The Hams I Carried Down the Road

The Locker Again

I was not there. I heard it from Harlan himself, later, because Harlan felt bad about the Webb ticket and wanted me to know. I will tell it the way he told it.

It was deer season by then, and the locker was full of men standing around the cold room the way men do, waiting on their processing, talking.

Somebody, Harlan thought it was Russ Pruitt, said something about the finest country ham he had ate since his mother died. Cured by Verna Sten right down the road, molasses and hickory, the old way. Gave to every house on their lane for nothing.

Another man said he had heard about that. His wife had read it in the parsonage bulletin. A woman pulling a garden cart of hams through the snow. Wasn’t that something.

And Clay was standing right there. Right there in the cold room with his deer on the rail waiting to be cut.

Every man in that room was praising his sister’s hams to the rafters. Not one of them knew or remembered that he had stood in that same room a month before.

That he had told Harlan to put both of her hams on his ticket. Because a single woman did not need that much meat.

Harlan said Clay did not say a word. Said he got quieter and quieter, and then said he had to get on, and left his own deer hanging. It was three days before he came back for it.

I did not gloat. I want Ruth down at the church and everybody like her to know I did not gloat. There was no joy in it for me, only a kind of tiredness.

He was still my brother. Our father was still three years in the ground, wishing the two of us would do better by each other.

But I will not sit here and tell you it did not settle something in me. To know my brother stood in the cold room and heard the whole county call my hams a gift. When he had called them too much for a woman alone.