Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [129]
Amy looks at Muzzy, then looks up at me. “Whaddya think?” I say, breaking into a grin. She looks back at Muzzy; then you can see it dawn on her that he is joking. “Noooo!” she says, giggling. Muzzy laughs happily and starts peeling the guts out. But he keeps stopping, using his knife as a pointer, urging Amy to get closer, to have a good look. “See that? That’s the spleen!” He cuts it free and splits it, points out the vascularity, tells her how it can be injured in a car crash. He gestures toward the underside of the liver. “That’s the gallbladder!” Amy is fascinated. When he shows her the heart, he explains how it works and how a pig heart is like a human heart. “Sometimes they use parts of pig hearts in people,” he adds. Amy is soaking it in. He lays the lungs on the ground and dissects them, showing her how the air goes in and out. Then he asks, “Are you going to smoke cigarettes?” Amy shakes her head solemnly. “If you smoke, your lungs will have all kinds of black spots inside them,” Muzzy says. Then he slings the lungs in the bucket. They land with a slickery flop.
When it is time to halve the pig, he produces a monstrous steel hacksaw and plugs it into an inverter outlet on the truck. When the pig is split, he rotates one half out to show Amy how the brain lies tight in its case. She squats down and has a good look. “I can see his teeth!” she exclaims.
I have backed the pickup down to the butcher site and lined it with plastic. Muzzy swings the winch boom over the bed of my truck and slowly lowers the pig as I guide the halves into the bed. Then he starts in on the second pig, Amy at his elbow from start to finish. Muzzy continues in the professorial vein, but we also get him going on stories. He has been working the entire time with his fingerless hand stuffed in an athletic sock, the thumb protruding through a hole in the fabric. He keeps a small meat hook pinched between his thumb and the palm of the hand, snagging the meat and skin of the pig as need be to set up the cut. What the heck, I think, and just plunge in: “So what’s the story with the missing fingers?” In more delicate company I might have anticipated gasps and umbrage, but Muzzy launches off as if he thought I’d never ask.
“Corn picker!” he exclaims, almost triumphantly. “Took these three fingers right off, and degloved this one.” I’ve seen a few degloving injuries in my day. I know he would have seen the bone sticking out naked as a Halloween skeleton, the skin stripped away. “So they amputated that.”
“What about your thumb?” I asked. “Is it a toe?” The thumb looked a little flat, and I know they do that with toes.
“NO!” says Muzzy, emphatically. “They tried to do that. But I told ’em, I need that toe. I was a truck driver at the time. You use your toes all the time—shifting, pressing the gas…Nope, I wouldn’t let ’em take the toe.
“I was in the hospital for eight days. Four days after I got home I was back to butchering.” The palm of the hand looks padded, like a mitt. “They took meat from my forearm to build it up,” says Muzzy. “Then they covered it with skin they took from my leg. My leg hurt worse than anything else.”
His thumb looks cold in the sharp air. The white sock is wet and reddish with blood. “No, the sock keeps it warm,” he says. “Cold’s not the problem. It’s got good circulation. Cold don’t bother it.” He looks at me with a reckless grin. “But you stick it in a bucket of hot water, and I’ll go to the moon!”
When both carcasses are in the truck and Muzzy is gone, I pull the plastic sheeting around the pigs and drape a logging chain back and forth over the plastic to keep it from blowing loose. Then Amy and I drive the pigs north to Bloomer, where we will turn them over to my friend Bob the One-Eyed Beagle. “Tell him to save the fat,” says Anneliese as we are leaving. “I want to render the lard.”
I delight as usual in having Amy as my copilot. Bombing down a country road in a pickup truck with my daughter has become one of the signal joys of fatherhood. Throw a couple of dead pigs in the back and you