Friends have told me that a lasting effect of my early experience with food is that I don’t take their struggles with diet seriously. One friend argued, sincerely, that he shouldn’t be expected to take the same responsibility for his actions as I because he was “deprived”: never having been poor, he’d never had the opportunity to learn self-discipline.
Only once or twice were my brother and I hungry, and then only after my parents had been living on short rations a while. But we often ate the same things for days at a time, especially in the winter. Some foods bore repetition better than others. Pinto beans and corn bread were acceptable staples. But a week of pears and green beans not only produced near-debilitating diarrhea but left me with a gag reflex at the sight of them.
Having seen my parents worry and argue about where the next meal was coming from, I feel more of a connection with people my parents’ age than with my own pampered generation. In the thirties, President Hoover stated flatly that no one was starving in the United States; on a hunting trip in the Appalachians, locals insisted he accompany them to a cabin where a child lay dead from starvation. Now, recalling our neighbors in the Missouri Ozarks, I recognize the signs of poverty: retardation, blindness, missing teeth — problems that are preventable through proper diet and education. Though there is a strength in the rural poor folk who survive privation, it is a rangy strength. The hale and hearty Lil’ Abners and Daisy Maes exist only in comic strips.
After one bad winter was compounded by the spoiling of some of our canned goods, my parents became more serious about growing their own food. We had a double-shovel plow, and we arranged the loan of a mule, a tall, dark animal, even-tempered as mules go. He wouldn’t pull on command, but by zinging dirt clods about his ears we could get him moving. Once my father let me drive him for a row, even though I was too short for the plow. Looping the reins over my shoulders, I took off, dangling from the plow handles.
The acre we farmed produced a great deal of food. Enhanced by several abandoned fruit orchards, my grandparents’ milk cows, and woods full of game, our place provided subsistence. (We bought staples such as flour, sugar, pinto beans, and oatmeal. The garden was for variety and for canning.) Most of the crops were bug-resistant except for potatoes. I spent many hours picking first soft grubs and then adult potato bugs off the plants and dumping them in a Mason jar filled with gasoline. Beans needed to be weeded; melons and potatoes, which grow in hills, required hoeing. Weeding is bearable, but forming hills and rows, breaking up dirt clods with a heavy iron hoe, and stooping to pick out rocks and flinging them toward the fence line is backbreaking. Muscles knot up between your shoulder blades. Blisters form, break, and form again in the next layer of skin, which breaks and bleeds and collects dirt. “A tough row to hoe” is not a casual metaphor if you’ve actually done it. Unless you’ve picked cotton. My mother picked cotton as a child. For her, hoeing a garden was leisure compared to pulling the heavy sacks and slicing her hands to ribbons on the sharp, dry husks of the cotton boles.
After gardening or sawing wood into lengths with a crosscut saw, my father mowed the lawn with a scythe. He walked through, usually in the midmorning as soon as the dew was off, swiveling from the waist and keeping the scythe blade an even distance off the ground. Each stroke swept the grass into a windrow, which kept the yard relatively clear of snakes and other pests. The windrows dried by late afternoon. We raked them into stacks to be used as mulch for the compost or as food for any livestock we were keeping. When we heard the peeps of bobwhite quail chicks whose nests had been destroyed, we killed them mercifully, one by one, with our heavy shoes.
In the evening there was time for a game of pop-up before the light failed. In dusk like a grainy photograph, the whippoorwills sang from the stump in the middle of the yard — our third base — so close we could hear the clicking sounds preceding their call. Later the fireflies appeared. Out under the eaves of the forest, their thousands of lights looked like an army of soldiers smoking their last cigarettes before battle.
The dark felt threatening. People living along the dirt road by our place kept dogs and were usually armed. They told stories of thefts, rustling, and other events about which they would fall silent when children were present. There was an atmosphere of watchfulness. When the whippoorwills grew quiet, I held my breath. Out in the suddenly expanded night, the whirring of the bugs surged and the songs of the tree frogs crested in the cottonwoods by the pond.
The main threats at night weren’t human criminals, however, but animal predators — not the barred owls looking for squirrels or mice, not the bobcats and coyotes sniffing for rabbits, but the rabbits and deer stalking our vegetables. Any tender young shoot, especially if it was growing in rows, the weeds carefully hoed away, was fair game. And rabbits, as any gardener knows, are not timid creatures. They are fast and ravenous, and about the only time they show fear is in the fall, when they get so terrified of winter that they’ll keep eating the greens until the last instant before running from a dog.
Rabbits and deer are merely pesky for suburban gardeners who just want to feel earth in their hands. But if a deer walked up to the suburbanites’ children and ate the cereal out of their bowls, they would be in a position similar to ours. Our garden was our tenure, our insurance in a place that provided very little other.
