by Donis Casey
Shaw lifted the peeled tree limb used to bar the makeshift door of the portable cage and went inside. He held the lantern high and circled the dead swine, patting them up and down to make sure they were well cooled. When he circled around the back of the second hog he froze, his hand still extended, hardly believing what he was looking at. He moved in so close that his nose was almost touching the meat and moved the light up next to his face. A long rectangle of fatback and loin had been cut out of the carcass.
He stepped back and drew a sharp breath.
What is this?
He stood holding up the lantern, staring at the raw gape. It was jagged and uneven, but not as though an animal had ripped it out with its teeth. More like an inexpert butcher had sawed at the meat. Whoever had helped himself to a slab of pork had replaced the bar on the door and had made sure to leave everything in the shed as he found it. Shaw didn’t feel particularly frightened. If the thief had been intent on real harm there was no evidence of it here. He wasn’t happy that an intruder had been wandering around on the property and he hadn’t known a thing about it. He suddenly thought of the moccasin-clad feet that had made free with their campsite and was struck by an unreasonable pang of annoyance at Crook. Why hadn’t that durn beast barked?
Now he was alarmed. Had someone followed him home? He held the lantern down close to the ground, searching for footprints, but could see nothing. He stepped out of the cage, closed it back up, and sat down on a stool to think about this development. Charlie Dog sidled up to him and Shaw draped his arm over the dog’s back.
“I don’t want to scare Alafair and the children,” he said. It was helpful to ponder aloud and Charlie Dog was a good listener, even if he was short on advice. “I expect our visitor helped himself and left, but I’d just as soon be careful. I’ll tell Kurt and John Lee what happened and see that they keep their eyes peeled. Better tell Alafair, too, and have her keep the young’uns close to the house for a few days. I’ll ride into town when I can and let Scott know we’ve got a thief about in case he wants to warn the other farms around here.” He gave the dog a squeeze. “Crook and Buttercup are love-struck and worthless right now, so I’m expecting you to look out for everybody until we’re sure we’re safe.”
He stood up. “Alafair will be expecting us for breakfast. Let’s take a look around first and make sure that back bacon is the only thing the sneak took last night.”
Chapter Twenty
When Shaw finally got back to the house, a couple of fingers of sunlight were poking up over the horizon. His inspection of the barn and outbuildings around the house had turned up no further evidence of an intruder and he was feeling more reassured that it was a passing vagrant who had been carving on the swine carcass.
Breakfast was in full swing. Kurt had joined the family and John Lee was at the table as well, along with his wife, Shaw’s fourth daughter, Phoebe, and their baby Zeltha. Charlie and Ruth were both staying home from school again today to help finish the butchering. But Mary was dressed for teaching duty and was already herding the younger girls toward the door for the trip into town. Martha was at the stove frying thick slabs of homemade bread in bacon grease. Judging by her attire she was taking the day off from work to help her mother render lard and make sausages, blood puddings, and head cheese. Alafair was sitting in a kitchen chair with a squirmy Grace clamped between her knees as she brushed the girl’s black pageboy.
Every eye turned Shaw’s way as he entered. The warm kitchen was cheery with lamplight and fragrant with the smell of fresh bread, oniony gravy, and bacon. His mood lifted at the chorus of greetings from his family and he smiled.
Zeltha appeared from under the kitchen table with a cry of “Wa!” and crawled toward him. He lifted her into his arms and sat down in his place at the head of the table. His granddaughter was just over a year old and not yet walking or talking. It seemed to Shaw that she was small for her age and immature, especially compared to his hearty crew, every one of whom had been on his or her feet by fourteen months. But she was an exceptionally sweet and pretty child with thick black hair like John Lee’s, and large, kind, hazel eyes like her mother Phoebe’s. Or like her Grandpa Shaw’s. Besides, she zipped around perfectly well on hands and knees and Shaw knew for a fact that “Wa” meant “Dearest Grandfather.”
Martha set a plateful of bacon before him, along with fried bread topped with fried eggs and potatoes on the side. Phoebe removed Zeltha from his lap so he could eat in comfort and Charlie passed him the syrup to pour over everything on his plate.
