We put a pet crate in the back of 52’s pickup and drove down the road to the Ornery Angel’s house one spring weekend afternoon to pick up two piglets. I sat next to him on the truck’s bench seat, my hand resting on his jean-clad leg, as we puttered past our sun-dappled meadow bottom. I liked driving around in the truck with 52 on our farm when he was in a good mood. We had the sheep in the bottom now, and I’d ride down the driveway with him to feed them or check on them.
You couldn’t even see the meadow bottom from the house, separated as it was by the steep hillside and thick trees, so it felt distant in a way, despite being part of our farm.
“Who’s going to take care of the pigs?” I asked.
I was leery about pigs, but eager for the homegrown sausage. I wasn’t planning to get emotionally attached, and I was very interested in making as much of our own food as possible. At some point, that meant addressing where meat came from.
“I’ll take care of them,” he said. He was planning to build a pig pen in the meadow bottom.
This sounded good since I thought the less time I spent with the pigs, the better.
“What do pigs eat anyway?” I knew nothing about pigs. I’d never been near a pig except at a fair.
“Near the end,” 52 told me, “you just feed them corn, to fatten them up. Until then, they’ll eat just about anything. I can get fruit and vegetables from the farmers’ market in Charleston.”
“Really? You mean buy fruit and vegetables?” This wasn’t sounding very cost-effective.
“Cast-off fruit and vegetables.” He explained that he’d talked to some of the vendors at the market. He’d set up a deal to haul off their bruised or nearly spoiled fruit and vegetables. The vendors would get rid of the stuff they couldn’t sell, and we would get free food for our pigs.
52 was really good at finding deals and freebies, whether it was salvaged building supplies or free fruit and vegetables. He was always thinking of things that would never occur to me in a million years.
We turned in at the Ornery Angel’s driveway. The whole family was waiting for us in the yard—the Ornery Angel, her husband, and their three kids. I’d never been to their house before, so this felt like a huge step in our relationship.
They led us to the rickety, ramshackle pig pen that backed up to the woods beside their house. There was a kind of shedlike enclosure with a wooden-fenced yard in front of it. The most gigantic pig I’d ever seen in my life lay on her side with approximately five billion piglets attached to her five billion teats.
Or maybe like a dozen piglets and a dozen teats, I’m really not sure. I was kind of stunned by the multiplicity of teats and the size of the sow.
The pig got up, shaking off the babies, some of which tried to latch back on to their rambling mama while others scooted under the wooden fence, racing around the yard squealing.
“Those two in there are the ones you can have,” the Ornery Angel told 52, pointing. She wasn’t really directing conversation at me.
I was busy staring at the sow anyway.
52 and I approached the pig pen. The sow reared up and came at the fence, which was nothing more than weathered wooden rails.
“She can’t get out, can she?” I asked nervously.
“She hasn’t gotten out. Yet.” The Ornery Angel’s husband laughed. “If she gets out, I’m shooting her.”
One of the piglets that was set aside for us came near the fence. 52 leaned down and swiped it into his hands, barely catching it. It started squealing bloody murder.
The sow blasted into the fence.
I backed way, way up. Maybe it was all a trick. The Ornery Angel had gotten me here to have her pig kill me!
52 stuffed the first piglet into the pet crate in the back of the truck and went back for the second. The piglets were outrageously cute with their curly tails and high-pitched squeals. The mother pig was one of the scariest animals I’d ever seen in my life.
The second piglet required a lot of chasing, which involved a lot more sow crashing into the fence, but we finally rolled away with two pork producers in the back of the truck. The mother pig was still making a ruckus as we drove off.
“I’m glad you’re taking care of the pigs,” I told 52. “Because when they get like that one? I’m not going anywhere near them.”
The piglets were a boy and a girl. We named them Sausage and Patty. After keeping them up top near the house in the goat pen (Clover’s former milking parlor), 52 finished the pig pen in the meadow bottom and they moved down.
Next, it was time to call the pig man, and I don’t mean somebody who appears in circus sideshows or special effects sequences in the movies. One of the strange things about the country is that you can always find somebody who specializes in whatever gruesome thing you need done. We needed a man who cuts pigs.
By then, we had a farrier for the donkeys, so we asked him if he knew a pig man.
He said, “My cousin cuts pigs.”
