Chapter 6 #5
"If you're here," she said, "you'll stand in the corner of the room the whole time with your arms crossed, and that child will spend four hours watching a strange man watch her, and I will get nothing done."
"Imogen."
"And Arlan Crowe will see you standing in the corner and he'll learn something about you that I don't want him to know."
"Which is what?"
"That you don't think I can do this alone."
Joe got in the truck.
The Tandy place was two miles down and it had been sitting empty for eleven days and it had been gone through.
Not burned. Gone through.
The back door was open. The kitchen drawers were pulled out and dumped. The pantry was stripped, every shelf, and somebody had taken the time to take the curtains.
Delores's mother's china was broken on the floor in a way that was not an accident.
Bill Tandy stood in the middle of his own kitchen for a long moment.
"Don't tell her about the china," he said.
"Bill."
"I'll tell her. Later. In the spring." He turned around slowly. "Right now she thinks her house is fine and I'd like her to keep thinking it for a while, and that's my business and not yours."
"All right."
The hogs were alive.
That was the miracle of the morning. They were in the pen behind the barn, filthy and enormous and furious, and whoever had gone through the house had either not seen them or had not known what to do with four hundred pounds of angry pig.
"They had a self feeder," Bill said. "Look at that. Full to the top."
It took four hours.
They killed and dressed both hogs there, on Bill's place, because there was no earthly way to get two live animals of that size into a truck bed without a chute and a fight.
Joe had read about it. He had a laminated card about it.
The card did not prepare him.
It was hard, hot, filthy, dangerous work with a knife and a block and tackle thrown over a barn beam, and Bill Tandy ran the whole thing with the absolute calm of a man who had done it every November since 1958.
They scalded the first hog in a stock tank with water heated over a wood fire and scraped the hair off with bell scrapers that had been hanging in the barn since before Joe was born.
They gutted it and split it and saved everything.
Everything. The liver, the heart, the kidneys, the leaf fat in enormous pale sheets, the intestines into a bucket of salt water because Bill said casings were worth their weight in gold.
The head, which Joe had assumed was waste and was not.
"Head cheese," Bill said. "Scrapple. And the brains if anybody's brave, which nobody is."
They skinned the second one instead of scalding it, because the water took too long and the light was going.
They loaded the truck at four.
Two hundred and sixty pounds of pork on the back, wrapped in clean tarps, and two five gallon buckets of leaf fat that Joe would not have traded for gold.
Colby was gray in the face and had thrown up twice and had kept working both times.
"That's the worst thing I ever did," he said.
"Yeah."
"How do you do that and then eat it?"
Joe leaned on the tailgate.
"You do it exactly once," he said, "and then you understand every single meal you ever ate before, and you can never go back to not understanding it, and I think that's probably better."
Colby thought about it.
"It's still the worst thing I ever did," he said.
"I know."
They came up the drive at five thirty in the last of the light.
Joe saw the tracks at the second switchback. Two vehicles, in and out, and the out tracks were on top.
He felt something in his chest unclench.
He came around the last bend and the house was standing and there was smoke from the chimney and a lamp in the window, and there was a small figure sitting on the porch step with a shepherd lying across her feet.
Joe put the truck in the yard and got out.
The girl on the step was nine years old and thin and had a dark braid and her father's pale washed out eyes.
She was wearing a coat too big for her and she had a mug in both hands and Mack had put his entire head in her lap.
She looked up at Joe.
"Are you the husband?" she said.
Joe stopped walking.
"I am."
"My dad says you're the most careful man in the county."
"Does he."
"He said it like it was a bad thing but I don't think it is." Merrit Crowe scratched the dog behind the ear. "Your wife says I can stay for dinner."
Joe looked at the porch door.
Imogen was standing just inside it with her arms folded, watching him, with an expression on her face he had not seen since Los Angeles.
"Dinner," he said carefully.
"She says I have to eat at six because of my shot. She says everybody's schedule works around my shot now."
"That sounds like her."
"She's bossy."
"She is."
"I like her," said Merrit Crowe.
Joe sat down on the step next to a nine year old girl who was the daughter of the man who had murdered his friend.
"What's the dog's name?" she asked.
"Mack."
"He's the best dog I've ever met."
"He knows it. Don't tell him."
She laughed, a real laugh, and it turned into a cough at the end.
Joe turned his head.
It was a small cough. Two of them, dry, into her sleeve, the completely ordinary cough of a child in a cold house in October.
And behind him, in the doorway, he heard Imogen's arms come uncrossed.