From Sea to Shining Sea (7 page)

It was too much. Billy screamed and began wailing. The older boys laughed, but they laughed weakly, because they could remember the first time they had had to learn this. John Clark did not relent. “Now ye feel that hard thing, like a tube? That’s what
I just now cut. That’s this,” he said then, and with his free left hand he grasped Billy’s and placed it at his own gagging, keening throat. “That’s where it is in you,” he said.

The thought of it all, the pig’s gullet, his own, was just unbearable. Billy screeched and gasped and wailed and tried to escape.

His father’s iron hand suddenly began shaking him, till his teeth all but rattled. Loudly, but not angrily, the deep voice drove through the howling turmoil of Billy’s mind: “I’ll not abide such caterwauling! Cease it, right now! There be things ye got to learn, and there’s no nice, girlish way to learn ’em! Can y’ hear me? STOP THAT SQUEALIN’! By th’ Eternal! They’ll think it’s you I’m slaughterin’. D’ye think Georgie would be proud o’ you now?”

That worked. Billy stopped struggling and his screams trailed off. Thinking of Georgie looking on had shamed him. He still sobbed, but he was no longer frantic.

“Now,” John Clark was saying, releasing Billy, “that’s better. Georgie learned this long before he could learn to survey land. Now, boys, scald ’im and scrape ’im.” They swung the carcass down and, grunting, heaved it into the steaming kettle. Soon then they had it on the table and were adroitly scraping off the hair with wide iron blades.

“Did ’e cwy? Did Jo jee cwy?” Billy gasped out. His bloody hand felt hideous and sticky, and the greasy steam was nauseating.

“No, he didn’t.”

“I sowwy I cwied. Don’ tell Jo jee I cwied, Papa, huh?”

“I won’t tell ’im.”

“Jo jee bwave, he di’n cwy,” Billy said wistfully, feeling unworthy.

“That’s right, he was brave, he didn’t cry,” John Clark said, then he chuckled. “But he surely heaved up his breakfast! Ha, ha!”

“Jo jee did? Jo jee puke up?”

“He did for sure, son. And
you
didn’t. And believe me, vomit’s a sight messier’n tears.”

Billy suddenly felt a lot better about himself. The older boys were watching him and smiling sympathetically.

“I cried, too, Billy,” Dick said.

“I,” Johnny told him, “cried
and
puked.” They talked as they roped the pink, hairless carcass back up onto the spar.

“So did I,” Edmund admitted.

“Not to mention, y’ also beshit your breeches,” Dick snorted.

“I didn’t either!” Edmund’s face went as red as his hair.

“Aye, but ye did,” his father reminded him.

“Well, just that first once. I butcher all the time now; everything I shoot I clean.”

“No right man
likes
doin’ this, Billy m’ boy,” said Mr. Clark. “But we have to know how, ’cause we have to provide for family. God knows how many animals you’ll do this to as the years go by. But it’s as God meant it. That’s why He put meat-bearin’ animals here in Creation. Only thing a sin about this would be to enjoy it. Now ye watch and listen close, because I’m about to show ye how we take the guts out without dirtyin’ the meat. This beastie’s going to be the feast at Annie’s wedding, y’ see! And he’ll also be sausages, and lard, and puddings, and scrapple, bacon, and chitterlins, and soap, and brush bristles, and candles, and a blow-up ball toy, and all kinds o’ good things for family, y’ see? For as we say about a pig, Providence shows us how to use everything but the squeal—and we’d save
that
up for dancin’ music, if we knew how to catch and presarv it. Waste is a sin, t’ my mind, Billy, though somehow they don’t harp on it in the Scriptures. Especially is wasted life, be it swine or man.”

Thus he talked on, as he pulled the pig’s short tail and carefully cut a circle around the anus, then sliced open the carcass from there to the throat and removed the varicolored guts all in a slimy, sliding piece, teaching precepts and morals as he worked, and the boys worked with him and listened, and it was as absorbing almost as a story, so interesting, though not entirely understandable, that even the gleaming guts didn’t make Billy feel sick.

