Cut her up, she’d cool quicker anyways.”
It was Uncle John who broke over the edge, his pressures too great.
“What we hangin’ aroun’ for?
I want to get shut of this.
Now we’re goin’, why don’t we go?”
And the revulsion spread to the rest.
“Whyn’t we go?
Get sleep on the way.” And a sense of hurry crept into them.
Pa said,
“They say it’s two thousan’ miles. That’s a hell of a long ways.
We oughta go.
Noah, you an’ me can get that meat cut up an’ we can put all the stuff in the truck.”
Ma put her head out of the door.
“How about if we forgit somepin, not seein’ it in the dark?”
“We could look ’round after daylight,” said Noah.
They sat still then, thinking about it.
But in a moment Noah got up and began to sharpen the bow-bladed knife on his little worn stone. “Ma,” he said, “git that table cleared.” And he stepped to a pig, cut a line down one side of the backbone and began peeling the meat forward, off the ribs.
Pa stood up excitedly.
“We got to get the stuff together,” he said. “Come on, you fellas.”
Now that they were committed to going, the hurry infected all of them.
Noah carried the slabs of meat into the kitchen and cut it into small salting blocks, and Ma patted the coarse salt in, laid it piece by piece in the kegs, careful that no two pieces touched each other.
She laid the slabs like bricks, and pounded salt in the spaces.
And Noah cut up the side-meat and he cut up the legs.
Ma kept her fire going, and as Noah cleaned the ribs and the spines and leg bones of all the meat he could, she put them in the oven to roast for gnawing purposes. In the yard and in the barn the circles of lantern light moved about, and the men brought together all the things to be taken, and piled them by the truck.
Rose of Sharon brought out all the clothes the family possessed: the overalls, the thick-soled shoes, the rubber boots, the worn best suits, the sweaters and sheepskin coats.
And she packed these tightly into a wooden box and got into the box and tramped them down.
And then she brought out the print dresses and shawls, the black cotton stockings and the children’s clothes—small overalls and cheap print dresses—and she put these in the box and tramped them down.
Tom went to the tool shed and brought what tools were left to go, a hand saw and a set of wrenches, a hammer and a box of assorted nails, a pair of pliers and a flat file and a set of rat-tail files.
And Rose of Sharon brought out the big piece of tarpaulin and spread it on the ground behind the truck.
She struggled through the door with the mattresses, three double ones and a single. She piled them on the tarpaulin and brought arm-loads of folded ragged blankets and piled them up.
Ma and Noah worked busily at the carcasses, and the smell of roasting pork bones came from the stove.
The children had fallen by the way in the late night.
Winfield lay curled up in the dust outside the door; and Ruthie, sitting on a box in the kitchen where she had gone to watch the butchering, had dropped her head back against the wall.
She breathed easily in her sleep, and her lips were parted over her teeth.
Tom finished with the tools and came into the kitchen with his lantern, and the preacher followed him.
“God in a buckboard,” Tom said, “smell that meat!
An’ listen to her crackle.”
Ma laid the bricks of meat in a keg and poured salt around and over them and covered the layer with salt and patted it down.
She looked up at Tom and smiled a little at him, but her eyes were serious and tired.
“Be nice to have pork bones for breakfas’,” she said.
The preacher stepped beside her.
“Leave me salt down this meat,” he said. “I can do it. There’s other stuff for you to do.”
She stopped her work then and inspected him oddly, as though he suggested a curious thing.
And her hands were crusted with salt, pink with fluid from the fresh pork.
“It’s women’s work,” she said finally.
“It’s all work,” the preacher replied. “They’s too much of it to split it up to men’s or women’s work.
You got stuff to do.
Leave me salt the meat.”
Still for a moment she stared at him, and then she poured water from a bucket into the tin wash basin and she washed her hands.
The preacher took up the blocks of pork and patted on the salt while she watched him.