Of course.
So we called his cousin, who showed up one Saturday afternoon with his wife and teenage daughter. The pig man and 52 dragged Sausage, our male pig, kicking and screaming out of the pig pen. And I do mean screaming.
Once they had the pig out in the field, 52 got out of the way and the daughter stepped into the action, holding Sausage on his back by his hind legs, tipped so his legs stuck straight up in the air. She was obviously an old hand at assisting her father, though the wife apparently didn’t want to take part—she stayed in the truck. The pig man took out his knife and made quick work of Sausage’s package.
In the country, veterinarians aren’t called in to neuter hogs. You do it yourself, or you call a pig man. The main reason male hogs are castrated is because boar meat can have an odor to it, but it also makes for a more mellow pig in general.
Though Sausage wasn’t exactly mellow while it was happening.
It was disgusting and oddly fascinating.
The pig man sprayed the “affected area” with antiseptic when he was finished. 52 took custody of Sausage, and the daughter wiped her hands on her jeans.
Then, approaching me, the pig man held out his palm. Sausage’s family jewels sat in a fleshy, bloody clump. “Take it up to the house and fry it,” he said. “It’s a delicacy.”
I said, “You can have it!”
They drove off, and 52 returned Sausage to the pen and Patty. I told the pigs good-bye and that I’d see them when it was time to make the pork chop batter. I never felt any attachment to them whatsoever, which made it easy to look forward to the bacon, and also made me feel slightly more like a farmer.
The free “pig” fruits and vegetables from the market rolled in all summer, and the amazing thing was that so much of it was good, or at least good enough. Cut off a bad spot here or a bad spot there, and it was people food, not pig food. The slightest blemish can make produce unsellable, but that wasn’t the same thing as inedible. With money tight, I set to work preserving the bounty. 52 pulled up in his truck at the house after coming home with a load from the farmers’ market, and I sorted through to take what I wanted before he hauled what I rejected down to the pigs. It was like Christmas every time, just with vegetables instead of presents. Dumpster diving, farmer style.
After experiencing the previous winter where I could barely get out the road, much less to a store and back, I started preparing early for the coming one. I cooked then scraped over one hundred ears of corn to make cream corn in freezer packs. I processed boxes of peppers, hot and sweet, to freeze and dry. I canned tomatoes, green beans, and all kinds of fruit for fillings and jams. Much of what I preserved came from the free farmers’ market hauls, and some from our own garden. I dried zucchini and squash (in chips, to rehydrate later for stews and soups, or to grind for vegetable sauces). Herbs were dried by the basketful and stored in jar after jar.
Pressure canning was still new to me—52 had brought home a fifty-year-old pressure canner that worked perfectly, from a coworker at his office not long after we first moved to the farm, and had taught me to use it—but I’d learned boiling water bath canning at the Slanted Little House.
Georgia still used the kitchen in the Slanted Little House to do her canning, and she stored it all in the old cellar. Low on money, I enjoyed “shopping” in that cellar for our meals when I first moved in, so I suppose it was only fair that she taught me how to replace what I ate.
She followed me into the kitchen one day the first summer I lived there, me lugging a heavy basket from the garden, and said, “What did you say you were going to do with these tomatoes?”
I hadn’t said I was going to do anything with the tomatoes. I was hot and tired because she’d just made me pick them. I didn’t want to ever look at a tomato again much less stand in a hot kitchen blanching, peeling, slicing, and canning them. I was a writer, and I was always trying to find time to write. Georgia was always trying to find something for me to do.
“You go to the cellar and get some quart jars and a big pot,” she said. “I’ll sit down here and wait for you.”
The back of the Slanted Little House was lined with windows that allowed the hot summer sun to beam in full force. There were no curtains or shades, and most of the windows were painted shut. The sills were lined with the most enormous collection of knickknacks I’d ever seen. Whenever I took a hankering to dust them, it took half the day.
I brought up the biggest pot I could find in the cellar, and there was a dead bug in the bottom of it, which meant I had to wash it. There was never a lack of jars—the cellar was full of them. In the old days, canning jars were a typical gift to a new bride. They were prized possessions and tools of survival. Families passed them through generations.
The old cellar hadn’t changed a bit since I was a kid. I still found it creepy yet mysteriously alluring.