John Clark could not help talking about the meanings of all the things people did, because God’s intents were plainly there within everything that lived and grew and moved and died. And his wife, good Ann, was likewise—though, being a Rogers, she could say these things better, in his opinion. The Rogerses were real talkers, and they were firm in their faith, and they believed in their own thinking. Ann’s great-great-great-great-grandfather was John Rogers the Martyr, who had been locked in a dungeon of St. Andrews Castle back in Scotland two hundred years ago, and then burned at the stake, for being so bold as to believe in God in his own way. All the Rogerses took pride in that ancestor, and seemed to live as if they felt him looking over their shoulders. John Clark appreciated that in their family—after all, he had some of that Rogers blood in him, too—and he was profoundly content in having got Ann Rogers, the most beautiful Rogers daughter, as his bride those long years ago. Not one day,
in almost a quarter of a century since, had he ever regretted that choice. Many of the marriages among the gentry that he knew had been marriages for advantage, for fortunes or connections or breeding lines, and if a husband and wife came to loving each other truly, so much the better. But John Clark had adored Ann Rogers from the moment he had seen that fresh, tall, pink-and-rose thirteen-year-old squinting at him in the summer sun twenty-five years ago, and her good character had only deepened and broadened his adoration for her over the years, till now he could not even imagine being without her. “If something took ye away untimely,” he had told her once when she was having trouble with a childbirth, “I shouldn’t even want to live on.” And he had meant that.

It had been true then and it was even more true now. He had worked like a titan all his life, and every effort he had made, from topping tobacco plants to shaping horseshoes on a forge, had been for the betterment of their life. He knew too that every effort she had made, from the labor of weed-hoeing to the labor of childbearing, had been for that same purpose. And raising their children to feel and understand all God’s intents was also for the betterment of their life together, because it would not be a good thing in life to be ashamed of offspring.

And so now John Clark was saying, for the benefit of these offspring working near him: “Aye. The wasting o’ lives is man’s worst sin.
War!
” he snorted. “D’ye know how many precious lives are wasted in that abominable business? If one slayin’ is a murder, what’s a thousand a day? Lives wasted because men are too vainglorious to sit face to face and talk things out! My boys, I remember a day a thousand died! Back in ’55, ’twas, when that war was on against the French and Indians. Some militia rode in one day, some bandaged, all thirsty and sooty, they rode up to our house in Albemarle, goin’ home from a lost battle. They told us how the Frenchmen and savages had ambushed General Braddock’s whole army in the woods near Fort Pitt, and killed a thousand of ’em. A
thousand
, boys! One thousand Christian Englishmen, all slain in one day! Think on
that
for the wastin’ of life! I swear that was the worst day I’ve ever had in all my days, when I heard that news. I got sicker than anyone ever got a-slaughterin’ a pig, I’ll tell ye so.” His lips were tight, his eyes darkening with the memory. Then he went on:

“Now, hear me. Sometimes, like when Georgie comes home, and everybody wants t’ know, ‘have ye kilt any savages yet’ “—he glanced up from his meat-trimming at Edmund, and Edmund’s eyes dropped—“well, it doesn’t please me to hear a question like
that, though I know that’s what everybody wants to hear of. And I know, too, someday it might be George or an Indian, who’s ever quickest, and let us pray then that it’s George who’s quickest. But I’d rather hear him say what he said, that he’s befriended an Indian, than that he’s killed one. For an Indian’s a far higher creature in Creation than is a hog like this, or even a calf, or a pet dog. Indians pray, did y’ know that?” He looked at them one by one, then bent over his knife and went on. “Indians pray. George told me about that Logan’s religion, told me after you all were a-bed. Said for all he knew, that savage’s god was the same one as ours, but just by a different name. Now mind you, I allowed as how I thought that was probably not so, and I told George I thought that was pretty loose thinkin’. Nonetheless, that Indian prayed, and lived reverent, George said. So even an Indian, with his unredeemed and misguided soul, does
have
a soul. And so, to think it’s sport to kill Indians, why, that’s to condone the wasting o’ life. And I’ll have none of it in this family, hear me now, all of you.” Edmund blinked his downcast eyes and worked harder over the pile of entrails before him.

One disapproving look from John Clarke was more effective than a whipping. He had never had to lay a switch on any of his sons, and only once had he had to knock one down—once when George had been having a red rage. John Clark did not believe in whipping. Once long ago on the way from Port Royal, seeing a sheriff administering a public whipping upon an adulteress, John Clark had got down from his wagon, snatched the whip out of the sheriff’s hand and looped it around his neck, at the risk of being arrested and whipped himself. A person’s body is the home of his sacred soul, John Clark believed, and not to be punished or damaged by another. Thus, war was an abomination before God. “In war,” he said now, “all men red or white are but meat left to rot on the field where they fell. Man is offal, and only the buzzards are fed. Kings and soldiers call that ‘glory,’ to the disgrace of the very word!”