***
The children were on their way to school and Phoebe had left for home with the toddlers in tow by the time Kurt, Charlie, and John Lee all finished eating at once and stood up from the table. They were just moving toward the back door when Shaw spoke.
“Hang on for a minute, boys.”
The three young men paused and eyed him. Shaw sopped the last of his gravy with a piece of bread and swallowed it down before continuing. Out of the corner of his eye he could see that Alafair and Martha had stopped scraping dishes and were watching him as well.
He pushed his plate away and sat back in his chair. “Seems we had us a sneak thief break in during the night and carve himself off a slab of pork.”
The boys exchanged a glance, but only Kurt exclaimed. “I heard nothing!” Kurt slept in the tool shed, one end of which had been partitioned off to create spartan living quarters. His room was situated a scant ten yards from the ramada where the hog carcasses hung.
“I’m not surprised,” Shaw said. “The fellow must be pretty good at slinking about unseen and unheard. He got inside the cage, hacked himself out a piece of meat, and closed everything up like he found it. It was still dark when I went out there this morning, but I couldn’t find any footprints.”
“Sounds like a tramp,” Alafair offered, “who makes his way by helping himself to whatever he can find on farms he passes by.”
“That’s what I figure,” Shaw agreed. He felt an odd relief that she would offer this perfectly logical explanation.
“Did he take very much?” John Lee asked.
Shaw shook his head. “No, just enough for a couple of meals, I reckon. But what he did take was choice. Charlie, you go start the fire under the cauldron. Kurt, head on out to the shed and fetch the saws and knives.” He looked at his son-in-law, who stood gazing at him out of solemn black eyes awaiting his assignment. “John Lee, it’s finally about to get light enough to see. Have a look around and see if you can find any other signs of mischief. Maybe a stray print or anything else that would give us a clue about where the vagabond went.”
As the boys hurried off to their tasks, Shaw turned to Martha and Ruth, both still at the table. “Darlin’s, when you slop the hogs and feed the chickens, take some breakfast to Buttercup, please.”
The girls moved to obey, but Martha shot her mother a surreptitious glance before she put on her coat and left with the scrap bucket in one hand and an empty tin pan in the other.
As soon as they were alone Alafair folded her arms over her chest. “Are you thinking of your haint?”
Her comment wasn’t meant to be funny but Shaw couldn’t help but laugh. Alafair never did beat about the bush. “That was my first thought,” he admitted. “But I’m more inclined to believe your tramp story.”
“And that’s sure enough who stole the pork.” She was firm about it. “There’s no other way to look at it. I never knew a ghost to eat fatback.”
He walked across the room and gave her a hug and kiss. She not only could read his mind, she knew just how to set it at ease.
He retrieved his hat from the rack by the door and plopped it on his head. “I’ll be outside carving hams for a spell, sugar, and will be too busy to worry about thieves or departed spirits, either one.”
Chapter Twenty-one
Shaw and the boys spent the day carving the cooled carcasses into hams and loins, bacon, ribs, roasts, and shoulders. By mid-afternoon the meat had been shelved
or hung on hooks in the smokehouse. Shaw was kindling the hickory wood fire in the center of the little room when John Lee found him. Shaw brushed the ash off his hands and directed John Lee outside away from the rapidly spreading smoke, where they could talk. He barred the smokehouse door and secured it with an iron padlock, then put the key in his pocket before he turned to see John Lee with his chilly hands muffed in the bib of his overalls, patiently waiting for him to finish.
Shaw spoke first. “Did you find any trace of our thief?”
“I didn’t, Pa. Nary a footprint. There’s a place in the yard where there’s no grass, though, where it looks to me like the ground has been brushed. Our tramp likely rubbed out his prints. Maybe tied leafy twigs to his heels like I’ve seen some Indians do. He knows how to cover his tracks, I reckon. I didn’t find any broken branches in the woods, neither. But without a trail to follow I don’t know where he went into the trees, so just ’cause I couldn’t find any that don’t mean they ain’t there.”
“You didn’t find a camp? If he took pork loin for his breakfast he had a campfire. He sure didn’t eat that meat raw.”
“I didn’t see one. I didn’t smell one, neither.”