As Iowa poet and farmer Michael Carey wrote, when you farm you spend more time killing than nurturing. We put high fences around our garden and hung scraps of cloth on them to frighten deer. We enclosed most of the chicken yard with wire fencing, even making a wire roof to ward off aerial attacks. But snakes still got some of the eggs. I have a picture of my mother’s father, six feet tall, standing on the raised threshold of a chicken coop with a blacksnake’s head in his upraised hand. The snake’s tail drags the ground — probably a ten-footer.
My parents weren’t hunters, but we kept a .22 rifle and a box of shells handy. I remember my mother taking aim at a marauding hawk and firing, a red tail feather drifting into the trees. One tough winter my father did go hunting, but with a .22 he’d have had to be so close that he’d have been better armed with a rock. Most of the time, we treated the deer as beautiful scenery, feeding them to bring them near if we had extra food, petting them and pulling off the ticks behind their ears. When my father found a fawn tangled in a barbed-wire fence, he wrapped it in his shirt and took it to the game warden. Run to panic by dogs, the fawn’s condition was hopeless. I think the warden butchered it.
Nurturing wasn’t easy. One year we got a hundred chicks, reds and leghorns. We kept them well into spring in a corral around the wood stove, where they were never too hot. Sometimes in the morning we would find them huddled in the warmest corner behind the stove. In their treatment of the ill, they were much like a human community. The weak were wise to hide sickness, for a feather out of place would tempt a larger one to peck to test for frailty. If the first jab drew blood, the rest would join in and poke at this new blemish. Soon the unfortunate chick would be mobbed. We kept several sick ones in isolation, where they grew even more dispirited and peeped pitifully.
When we got electricity, the men who came out from the power company felled the trees between our cabin and the road and blasted the rocky ground to sink the poles. I watched from our cabin as the boss yelled, “Fire in the hole!” and the men sprinted back. From where I stood, the explosion was a shock to the chest, a splash of red clay, and then streamers of flying rocks, which became a pattering rain as the echoes died away. With electricity came the freezer, the washing machine, and other appliances that freed my mother from building fires, from the old stove-heated irons, and from the wringer washer.
I can’t recall whether the especially cold winter came before or after modernization, but I can say that the image of the cozy, old-fashioned cabin in the frozen woods is a romantic fiction. In our cabin, we could stand facing the wood stove until our pants smoked and still be cold in the back. We spent a lot of time turning like chickens on a spit. In first grade, I impressed my new friends by kicking the brick wall with my cold, numbed foot until the teacher stopped me. She sent for a pan of warm water, and I spent the morning soaking my foot.
During that cold winter, my mother invented a game for us. We imagined ourselves stuck in a desert on the hottest day we could remember, the thirstiest we had ever been. We had to cry loud enough to attract the attention of passersby, “Water, water! Help!”
“Louder!” she said. “No one will hear you if you can’t call louder than that. You don’t sound very thirsty. How do you expect to convince anybody that way? They’ll think you’re cool and comfortable.”
Eventually spring came. The surviving chicks were put out in a temporary pen while my father built the coop and the wire enclosure. When the chickens were grown and laying, I followed my father to the pen for feeding and egg gathering. The big rooster, king of the coop, took exception to me the first time he saw me, possibly because I was close to his size. The squawking of the hens as my father took their eggs set him off, and he was on me like a schoolyard bully. He grabbed me by the front of my shirt, balling up the fabric in both talons, and set about working me over. I ducked my head and put my hands over my face to protect my eyes. This presented the top of my head, which he pecked like a woodpecker on a hollow trunk. Meanwhile, wings as tough and abrasive as a farmer’s palm battered me about the ears.
My father chased him off easily, and afterward I always went into the coop armed, hoping and fearing I would have to use the length of lath I carried. The hens were no pushovers either. Perhaps they sensed weakness in me the way they would have sensed it in their own. Maybe I was just too slow. They always got in a good peck as I rummaged under their plumage for eggs. A hen peck is like the snap of a mousetrap, rarely hard enough to break the skin but hard enough to bruise.
Killing chickens wasn’t revenge, just dirty work. My parents usually tied their feet to the clothesline and cut off their heads with a sharp butcher knife. The ax and chopping block are OK if you want to hold the chicken for a minute and a half as the headless body convulses. Or you can let go and follow the body as it runs and half flies for the woods, stopping at the fence when it blindly runs into the strands of barbed wire, after which you have to pick twigs and leaves out of its neck. Chickens on the clothesline, however, flew almost gracefully, blood arcing out onto the white feathers. Sometimes two of them spun in opposite directions like the whirligigs we used to make out of buttons and string.