On the sagging shelves of the old cellar, you could find all sorts of treasures. Ball Ideal jars. Blue “1858” Masons. Atlas Shoulders. Some of them had the old zinc or bail wire lids, though we didn’t can in those.
Georgia had been canning all her life, and on that hot summer day and more in the Slanted Little House, with the sunlight beating in those back windows, she passed the baton to me, teaching me to make the garden witchery of Ruby. She sat at the table and gave instructions. If I didn’t follow them exactly, she’d get a little testy. Other times, she’d refuse to give me instructions at all.
She’d hover over the pot, then sit down again. I thought she had me do most of the work because she tired easily. She’d grown up on a farm and had done it all.
Peeling tomatoes burned my fingers even in their ice water bath. Georgia fussed around, lining up the jars, ordering measurements of salt and lemon juice. She didn’t use a cookbook. Everything she knew was in her head.
If she’d ever had a canning rack, it had disappeared into the murky depths of the cellar. She showed me how to make do and fold dishtowels to set in the pot to keep the jars off the bottom.
When the water was boiling and the lid safely down, I was ready for a glass of wine and a rocking chair on the porch.
I was sure we were saving the rest of the tomatoes for tomorrow. Or never.
Georgia said, “You better start peeling. When these jars come out, we’ll put more in.”
Then she sat down, one gnarled hand resting on her cane, and eyeballed me. She wore one of her usual at-home ensembles of a faded West Virginia Mountaineers T-shirt, stretch slacks, and a ball cap with her curly white hair poking out on all sides. She looked like a cross between a little old church lady, a gnome, and a homeless bum.
“Can’t we wait till tomorrow?”
Her reply was clipped. “No, we can’t.”
She fully understood that I was lazy, and she was having none of it. You make hay while the sun shines, and you can tomatoes when they’re sitting on the counter. No excuses. Or wine.
The tomatoes didn’t go on forever, but there was always something else. Apples off the trees. Pears from a neighbor down the road. She taught me to preserve everything she could get her hands on.
I’d be stirring a simmering pot of some kind of jam or butter and make her come take a look. “Is this ready?” Can we put it in the jars? Is this over yet?
She’d give it a look, then sit down and say, “Do you think it’s ready?”
“You’re supposed to tell me that!”
Sometimes I’d get frustrated with her because she’d describe what it was supposed to look like, then make me figure out the rest on my own.
The next spring I was helping her plant when she called me over to the far side of the garden where she always put the corn. She was planting giant sunflowers for the birds between the hills of corn seed.
She said, “I can’t remember if I planted this row already or not. Can you tell me?”
I looked down the row. Yep, corn seeds, with sunflower seeds between. I looked up to meet her stubborn gaze.
That’s when I realized how bad her eyesight had become. No way was she giving up her big garden any more readily than she’d give up canning, even if it meant she needed me to “see” for her.
“Putting food by” (preserving the garden’s bounty) wasn’t a hobby or something to do to impress people. For Georgia and the long line of women like Ruby who came before her, self-sustainable living was a way of life.
The first time I canned something at the Slanted Little House all by myself, without Georgia in the kitchen by my side, I was thrilled with the sense of accomplishment. I practically danced across the yard to her house to present her with a jar.
She said, “I need a spoon.”
I leaped into her kitchen to get her one.
She dug the spoon right in and ate the whole half-pint of blackberry jam in one sitting, then pronounced it satisfactory.
That’s what I’m planning to do when I’m in my seventies. Eat entire half-pints of jam whenever I want.
Once I learned to can, of course, I wanted to learn so much more. What else could I do? If self-sustainable living is an addiction, canning is a gateway drug. Next thing you know, you’re dehydrating, pickling, fermenting, and milking a cow. Or at least that’s what happened to me.
Morgan came in one day and found me standing in the pantry at our new house, staring at the wall of shelves lined with jars from canning up our freebie bounty. She said, “You like to look at that, don’t you?”
I said, “Yes, it gives me a sense of satisfaction for all the work I’ve done. Like I enjoy looking at you. It gives me a sense of satisfaction for all the work I’ve put into you.”
She said, “What work?”
Children are so ungrateful!