Shaw thought about this. John Lee was thorough and observant, and if he couldn’t find a sign of the intruder, then there probably wasn’t a sign to find. He dismissed the young man to help Kurt finish packing some of the bacon in a barrel of salt before going by himself to check the root cellar close behind the house.
He lifted the plank barring the door and walked down the half-dozen steps into the dark, earthy-fragrant interior. The cave-like room carved out of the dirt was lined with shelves and piled high with sacks of beans and potatoes, jars of vegetables, canned fruits, jams, bags of nuts, barrels of apples. Had the contents been disturbed? None of the sacks appeared to have been opened. How could he tell if a potato was missing, a jar of blackberry jam or a handful of beans? Would it do him any good to inspect the corn crib? Had an ear of dried corn disappeared? He retrieved an extra padlock from the tool shed and secured the cellar door.
Whoever the intruder was, he wasn’t a vandal. He had not been bent on destruction but had only helped himself to a meal. Shaw doubted the vagabond posed a danger, although he couldn’t know the man’s mind. It was best to be careful. He decided to wear his gun belt for a spell, just as a precaution, while he was outside working. He walked back toward the house through Alafair’s large truck garden, his eyes sweeping the rows for any sign of disturbance. The garden was mostly gone. Alafair had already brought in the pumpkins and squash, the last of the season’s harvest. Only the potato vines were left, and they were dying back quickly since the cold snap.
He stopped on the back porch long enough to break the skin of ice on the wash bucket and wash his face and hands with yellow-grey, homemade lye soap. Dozens of glass jars and masonry crocks of newly-rendered lard, white as snow, were stacked in pyramids on one of the long wooden benches that ran along the sides of the screened porch. He retrieved a flour-sack towel from the twine clothesline Alafair had strung across the porch for rainy days or emergency child-spill laundry and vigorously dried himself. By the time he opened the back door into the kitchen his face was glowing a healthy red.
Warmth enveloped him like a blanket. The kitchen had become a meat processing plant, hot, raw, and spicy smelling, full of the laughter and chatter of females. Alafair and her girls were making sausages, each woman busy at her task. Sophronia was having a high time forcing chunks of raw pork through the iron meat grinder that was attached with a clamp to the end of the kitchen table. Alafair stood next to her at the center of the action, pounding dried sage and thyme in a mortar and supervising at the same time. At her side, daughter Alice leaned over a tub of ground pork and minced fat, mixing in the spices with her bare hands. At the other end of the table Blanche was feeding the finished mixture through a sausage stuffer. As she pressed the plunger into the canister the meat was forced out into a length of hog intestines that had been washed so often and scraped so thoroughly that it was transparent. Ruth sat in a chair and carefully pulled and guided the filling tubes of sausage. Every five or six inches she gave the meat-filled tube a twist, creating a long string of links which she wound around into a circular pile on the table. Martha was at the stove frying sausage patties in a cast-iron skillet. When she had a goodly number of fried patties on her platter, she stacked them into ceramic pint jars and poured hot fat over all. After the jars of sausages were sealed they would be turned upside down and stored standing on their lids in the root cellar.
Alice, up to her elbows in ground pork, looked up at Shaw and smiled. “Hi, Daddy!”
Shaw grabbed a handful of cracklins from a big bowl on top of the pie safe and popped one into his mouth. “Hi, honey. I didn’t see when you came in. Is Walter here?”
“No, the barber shop is open today and he didn’t figure he ought to leave. But Mama told me that if I wanted a share of sausages or some head cheese this year I durn well better come help her put them up.” She winked a pale blue eye at him when her mother snorted.
Alice, the third of the Tucker brood and wife of barber Walter Kelley, was the closest thing the town of Boynton had to a socialite. She was tall and exceedingly pretty, and usually dressed to the nines. But today she was clad as scruffily as the rest of the family, her blond hair wrapped up in a frayed and faded scarf.
Alafair wiped her hands on her apron. “You want something to eat?”
Shaw popped another cracklin into his mouth and shook his head. “Don’t let me bother you gals. I just came in to fetch something from the bedroom. I’ll be out of your hair directly.”
