by Amy Thielen
There was a long pause. “I’d take a twenty-five-year-old Adeline to bed,” Jason said, grinning.
“Oh, yeah,” the others confirmed. “For sure.”
As I ushered the clattering mussel shells into a serving plate, I looked over at Kyle, the one who had guessed my predilection for Heart, the one who had marked our quart of communal sugar with a satanic symbol and the words MORBID SUGAR and who was now labeling a container of braised baby romaine BABY REMAINS. That was one of his darker quips, but nonetheless consistent with his death-metal takeover of our kitchen. “Ky-o,” I called. “That’s so not funny, man. Do you see what I’m carrying here? You ever cook with a pregnant lady before?”
He swooped his head deferentially toward me. “Can’t say that I have, ma’am.”
“It’s mami, my friend.”
“Okay, Mommy,” he mocked. “You know what, when you go back to Minnesota you should make a really good version of sloppy joes, and you should call them ‘Morbid Joes.’ ”
“Do you know what some people in northern Minnesota call sloppy joes?” I paused dramatically. “Barbecues. Plural.”
A chorus of booing rang out in the kitchen, and Kyle grinned. “That’s truly messed up, dude. I’ve never heard of something so wrong.”
I turned away to hide my smile, because there was nowhere I’d rather spend my pregnancy than here, where I could be referred to as both mommy and dude in the space of a minute.
—
By my seventh month of pregnancy I could not walk. Not because I was so huge, but because after even three blocks of pavement a thick pain settled deep into my left side. My midwife group, the most laissez-faire bunch of birth professionals in the city, dismissed these as harmless Braxton Hicks contractions and alternately told me to take a chill pill, to try to ignore them, or just to walk less. I was already like a frail one-hundred-year-old lady, plotting whether or not I could make it the four blocks from the subway to my intended destination; in New York City it was pretty hard to walk any less.
One day in March I woke up, felt worse than ever, grabbed the phone to call Shea, and told him without preamble, “I’m sorry, I’m done.” I hung up and considered our next move. I was due June 1. When I weighed the prospect of staying in New York and spending the first relatively housebound month with a newborn in our apartment above a grease-belching deli, amid the clattering of the metal scrappers and the coffee klatch of methadone users who assembled every morning to gab around the piss tree, versus having our baby at the hospital back home and cuddling with him on our screened porch in the warm summer breeze, there was no contest. Besides, while I waited around for my baby to be born, I could begin diving into old Midwestern recipes. I could drive down the road to the dairy farm for unpasteurized cream and make naturally soured cottage cheese. I could spend his first few nap-filled newborn weeks making pickles and jam.
Within weeks we’d found a subletter to rent our apartment and Aaron’s studio and started packing. As usual our seasonal haul was significant. It included, in addition to clothes, all of my kitchen equipment, dry goods, all of my home-canned pickles and jams from last year that we hadn’t yet eaten, four boxes of my favorite cookbooks for reference and inspiration, plus the entirety of Aaron’s studio, his many chisels, art books, and three half-finished sculptures. One of them, seven feet tall, filled a third of our ten-foot box trailer.
We set out westward, on superhighway 94, and on the second day decided to make a detour to Bloomington, Indiana, to pay a visit to Aaron’s sister, Sarah, who had just the day before given birth to baby Irene. His parents, Maurice and Carolyn, were already there. We would surprise them all.
Driving through the mountains of West Virginia during an uncharacteristic cold snap, at seven o’clock in the evening, we hit a patch of ice on a bridge. The heavy trailer we were carrying turned into a pendulous weight, swinging our car in three circles, as if it were the ball at the end of a hammer throw. The last thing I remember seeing before closing my eyes were the lights of the big rigs behind us, boring straight at us. Our trailer flopped over in the ditch, stopping our motion and raising our back end, leaving our tires to spin in the air. On the other side of the road was a deep ravine. The accident made the local nightly news, but miraculously, no one was hurt. Our trailer was totaled, but the contents inside were all salvageable, except for my jars of fermented pickles, which had broken and covered everything with garlicky brine. It was April 5, seven years to the day of Aaron’s brother Matt’s death. And though I am generally not one to talk about signs or angels, as I stood in our hotel room that night, I leaned into Aaron and choked out sobs. I think we both felt the full weight of our baby’s determination to be here. The words flew between us: We can’t raise this kid in New York—we can stay while he’s a baby—until he goes to school—but then we have to take him back home, near his grandparents—all of them—I want him to grow up playing in the same lakes, knowing the same Main Street—the same three stoplights.
