Mama always said Daddy's barn was a "Por' excuse for a man." Daddy laughed, not paying much attention to the remark. The barn served the purpose he had in mind, two stalls for the mules, another smaller one for the cow or two he kept when winter days and nights got too severe, a hayloft for feed. He would sometimes crawl up into that loft and go to sleep himself, "Jest t' git away from the woman's jawin'," he would say. I learned early that the world was divided into halves: man's and woman's-and that the two could not be crossed over lightly. While I disliked the endless repetition of household chores, I knew that Mama had fled to it in part as a way to escape some of the harsher realities of the struggle for survival. Men took to the "kill to survive" much more easily than women.
Even though the barn was clearly man's territory, much of what I learned about life, I learned at the barn. As a child, I rebelled, resenting Mama and the house, fleeing the dreariness into the sunshine and the world it represented. Behind the barn, Daddy kept a pig or two in a pen. In the spring, there would always be newly born calves, chickens, and pigs. Daddy would always take us girls down to see the newborn, and occasionally, even Mama could be coaxed into walking down to the barn with us, even if largely she considered this a man's domain. As I got older, I would hang around the barn, whether or not I was being "unlady-like." I learned there a great deal about the fierce give and take between the species, the brute show of strength, the eventual submission to a continual breeding game. Mama, I knew, wanted to guard me from this reality, to keep me innocent as long as possible. Played out in the barnyard was the drama of an entire universe caught up in a thrust-counter-thrust travail in which life and death united and from which new life emerged. I didn't understand then, and I don't understand now, but I know instinctively it is my destiny, as it was Mama's&ldots; a destiny I will never be able to outrun, a destiny to which I've already submitted.
The barn gave off a muddy-sweet smell outdoing even the dank manure in the mule stalls. Most times, boars were kept separated from the sows, but we kids learned, nonetheless, about breeding. I'd watched the sows mounted, understanding their necessary submission. It is a submission of levels, animal-to-animal, female animal to male animal, animal to man, and from their continual struggles, life finds and sustains itself. People hide most of the brutal struggle from themselves, dressing it up in social rituals and facades, but get beneath the thinly gilded surface, and what you'll find is life squirming out of the manure. The pigs' snouts had rings to keep them from rooting out from under the pen. I had watched as my brothers cornered pigs and held them down while Daddy used pliers to close the rings, piercing the soft flesh, the pigs squealing frantically, the dark blood trickling from their snouts. Daddy and my brothers would laugh crudely, it seemed to me, uttering oaths when the pigs urinated on them. The truth was they didn't like this any better than I did, but men did what they knew they had to do, and the pigs had to have noses' rung to keep them from rooting out from under the pen. Daddy always told us girls, "Don't hurt 'em none," but I knew better. The hayloft not only was a refuge for Daddy, but it also was a place where hens built their nests, and we girls were warned not to go "messin' round up there." Still, my sisters and I learned to climb the crude pole ladder and to lean into a soft-foot fall the whole seven feet down.
That barn still leans crazily in upon itself; it stands, like the house stands, full of shadows and past sounds, but it's mostly empty and falling down. The rail fence is still there, too, as is the crib. Weeds are waist high, and the wind blowing through them mourns hauntingly. Even the pasture just behind the barn is overgrown and holds only the memories of kids slipping down to the pond they'd been warned to stay away from. Daddy and my brothers had cleared this "new ground" of brush and dug the pond by hand. In the fall, sage grass overgrew the field, and it was an adventure to wade through it, the wanderer beating a clear path as the grass yielded to the intrusion. I had my share of adventures in this field; I liked to watch the small life that would scurry out of the grass before me-mice, lizards, all species of insects, occasionally a rabbit or larger animal, and once it had been a red fox, its tail hoisted high. I was apprehensive of stepping on a snake, but this fear heightened my sense of adventure. One late evening, I watched a cat creep stealthily upon a rabbit; the rabbit's death cry, the only sound the rabbit makes in its life, curdled the air. I wondered why I didn't intervene, but even if I'd tried, could I have stopped it; would it have done any good?
Another time, I followed a soft lowing into the tall grass; there, I found Ol' Brindle having a calf. I watched Brindle's heaving labor, her rippling contractions pushing the calf down and out. Until then, I had been shielded from the birth process. I watched the calf emerge, hearing Brindle's soft moans growing louder with each push. The calf emerged head-first, its bloody, filmy hammock coming with it; its hooves were already sharp, and I wondered how Brindle could endure, for she was stretching tremendously as the calf bulged out of her and dropped. I watched Brindle lick and chew away the bloody gray of the filmy sack. Within minutes, the calf stood awkward and knobby-kneed, wobbling. I couldn't tell Mama about this, for she would have scolded me for being there in the first place, so I waited until Mama told me about the calf and pretended surprise.