He half expected that Alafair would ask him what he wanted. But to his relief, she was busy enough that she left him to his own task. He bestowed several forehead kisses as he made his way into the bedroom to retrieve his gun belt from a hook on the wall and his .44 revolver from a strongbox at the top of the armoire. He only took the time to scoop out a single handful of cartridges from the box in a dresser drawer and put them into his coat pocket before making his escape out the front door.
Chapter Twenty-two
Shaw and Peter stood together on the covered front porch of the McBride house. Alafair and Sally were already half-way across the yard, heads together, deep in conversation and walking toward the Tuckers’ buggy parked at the front gate. Shaw and Alafair had made a quick trip to the parents’ house to deliver a brown paper- and burlap-wrapped package of fresh head cheese, along with a ham joint and a long string of sausage that Peter would smoke in an applewood fire. It was a bright, clear afternoon, but cold. Shaw put his hands into the pockets of his sheepskin coat. He could feel the knobby protrusions of the snake-bone necklace under his left hand and the curve of his revolver handle under his right. Alafair’s eyes had zeroed in on the gun belt about five minutes after Shaw had put it on, but she had said nothing.
“You think Scott’ll get your pork thief, Shaw?” Peter asked.
“No. I expect he’s long gone. Every few years there’s a rash of vagabond thievery on several farms and seldom does the culprit get caught. By the way, whatever happened with that fellow from Shawnee that came by here the other day to contract a stud fee? Did y’all come to an arrangement?”
Shaw was surprised when Peter scowled. The older man was usually elated when he was able to put Red Allen to a likely mare. “I did not. Turns out he was a faker. That rascal Doolan had paid the scallawag ten dollars to pretend he was the owner of the red walker mare Doolan wants to breed.”
“You don’t say! Well, that’s pretty clever if you ask me.”
Peter was not amused. “Not clever enough. I got my suspicions when he slipped and said his farm was in Okmulgee and not Shawnee like he’d told me before. So I asked for the filly’s papers, and he turned shifty. That’s when I got it out of him.”
Shaw’s mustache twitched. He could imagine how Peter “got it out of him.” Some combination of threats to sue and a couple
of fancy moves with that knob-headed stick he liked to carry. “So you sent him packing?”
“I did.” Peter was peering into the distance, thinking his own thoughts.
“Papa, I know you don’t like to talk about it, but I’m wondering what happened between you and Doolan. As long as I’ve known the both of you—and that’s a mighty long time—y’all were the best of friends. Until a few years ago. What could he have done to turn you against him so?”
Peter slid him a brief glance but was silent for so long that Shaw thought he wasn’t going to answer. But Peter finally spoke.
“He was my friend, Shaw. As good a friend as ever was. But he’s lost my good opinion and he’ll never have it back, even if he sprouts the wings of an angel and flies away to heaven. I’ll have no truck with a man who’s cruel to a beast.”
Shaw looked doubtful. “I’m surprised to hear that. I’d have never pegged Mr. Doolan as the kind of man to mistreat an animal.”
Peter blew a small breath that was half-way between a snort of exasperation and a sigh. “I’d have never thought it of him, either. Not Doolan, of all men. Yet I caught him red-handed at the County Fair back five years ago. It was the middle of the night and I went to check on Red Allen in the horse barn. I found Doolan with that walker gelding he used to have. Osage Dancer. Remember him?”
“I do. He was a roan with two white stockings. That horse had a fine high gait and won many a pacing competition.”
“There was a sad reason for that high gait. Doolan was putting mustard oil on Dancer’s feet the night before the Walker competition.”
Shaw was so taken aback that he struggled to find an appropriate response. “He ‘sored’ that handsome critter?”
If a man owned a naturally talented Tennessee walker and worked with it long and hard, he could turn the horse’s in-born high stepping gait into a dramatic prance called a “big lick.” Unfortunately some less scrupulous owners weren’t willing to go to the trouble to train the horse in order to enhance its natural pace. Instead, they would use a variety of cruel methods to make an animal’s feet so sore that it could barely tolerate the pain. Every step hurt, so as it strode the horse would lift its front hooves off the ground as fast and high as it could.