All my preserving efforts weren’t just for us, of course—I was planning ahead for holiday gifts, too. We still didn’t have much money, and frugal was the motto by which we lived. I made homemade candles and was even mixing my own homemade laundry detergent. I was constantly coming up with new ideas for things to try homemade. It helped the budget and, of course, gave me plenty of material for my website.
52 was a willing participant in every new experiment, trying out anything I’d make, though our relationship continued to be rough and I couldn’t understand why. I recognized the pattern of his diatribes, but I never figured out how to stop myself from stepping into the trap. Evening after evening would be just fine, then the next thing I knew, things were going to hell in a handbasket and I didn’t know how we’d gotten there.
It didn’t take much.
“Have you fed the dogs today?” he asked one evening when he came home. We had Coco, our Great Pyr, and by then we had Boomer, a little terrier mix stray Ross had picked up behind McDonald’s one night after work, and our “farm” shih tzu, Dookie. (I called him a “farm” shih tzu because he was always a mess. He was an elderly dog 52 had given to Morgan when we still lived at the Slanted Little House.)
“I fed them this morning,” I said. We were sitting on the front porch, the dogs gathered about his feet in greeting.
“They need to eat twice a day. They’re hungry.”
“I’m going to feed them tonight,” I said. “I just haven’t fed them yet.”
“Dogs need to eat twice a day.”
“I’m going to feed them. I was busy.”
I didn’t know why it was a big deal anyway. The dogs didn’t look like they were starving, and they were going to get their dinner in due order.
“Stop making excuses,” he said.
“I’m not making excuses!”
“Now you’re arguing. You always have to argue.”
There. Stepped right into it, didn’t I. I never saw it coming!
I stood. “I’ll feed them right now.”
“You think you’re perfect, don’t you?” he demanded.
A heavy weight sank in my stomach. I was so tired of this routine. I was baffled by his pattern of attack. I thought I was pretty obviously not perfect, though this didn’t bother me. I wasn’t even interested in being perfect and had certainly never claimed to be.
“I don’t think I’m perfect,” I said.
“Of course you do. You’re perfect, and I’m not.”
“Nobody’s perfect.”
“You’re right. You’re always right. You have to always be right,” he said.
I rolled my eyes. I couldn’t help it. Once he got started, it was like he was reading a script. The same one, over and over.
“I see you rolling your eyes,” he spit out. “I know what you’re thinking. You think I’m stupid.”
I heaved a sigh, standing there wondering whether I should get some dog food or if he would accuse me of running away if I walked into the house. Since he’d come back after the episode the previous winter, I’d been careful to never let our conversations escalate. I was willing, repeatedly, to just walk away when he got started, but often he’d then accuse me of running away. I didn’t know what else to do. We’d stopped seeing the counselor, and he’d resisted going back. I didn’t want the kids to overhear what was going on, and most of all, I was afraid if the conversation ever escalated, I’d end up telling him to get out.
I’d promised him I’d never tell him to leave again, and I meant to keep my word.
“I have never once thought you were stupid,” I told him. “I think you’re a very smart person.”
“No, you don’t. You think I’m a stupid little boy.”
“When have I ever said you are a stupid little boy?” I was flabbergasted. The “little boy” part was new, though it wasn’t unusual for him to occasionally add something new to his routine. It seemed to be getting longer all the time, with new attacks or assertions of what he “knew” I was thinking. “Where are you getting this stuff?”
We’d had many conversations in which he’d told me stories about his family. His mother was a schoolteacher and was known as a hard one. I knew he’d lived in the shadow of his brilliant older sister and that his mother had been a demanding parent, difficult to please. His father was known around town, by the reports of people who remembered him, as a detached and distant man. His mother had been the force in the family, or at least that was how it had been expressed to me, mostly when 52 wasn’t present and people were saying what they really thought about his parents. His mother and father had died in a car crash years earlier, so of course I had never met them.
I was starting to put a few things together, though.
Someone who’d been a student of his mother’s shared with me that she’d told him he’d never succeed in life and should plan on working at a gas station. He’d all but failed her class under the esteem beating, but he had gone on to be quite successful in life.
“Did your mother call you a stupid little boy?” I asked suddenly.
Maybe I took him by surprise. He didn’t answer, but he didn’t deny it either, which was answer enough.
I walked into the house quietly, almost forgetting about the dog food.
I’d stepped into something far deeper than I’d realized.