This memory strongly etched itself into my mind; I dreamed of it afterwards. In the dream, I was Brindle laboring giving birth to a strange and mysterious being, something I was afraid to bring into the world. I awakened pulled into dark tides sweeping me into a fearful beyond. I wanted to talk to Mama about the dream and my fears, but when I tried, I stumbled over words and couldn't explain I was afraid to grow up, afraid to become a woman, afraid for what had already happened to my body, and what I instinctively felt was a greater hurt to come. So many fears became tangled together in my mind that I couldn't be sure of anything-not myself, not Mama, and not life. The calf, though, remained special; I thought of it as mine. When her daddy loaded him up in the pickup, taking him, I knew, where he was going to be slaughtered to supply food for somebody's table, I ran to the barn, climbed into the hay loft, hunched up into myself, and cried. I'd known all along Spot would go this way, that he would have to die, but I still wasn't prepared. Bull calves had always been sold for money, and the heifers kept to make milk cows. As hard as the male species was-as unfeeling, crude, brutal, domineering, blood engulfing as they were-they, too, suffered. They suffered from acquiescence just as women suffered from a relentless submission.
The violence of feeding and enduring played itself out graphically in my early life. We ate this mostly chicken, this usually limited to Sunday's. I hated Daddy's way of killing a rooster; he'd take it out to the chopping block and slice the head off with one clean sweep of the ax. He never told the children that didn't hurt. The headless rooster would flop around in a wild circle or two before his heart stopped, then settle into a quivering death. It somehow didn't set just right, but we all liked chicken and would shut the brutal killing from our minds when we sat down at Sunday's table. Later, when ammunition was more abundant, Daddy took to killing the chickens off with one precisely fired bullet. Even then, the rooster didn't die instantly. Still, the bullet seemed somehow gentler than the ax or her Gramma's way of ringing off a chicken's head. Id watched her the first time in shock that she could be so indifferent about what she was doing. I knew my own mama must have been equally shocked, but practicality demanded killing the rooster somehow. After the kill, the rooster would be dipped in scalding water and his feathers plucked. From that point, the hair would be singed from the body using an old newspaper lighted by a match and run under the chicken as it was held aloft from the flame. Daddy did the gutting and usually the cutting up of the chicken. Mama then fried or boiled it into perfection, depending on whether the rooster was young or old. An old rooster would be stewed, and flour dumplings dropped into the broth. Mama always rolled her dumplings thin and cut them into strips, dropping them one at a time into the bubbling broth. Once, when a pet rooster was killed, hungry as we children were, we couldn't bring ourselves to choke down the meat. Daddy just laughed and ate an extra piece. In my head, yellow, downied chicks seemed to cheap out in protest; I envisioned scrawny hens pecking at the meager earth and strutting roosters with heads protestingly slung across chopping blocks.
Mama's heart had been so tender that she would bring in a sick or dying baby chicken, place it in a padded shoebox, hasten its recuperation or gentle its death. I got my first exposure to death through these angelic measures. I observed a dying chicken lie almost lifeless for minutes, then suddenly open its beak wide as if gulping for air. The small body convulsed and its legs shot straight out. Mama removed it from the box by one stiff leg and took it outside where Daddy tossed it as far into the weeds as he could. Sometimes, we kids insisted the chicken be buried in a hand-hollowed-out grave, marked with stones or sticks; we ritualistically went through the entire burial ceremony. I've seen my try to soften the reality of death by burying rabbits caught up in lawn mowers. Safe in their burrows just below the ground but terrified by the noise and sudden exposure to light, the baby rabbits would scatter but could not survive the shock of transition, and died. Children always forget about the animals in a week or two, and the rains and winds wash away reminders.
Death was never far away from me as a child, and though I sometimes felt it to be brutal, I learned to shut it from my mind, to go on with the daily grind that meant survival, understanding the cycle was necessary, that life fed on death and death in turn on life. After Mama's death, I was understood that it had been to this cycle that Mama submitted, not blindly, but knowingly. Mama came to understand her own urges to fulfillment had been realized in the conflict and submission to give birth to her children, and in that creation, she found an old world blotted out and a new one created and demanding her attention. I rebelled against becoming what Mama had been, and yet in the end, I have to recognize we all submit because we can not, ultimately, resist our own urges for connection to the boundless in ourselves.
A child's earliest memory of death remains especially poignant. I heard Mama speak of her own mother. She confidently reported she'd done everything for her mama that she could; I'm not I did. Mama had told me that "a girl would never have another friend like her mother," and she'd gone on to say, "I miss her so bad sometimes I could jest die." I sometimes feel the same way as I look back upon her Mama's death; time takes nothing but adds ever more poignantly to the memory.
My first memory of death is particularly sharp because I caused it, and it came suddenly in the spring of life when unexpected. I'd stood bent over the porch edge eating a watermelon, five or six baby ducks scurrying about under me, feeding on seeds and droppings. A large rind slipped from my hand and fell crashing on one small fellow. Mama, coming out of the house and onto the porch, seeing what had happened, yelled at me for being careless, not understanding her words failed to hurt me as much as the sight of that tiny yellow body when the rind was lifted off. What was life had become suddenly still. Whether that one was buried or tossed into the weeds, I don't know: I spent the next hours huddled up into my knees, crying. I wasn't even sure why I was crying: something had fallen out of life into death, and death seemed somehow malignant, hard, cruel, an exacting master, and I winced in its presence; my heart burning within me; I could feel in its flames a suffocation and coldness, and I could recognize something of my own soul dying inside me.
