one.

Brenda the pastor’s wife put it in the bulletin. Not my name. She is too kind for that.

She wrote a little piece about what a neighbor is. About a woman on their road who cured what she had and carried it door to door in the snow.

I had kept the trimmings for myself, the hocks and a shoulder and the sausage, so I was not without. And I had cut the heel end off one ham before I wrapped it, because of a promise.

I drove that heel to Clay’s house the week before Christmas. Dana let me in the back again, and this time she looked at me straight.

I carried it past her to the front bedroom, where Grandpa Sten sat in his chair. I set the paper in his lap and opened it under his nose.

He bent his face to it and breathed it in, and his old eyes ran. “There it is,” he said. “There’s your dad. Right there in the salt.”

We ate it at his little table with store bread, and he told the ice-storm story again, and I let him. It was the best hour I had all that cold winter.

That bulletin got around the way bulletins do. And it got to the one place I had not planned on it getting to. Which was the meat locker.