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11-15-2007 Jim Atwell As you'll remember, Tom and Kristin Pullyblank's farm was home base for the pig cartel through the summer. On last Saturday the parson and I got together at my place to finish up processing the last of the pork. He and I began turning two hogs' heads into the perfect complement for sunnyside eggs and buttered toast. My Anne was at a meeting in Toronto. Kristin had decided she didn't want to follow the process too closely; I can't imagine why. Anyway, with both wives away, Tom and I were operating without adult supervision. All went surprisingly well except for one jarring aftermath. Call it karma if you wish, or maybe the late pigs' revenge. Prior to our meeting, Tom and I had separately simmered our hog heads for about seven hours. On Saturday afternoon we got together to separate meat from bones (a lot to use on those jowls!), and then painstakingly run the meat through the grinder attachment on our big mixer. I lugged the results upstairs to the bathroom scale and found we had eight pounds. Great! That will make almost 20 pounds of scrapple for us to divide. Since our product now looks more like super-market ground pork (rather than props from "Lord of the Flies"), Anne and Kristin will gladly join us on another occasion and make sure the actual scrapple is made right. As you may remember from this column, scrapple is a kind of pork polenta made from equal parts of ground pork and corn meal, plus a little buckwheat flour, seasoned with salt, pepper, and herbs, and cooked into a thick porridge. It's then poured into bread pans to cool, sliced into onepound blocks, and wrapped and frozen. When you're ready to serve some, you slice a thawed block and brown it as you would sausage. But, since it's half corn meal, it's only half as bad for you as sausage - and it tastes great. Eat compost, Jimmy Dean! That unforeseen aftermath I mentioned involves Blue, my boon companion and all-'round exceptional dog. Through all Tom's and my slicing and grinding, Blue had sat near us like a perfect gentleman. He never once begged, but just looked infinitely sad. He gets a lot of mileage out of that look. Part of his coloring, you see, is black blotches under his eyes. They look for all the world like mascara that has blurred and run from recent prolonged tears. When he sits on the geezer bench, waiting for Anne and me outside the Fly Creek General Store, girls and women always stop to say, "Poor doggie!" and hug him around the neck. He loves it and manages to look noble and patient as well as mournful. Sometimes women enter the store and scold me for leaving such a sad, fine animal tied up outside. When this happens, Blue watches through the plate glass. If he had the mouth for it, I think he'd smile. Blue could have won an Emmy with his kitchen performance last Saturday, but Pastor Tom and I were unmoved. Until, that is, we were cleaning up at the end. Foolishly, I buckled and put a small piece of pork in his bowl. That bowl normally holds nothing but dry kibble, since Blue's digestion is easily upset. The dog was ecstatic. He wolfed it down. Segue now, please, to three the next morning. I awoke to the jingle of a dog collar right next to my bed. Impossible! Blue has been trained that, though kitchen and family room are his domain, he dare not step across the threshold and into the dining room. But he'd done not only that; he'd climbed the staircase to pad into the bedroom. I sat up and there he was, whining and dancing from foot to foot. Well, I've seen any number of small kids do that dance - did it myself a long time ago. It means a bathroom emergency, and this one had pushed Blue right beyond his ordinary discipline and up the staircase. I jumped up, scuffed on slippers, and followed his panicked run back down the steps. When I opened the back door, he shot outside and ran behind the woodshed. Minutes later, as I stood shivering and wondering if that little treat of pork (and hence I) was to blame, he emerged, looking much relieved. "Good boy!" I said, proud that he'd known that ordinary rules are sometimes trumped by a higher call. "Let's get inside!" I added, shivering. He started toward me, but then stopped, looking fixedly down the back yard. Uh, oh! In a flash he was off, tearing down the lawn and then around the far end of Anne's garden. Out of the blackness I heard his wild barking from our west field. Then came a sharp, pained yipe. Blue streaked back around the garden's south end, threw himself down, and rubbed one eye, then the other, against the frosty grass. And around the garden's north end scuttled a portly white-striped skunk, maybe 12 pounds. It swung briefly into the garage and under the car, then bustled out and headed toward Allison Road. The rest of my night, of course, went to swabbing down Blue with peroxide, baking soda, and dish detergent. It cut through a lot of the smell, but when Agway opened the next morning, I got a product that was even better. It's well named: "Nature's Miracle." The way it canceled the smell did seem miraculous. (If you have a dog or a cat, buy some to keep on hand. Sooner or later, you'll need it.) It later turned out that Blue's desperate bathroom emergency, the one that led to the skunk confrontation, wasn't caused by that bit of pork I gave him. (I'll explain another time.) But I do know that hog-caused karma condemned me to spend the night on my knees, swabbing a soggy dog as that searing smell made tears run down both our faces. Somehow, the former wearers of those two pig heads were behind my misery; I'm convinced of it. But why did poor Blue have to suffer, too? He'd barely met the pigs. And, come to think of it, if those former porkers were revenging themselves, how come Pastor Tom got off scot free? That guy was an accessory, before and after! I don't know, friends. Life's just too full of mysteries. Read about Jim Atwell's new book, "From Fly Creek - Celebrating Life in Leatherstocking Country" at JimAtwell. com. |
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