Now his sermon veered off onto another tack; he had reminded himself of something else. “Seducers of womanflesh are the same,” he said, with one of those sad, accusing glances now at Johnny. “They violate the temple of a woman’s soul, and make it but meat. And use the word love like soldiers use the word glory.” Johnny’s forehead reddened, both with shame and indignation. But he did not protest; after all, how could his father know that Johnny’s loves were
real
? That he was passionately, totally in love with the mysterious soul inside each shapely
body he caressed? But John Clark, who had loved the same woman all his life, only said now:

“Bear in mind, every girl is someone’s precious daughter. Like my Annie. And likely she’s also someone’s sister. Would y’ have
her
trifled with?”

There. Put in those terms, it struck Johnny hard. He put his head down and pondered as he worked, and hoped his father had had all his say about that.

John Clark would never have thought of giving so long a speech just standing up in front of people. Speeches were for natural talkers, like the Rogerses, or for burgesses, or for licensed rectors. But when John Clark was working he was thinking, and if the thoughts he had seemed likely important enough to help his sons be worthy, then he could talk as long as anyone.

“There,” said he, “that about does our pig. Let’s get all this up to the kitchen and smokehouse, for it’s a long way from ready for our Annie’s wedding feast, hey, boys? And that day’s not afar off. How y’ feelin’ by now, Billy my boy?”

“I fee’ bettuh, Papa.”

“Aha. Fine. And y’ve learnt something, isn’t it so?”

“Aye, Papa.”

“So here’s our pork, thank the Lord. I wonder if any venison will come our way.” He cast a glance at Edmund, and a sly smile.

“Watch me,” said Edmund, eager to please. “I’m out ’fore daybreak tomorrow.”

E
DMUND
C
LARK HAD SET HIS MIND TO WAKE HIM UP AT
four, because he had a promise to keep.

He dressed in darkness while his brothers breathed and snored and muttered in their sleep. He did not put on shoes, because he could move through the woods more quietly without them. He reached up in the darkness and felt for his rifle, and with a soft grunt lifted it down, then his powder horn and bullet bag. He could see the rectangle of the dormer window, and bright stars. He went out of the room and down the hall and down the stairs, feeling his way with his bare feet. He lifted the latch of the back door and went out into the night air and closed the door behind him, trying to be stealthy as an Indian.

The grass was frosted underfoot. The air was crisp and cold and the night was silent. He could smell the smokehouse where the pork was hanging in hickory smoke, and the smell of it made him salivate. There was a patch of yellow light in the kitchen house door and he could smell pone baking. Old Rose was already
up, as always before anyone else, getting the breakfasts ready. Edmund knew he could go in the kitchen house and Rose would exclaim and wrap him in a musky hug and give him something hot to eat, but he went on past the kitchen house. George had told him that it’s better to hunt hungry.

Edmund walked on dirt road past the smells of stables and pigpens and tobacco sheds. He came to the end of the road and walked on grass for a way, then climbed over a stile and walked on a long way through a meadow under the cold stars, toward a darker line that was the edge of the woods. He entered the woods and walked with one hand before his face to fend off twigs. A few feet away a slow, regular huffing sound began, and became faster and faster until it was a pulsating rush: a ruffed grouse drumming. He noted where its nest was; he would come here in daylight and get it. Deeper in the woods an owl was calling.
Hoo hoo-hoo, hoo hoo-hoo, hoo hoo-hoo, hoo-aw!
Edmund went on, feeling the ground slope gradually down as he crept toward the Mattapony River. There were places where deer came to drink at daybreak. George had begun bringing him down when Edmund was six, and he had learned all such places.

“EEEEEEYOW!” came an insane scream out of the darkness directly in front of him. Edmund recoiled, heart thumping, but he knew the woods sounds too well to be afraid; it was merely the wild preamble to a barred-owl’s statement, which now came hooting down from a high invisible limb as Edmund walked under, shaking his head. Those idiotic-sounding birds had used to make him think Indians were ready to leap on him, when he was smaller and hadn’t yet got used to them.