Nothing is more disgusting than a botched slaughtering job. The worst I remember was when several men tried to kill a hog with a .22. The first four or five shots only annoyed it, like a wasp sting would bother a person. It became obvious that the bullets weren’t going to penetrate the skull from any distance. A conference followed. Would it be better to wait, leaving the animal in pain, while someone went to borrow a heavier rifle? To try to capture the now-angry hog and shoot it through the eye or ear? To try for a heart shot? Someone tried the heart shot, but the hog bent around to bite at the wound like a dog biting at fleas. Then they tried to capture it, but it was too big. There was no way of holding it down without risk of shooting one of the men. I left, having no ideas to advance, but heard several more shots and a lot of squealing. Then, finally, silence.
We kept a pig we called Juny, a Berkshire, black with a white stripe. We named her for Juneau, since my mother’s sister lived in Alaska while it was applying for statehood. Alaska made statehood, and Juny was sacrificed. Not allowed outside, I watched through the window while my father tied her feet and opened her jugular with two strokes of the butcher knife. The only squeals were her cries of indignation at being tied up.
We’d built a smokehouse from several lengths of rough wood slab discarded by a local sawmill, then smoked the hams with hickory gathered from the woods. Perhaps because I was in school, I don’t remember the business end of Juny’s slaughter — the dismembering, skinning, debristling, plucking, disemboweling — only the fine, rich smell of the smokehouse and, vaguely, my parents washing a handsaw.
My urban friends often argue that if people had to butcher their own meat, they’d soon turn vegetarian. But I like to point out that most people in the world do butcher at least some of their own meat. Of course it would be good if most urban Americans had to be responsible for hand-producing a substantial portion of their own food. They’d have a much better idea of what it costs in time, energy, and dirty, sometimes violent, work. After burning off the trees or spading under a dozen or so acres of grass and flowers; hauling and spreading manure or compost; planting, say, corn; repeatedly hoeing back the indigenous flora; fencing out, trapping, and shooing away the indigenous fauna; irrigating; harvesting amid clouds of itching dust; and shucking, peeling, hulling, milling, pulverizing, or otherwise processing it into flour, mush, porridge, hominy, or grits — after this, many people might find killing and butchering a chicken an easy and relatively inoffensive way of getting a meal.
Euthanasia is another responsibility when you live among animals. One day our dog Shadow must have disturbed either a nest of black hornets or a copperhead, and he came home with a face swollen like a bulldog’s. His jowls hung slack and were draped with slobber. We could have found a neighbor with a truck to take him twenty painfully rough miles to the nearest veterinarian. Or else tied him up, ignoring his howls until he either recovered or asphyxiated. My father shot him.
Observers often remark that poor people treat their dogs cruelly. But I know of no treatment more cruel than the sentimentality of middle-class pet owners. When I worked for a veterinary clinic, I saw people who, weeping, would refuse to let the vets unhook their jaundiced dog or cat from an IV until the animal’s liver burst. And outside any town or city, one can see abandoned pets fighting the crows for road kill along the highway. The difference between the poor and the middle class is the difference between people who do and people who don’t have to live with the consequences of their actions. For most Americans now — not just urbanites but also the increasingly automated farmers and ranchers — the dump, scrap yard, sewage plant, slaughterhouse, and animal shelter are mostly out of sight and out of mind.
Every so often I’d walk to my grandmother’s for milk, climbing the stile — or fence jack, as we called it — that crossed the split-rail fence on her property. That fence was the site of the only courting story I remember about my parents. They’d each arrange to be walking with friends along my grandmother’s fence line in the afternoons, where they’d just happen to run into one another. One afternoon my father ripped out the seat of his trousers on the fence, and he was going home to change when my mother appeared. He stayed to talk longer than usual, until they both ran out of things to say. Then, still talking, he backed over the fence jack and walked backwards down the path into the woods, waving and smiling. Finally he turned, and she could see the flash of white in his trousers, like the tail of a deer, as he bounded into the woods.
I have photographs of my parents from their courting days. They were both very attractive, my mother tall and slender with nearly platinum blond hair (it fell out while she was pregnant with me and came back dark), my father with a face as delicate as the sensitive pea — touch it and it folds in on itself. I look at the photo and wonder if, when he went to New York in his youth to have tests for his epilepsy, he couldn’t have been discovered by a modeling agency.
A photo from St. Louis: we’re all in suits, Dad in the dark double-breasted, Mom in one of those square-shouldered, tight-skirted beauties, and me in the effete Buster Brown. Without the kid that young couple might have had some fun, might have raised some hell. They could have used it.
When I was a difficult teenager, my mother’s advice was always “Don’t harden your heart.” But I can’t look at these photographs without bitterness. Those young people, just out of the Depression and with so much against them — even their delicate, strange beauty. It’s a wonder worse didn’t happen to them than did. The meek do inherit the earth, don’t they? At least, after the powerful have had their way with it.
A version of this memoir appears in Art Homer’s The Drownt Boy: An Ozark Tale, to be published this fall by the University of Missouri Press.
— Ed.