When we reached Bloomington, we were thankfully distracted by the new baby. The only hint of our near-miss showed up later in the photos, in the unmistakable gray cast to our skin. Aaron, Sarah, and I stood in a small clump in the kitchen and talked about the accident in fervent whispers that Carolyn, Aaron’s mom, wouldn’t overhear. We’d been warned over the phone not to bring it up. Aaron’s mom, who had lost her son almost exactly seven years to the date that Irene was born, wore a huge camera on her chest and a resolute smile of family expansion on her face. The minute she saw us, pale but intact—all three of us—she struck the accident from her memory and has never mentioned it since.
19
STALKING THE BEAST CALLED DINNER
If I hoped on my return to the country to dive deep into rural Midwestern food, then I’ve certainly achieved it. Here I am, three weeks away from my due date, full up to the lungs with my little fateful lump, squatting in our front yard, heaving a forty-pound hog’s head from a bucket into a pot. I am so far up the ass of rural and local that I can’t see the lighted tunnel out.
Vern, our builder, is banging away on our house addition, and I, with the ever-present dull pain in my side now shooting up into my shoulder, am making headcheese. Aaron and his dad, Maurice, are down the hill inside the rock-lined well hole trying to get the water going again, because our sand point has inconveniently decided to stop running. I only hope it hasn’t run dry. With the new addition we’d have real modern plumbing, both hot and cold running water, but I’ve insisted that we hook up the pipes to the same well we’d pounded ourselves a few years earlier. Filtered through about forty feet of pure sand, that water tastes faintly stony. It’s the white Bordeaux of water, and I figure there’s no point in living in the country if we have to dig a regulation deep well and risk tapping into sulfuric, brackish water. How would I cook with that hard, acidic water? My beans would never soften.
Despite my present discomfort, I can no longer recognize in myself the girl who spent three years here sleeping in the loft until ten thirty and lazily rising up to go pick zucchini for my breakfast scramble. My years of professional cooking have long since ignited my personal motor. I can’t bear to sit and be idle, especially when there’s asparagus to pick or black currants waiting to be stripped from their stems. I am a fussbudget. A tinkerer. A woman who not only uncannily resembles her mother but also pads around the perimeter of the kitchen like her, calmly stalking the beast called dinner. Some people might identify the humming I felt in my hands as “nesting.” Whatever it’s called, my instinctive reaction to my son’s impending birth is to stockpile food. Big meaty piles of it.
My current concern is that I don’t have a bigger stockpot. As the water around the pig’s head comes to a boil, I am distressed to see the snout still poking out above the pot’s rim, blowing bubbles at me through its nostrils. I cannot contaminate cooked meat with raw meat. I grab the handles, slide a protective towel over my enormous belly, and jerk the pot outside, where I conveniently spot the thing
I need lying in the grass—Aaron’s Sawzall. Using two forks like corn handles, I hump the pig’s head into a clean roasting pan, grab the Sawzall, buzz through the soft fat and then the hard palate, the reverberations of which I can feel deep in my belly, and cut off the snout. Damn, I sheared off the tip of the tongue. But what’s done is done. The head returned to the pot and the pot to the stove once more, hot water seethes over the sawed-off nose, to my great relief.
—
When my cousin Matt arrived early that morning at our neighbor’s farm to kill the pig and take it back to the family meat market in Pierz for butchering, he stood in front of the hanging animal and asked me to repeat my requests.
“You sure you want the feet?” he asked, giving my belly a sidelong glance.
“Yep, and the liver and the kidneys,” I assured him, holding out a clean bucket for transporting them.