The march to the table was endless, animal after animal dying in sacrifice. In winters, bacon and sausage rounded out the routine diet of biscuits, eggs, and gravy. Cured ham and loin were treats usually saved for company. Daddy had a strong preference for red-eye gravy, and Mama taught me how to make it to his liking, frying the ham or loin, pouring some water into the skillet when the frying was finished. Put into a bowl, the grease would rise, the water holding its own at a lower level, the darker drippings settling. Not until after I went away to college in search of a self still mysteriously evading me was I to eat pork chops or pork roast. At home, these had always yielded to a scarcity of meat stretched into its most filling versions. At home, Mama cooked the hog's head. The fatter part would be spiced and shaped into souse. The head itself was a treat, especially for the unsqueamish men; Daddy and my brothers would take a piece of the skull, when it could be pried loose, and picked the meat out by hand. Daddy even found the eyes delectable and would poke a finger into the socket, pry out an eye and plop it into his mouth with a hollow, sucking sound. The de-meated skull always looked a little ominous to me, reminding me of the dog skulls, horses, and cats that would sometimes stumble upon in the woods, and which I took pride in being able to identify.
Winters brought wild meat to the table-squirrel, rabbit, even opossum. Rabbit was usually fried and served with gravy, squirrel stewed, opossum first stewed to tenderize, then heavily peppered, baked, and served with sweet potatoes. I didn't realize until after I left home that rabbit was considered gourmet and opossum low class. Life affords some people the luxury not only of surviving but of developing excess and taste. Deer meat, too, sometimes made its way to the table. Kids were taught to eat what was placed in front of them or to do without. I never really liked the strong meats provided by the woods; and a pile of squirrel skulls, cracked and de-brained, made me wish for summer and the undisturbed coolness of the deep forest.
Hog-killing day was another rite of survival. Daddy got plenty of help from my brothers and uncle.. The day had to begin with a hard frost or snow. In Tennessee, November usually brings frost but on occasion a light sprinkling of snow. The large, black kettle in the backyard would be filled and the water brought to boiling. By this time, the men would already have shot the boar. They would spear a pole through his lower leg tendons and hang him from a tree just so his snout was a foot or so off the ground. They would then slit his throat and bleed him. The warm rush of black blood lifted itself on the air evanescently on these cold mornings as a vanishing mist. They next slit the animal from the throat through the stomach and down, the hot guts, rolling and being pulled out, forming a steamy, bloody heap on the ground. The smell of hot entrails caused me to gag. After the bleeding, the men would heave the speared bore from the tree, dip him into scalding water to remove the hair or to loosen them so they could be scraped off. From this point, the work began in earnest, and involved them all in the cutting and sawing that distinguished ham from bacon. Once the hiding was done, Mama would get busy, tossing the fat into the same kettle where water had previously boiled, rendering the fat into lard to be used in seasoning; the smell of hot lard lingered poignantly in the crisp air. Inside, Mama baked the rinds until they blistered. When the lard had cooked out of the fat, the remaining cracklings would be carefully scooped into an old lard can to be used later in making crackling bread. That night, the dining room table would be laden down with oblong shapes of raw meat. Edging by the door into the dining room, casting sidelong glances to the table, I wondering if anything of the animal's soul still survived after it had been chunked into raw meat. Something in my soul was afraid for itself, and I shuddered; I wanted to talk with Mama, but I knew she would be tired from the day's work. I went to bed in a cold back room; I couldn't sleep immediately but lay there re-seeing, re-hearing all of the day's sounds and activities; drifting into sleep, I felt a hefting of the dark and mysterious within my womb; it became strangely mixed with birth and bleedings, guttings and death, and I was afraid in the bottom of myself.
Next day, Daddy'd salt down the winter's kill. The curing process took weeks; there was art in knowing when to take the meat out of the briny salt and hang it from the rafters of the smokehouse. Daddy didn't always perfect the process, and Mama would complain of the saltiness after he'd bring a cured shoulder into the house, sometimes having to trim away the gnawing of a hungry rat, for her to cook. Salty or not, the meat disappeared rapidly on the mornings when it made its way to the table. A biscuit of ham or loin was appreciated a great deal more, too, than the mayonnaised peanut butter or butter 'n sugar sandwiches that sometimes made us kids ashamed of our brown paper sacks with their greasy circles edging out. Mama had insisted "No child o' mine is gonna eat for nothing," so we took our lunches or worked in the kitchen to pay for our meals.
Daddy stopped repairing the barn as he aged. The rail fence skirting the barn fell apart gradually over time, rails hidden in knee-high weeds and bushes, the barn itself standing dilapidated, leaning crazily in upon itself, defying gravity. Returning after Mama died, the only life I could see was that of small animals scurrying about in the grass, feeding, avoiding being fed upon. Even the path back to the house was overgrown, the kettle long taken from the backyard, turned into a flower container somewhere. Much of the bone-grinding hardness of those early days I found softened by time-that life and death, a memory, a dream I recalled as I recalled the plaintive call of the whippoorwill, a song in some far off, forgotten place and time.