Supper for Fifty Two Boys

She patted my arm. “Lavern, are you going to sleep out here or do I have to bring the other lawn chair?”

Lavern had already dragged a lawn chair next to the smoker. He had a wool blanket around his shoulders and his seed cap pulled down over his ears. He lifted two fingers in a wave and did not open his eyes.

She went home. I sat down next to my husband.

The night was clear and cold, and the sky over Burkett was thick with stars in the way it only gets when you are far from a city and the fields are dark.

The smoker ticked. A train went by on the Union Pacific line two miles south, long and slow, the horn carrying across the stubble.

Around one in the morning, the shoulders hit the stall. The needle on the first thermometer sat at one fifty-eight and would not move.

“Is that normal?” Lavern asked, awake after all. “That’s the stall.” “How long?” “Hours.” He nodded. We sat there with our feet on the same cinder block.

“I called Milo back,” he said quietly. “When?” “Around four, while you were rubbing. He didn’t pick up. I left a message.” “What did you say?”

“I said Bernice’s smoking sixty pounds of pork for fifty-two boys and I would like to know why my brother lied to a high school football team.”

I turned and looked at him. He kept his eyes on the fire. “That’s all,” Lavern said. “Then I hung up.” I let the silence go for a little while.

“Did you listen to his voicemail?” “Not yet. I’m afraid of what’s on it.” “Why?” “Because I’m afraid it’s something I can forgive,” he said. “And I’m not ready to.”

I put my hand on his knee, and we sat with that. Around two I wrapped the shoulders in butcher paper to push through the stall, with a splash of apple juice sealed inside each bundle, and then we waited again.

The wood burned down and I fed it. The dark got thinner at the eastern edge around six.

Then a dull, silver gray, and then the sky turned a pale yellow over the Hendersons’ bean field, and the smoker kept ticking, and I thought: nobody is ever going to know I did this.

By eight the probe slid into the first shoulder like it was going through warm butter.

I pulled the first shoulder off the grate with Lavern’s welding gloves on and a rag under it, and the smell hit us both at the same moment.

“Oh,” Lavern said. “Yes.” “Bernice, that’s the best thing I’ve ever smelled.” “Wait until you taste it.”

We wrapped all eight in towels and set them in two coolers to rest, the way Lloyd Vogt told me at the counter.

They hold their heat for hours that way, and the juices settle back in. It would be the difference between pulled pork and pulled shoe leather.