He shook his head. His lifelong tenure cutting up farm animals had killed his romance for offal. “You are not going to want to eat the feet. They’re going to taste like they’ve spent their lives marinating in pig shit—because they have.”
“I want them!” I insisted. “And I want to make headcheese, so let’s leave the head whole.”
We both remembered the sturdy headcheese Grandma Dion used to make for Christmas Eve supper. She’d cut hers into neat cubes of translucent aspic, arranged them in two obedient lines on a flowered platter, and served them with a sidecar cruet of white vinegar. The cubes quaked whenever we awkward teenagers knocked our knees against the table. Matt and I shuddered at it while his dad, Uncle Keith, taunted us: Smacking his lips, he reached for more, lewdly consuming cube after gelatinous cube.
I was armed with visions of fancier headcheeses I’d eaten in New York. French tête de porc en gelée. Italian formaggio di testa. Served at room temperature, the testa was a mosaic of bits tugged from the pig’s most intimate, cranial spaces, and it was marvelous—more luscious than Grandma’s. Mine, I thought, would be on the soft side but still rustic, something like the delicious offspring of Italian testa and Midwestern souse. And while the head simmered, I’d poach the feet, debone them, roll them into roulades like we’d done at Danube, slice and sauté these sticky pucks in a hot pan until the edges browned, and then set them on a pile of steely, mustardy French lentils. I’d julienne the ears and fry them until they were the color of tobacco and as crisp as onion rings and serve those over sweet garden greens.
I frowned at the gray brew of meat in the pot. It didn’t look right. Having watched Todd the meat cook make testa in the subterranean Cru kitchen, I knew I should have cured the head for two days in a plastic bucket of fragrant brine. Two days’ cure was the usual—as cooks say—“ride” for headcheese. I had no time for protocols, though. I brined it for three hours.
When the pig’s jaw loosened from its carriage, I pulled out all the tender pieces. My hands ran through the pile, feeling out good bits of meat instinctively, blindly, tasting as I went. There were obvious gems—nuggets of dark tender meat at the apples of the cheeks, another nice pocket above the brow, the squidgy-soft tongue, and a triangle-shaped disk of sweet meat along the jowl. Like the middle streak of bacon that’s not quite fat and not quite lean, the jowl trembled with its marbling. I threw it intact into the pile. But then there were the hidden parts, the surprises awarded to those who pick from bones: a strip of tender meat hanging in the nape, a pleasing bounciness to the gelatinous snout, a sweet melting quality to the white fat. When I was done, the pile of what I considered usable outweighed my scraps and bones—as it should, I thought. I had watched this poor hog go down this morning; I couldn’t bear to waste an inch of it. Showering the contents of my bowl with finely minced garlic, thyme from the herb bed, and tons of chopped parsley, strewn like grass clippings, I delicately packed the headcheese into molds.
I then threw the pig’s feet—petunia pink and covered with bristly white hair—into a fresh pot of water and the furred ears into another. When they came to a simmer, a great fog rose toward the rafters into our bedroom above the kitchen, filling every cavity in my head with pigsty earthiness. I realized that I’d failed to take into account the super-nose of pregnancy. Matt was right; the feet reeked. I’d have to blanch them at least three times.
Aaron came into the kitchen looking as if he’d just come back from the mines, in a downpour, through a pack of pawing dogs.
“The pump’s not drawing,” he said, walking across my kitchen floor in his muddy boots to pour a glass of water from the plastic five-gallon jug.
“Sand point’s clogged. It’s probably just calcium.” Aaron drank the entire pint of water in a single laborious swallow. Gulping for air, he said, “We rented an old well-puller at R and R Rental and now we’re dragging the pipe lengths up with a lever. Fucking brutal. We’re doing nineteenth-century work here.” His dad followed him, eyes wide to the floor, his shirt dirt-streaked, and finished matter-of-factly, “And then when we get all the pipe pulled up, we’re going to repound another sand point.”
“Today?” I asked. They looked spent.
“Definitely.” Maurice laughed. “We will not be returning to this job tomorrow.”
The lack of a water source was making this entire pioneer day a lot more historically accurate.
“That smell is vicious!” Aaron gasped, following the sight of the fumes billowing up into our bedroom. He shot me an incredulous look, pivoted around me to the stove where the feet and ears were simmering, stacked the ear-blanching pot on top of the foot-blanching pot, and promptly took the stinking mess outside. A few moments later I heard it softly flop at the edge of the woods.
Half of my butchering-day projects were in those pots, but I didn’t say a word. I toddled across the kitchen to my new rocker and sat down heavily. I felt as bulbous and full of juice as a ripe melon. Never in my career as a cook had I been squeamish. I had dealt with my fair share of dead soft-shell crabs and rotten wild mushrooms, had ingested scraps of raw lamb to find out whether or not it was too old to serve. (It was.) I had been caught in a walk-in refrigerator with a tub of steaming tripe whose pastoral pestilence overtook all the good air. I was not afraid of barnyard.
Previously, all my intimate meat moments had taken place in a Manhattan basement kitchen, divorced from the source. This was different. Having seen the pig’s blinking eyes in the morning, and still looking at its empty stare seven hours later, I was as close now to real ingredients as I’d ever get. And at such close range the view was a little grisly. But the urgencies were also more natural. My ingredients in Two Inlets would not necessarily arrive in my kitchen in boxes, according to my timeline. The beans I planted in my garden would ripen when they felt like it, and when two bushels of apples, or a pig’s head, arrived in my kitchen, it would be my duty to cook them, no matter how busy I was on that given day. Or how pregnant. For better or worse, I was hooked to the seasons.
I fell deeper into the rocker. I knew that I’d finally earned the use of my personal talon—the paring knife that had been like an extension of my mom’s hand. And I’d finally gained the family motion, that smooth, vehicular way of moving around a pot. But I had to admit, simmering a pig’s head in my awkward physical condition was a day’s labor enough for this old girl.
Aaron came trudging through the door, even sweatier than before, his face blown wide with relief.
“We got it going,” he said, panting and leaning on the doorframe.
“Really?” I scooped myself up and followed him down the hill to the pump.
I was so excited to taste our rock-chilled water again that I joked, “The joy I feel at this moment is going to eclipse this kid’s birth!” and then immediately felt a sharp pang of guilt in my side, because of course that wasn’t true.
—
Our son’s birth was perilous to say the least.
When I woke up in intensive care, a kind priest with a deep Irish brogue was sitting next to me, his thick white hair glinting in the sunny room. A succession of youn
g nurses with different-colored ponytails had been taking care of me for the past day or however long it had been, gently rolling me this way and that way, changing my bedding, and as they moved my concrete legs I imagined that this was what it felt like to be a baby undergoing a diaper change. I couldn’t open my eyes and I didn’t know how long I’d been out, but Aaron was feeding our boy, holding him, I knew that. He had probably already given him his name: Hank.
My mother was sitting on the other side of my bed, her wide eyelids at half-mast, her hands clasped. Even in my haze I knew that she was the one who summoned the priest and that his presence at my bedside could mean only one thing: last rites. I was going to die.
“Relax!” My mom shushed me and petted my hand. “You’re going to be okay. I found Father in the hallway. He’s just going to say the Prayer of the Mothers.” As he canted the words, the Catholic rhythm of my childhood came back like a familiar pop song.
Turns out that the easygoing midwives had it all wrong and my side pains indicated that I had a rare pregnancy-related blood disorder, with a touch of liver failure on the side—on my left side, to be specific—called HELLP for short. Their neglect was strangely fortuitous, because the lack of a diagnosis allowed me to ripen Hank up all the way. I was shaken and yellow for a few days, but our baby was perfect, and Aaron was indeed holding him. And that was all that mattered.
—
A week later, when we came home from the hospital, Vern had finished the addition and taken down the partition that divided the old house from the new. The electricity we’d hooked up the previous year now flowed throughout the entire house, powering lights left and right. And water was running, in my kitchen, out of the faucet, like a miracle. Nonchalantly, as if it had always done so.