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By Root 580 0

1947 inception. For decades, some of the meat for the supper was procured during a single communal hunt; families gathered around bonfires while men and the older boys headed into the woods. One of the men was Frank’s father, who’d worked on the Arkansas River levees during the Depression. “He’d tie up his hounds while he was working,” Frank says. “When he was done, he’d just hunt his way back home. If he could get a coon or two in a week, that’d just about double his salary.” It says something about how hard times were then that the pelts were thought worth the trouble—the fur of Arkansas raccoons is much thinner and less valuable than that of those farther north, which have to contend with brutal winters.

Now Frank smiles mischievously. “Stomach feeling strong?”

“Sure,” I say, and follow Frank into the farm shop. Inside, not far from a dusty 1947 Ford truck, surrounded by white molded-plastic chairs, are a pair of metal cattle-watering troughs. Each trough is lined with a sheet of white plastic; each is halfway full of a slurry of brine and raccoon meat and blood. The sheets keep the salty brine from eating into the aluminum, but my immediate concern is how very brightly red they make the blood look. The liquid is actually probably mostly brine—still, it’s brine that’s gone extremely and thoroughly crimson.

I force a smile and a “Well, would you look at that,” or something similarly lame, and make myself step closer to where Scott Plaice—this year’s head cook and an absolutely enormous man—is loading cut-up raccoon into a sieve by the shovelful. The shovel blade has been drilled with holes (your kitchen probably has slotted spoons; these guys have slotted shovels), and as Scott shovels the meat, the smell of blood is rank and just everywhere. The breakfast special at the Paddy was scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast slathered in margarine—they threw in a couple of sausage patties just to be kind—and right now I’m feeling every bite of it.

If I didn’t already know what the cut-up meat is, I’d be hard-pressed to guess. It’s a perfect example of how modern butchering distances us from the animals we eat. Cutting up meat with an ax, as most Americans did before the late eighteenth century, left identifiable pieces of animal—a haunch, a flank, even a head. When you looked in a pot, it was obvious what was simmering there. Butchering with knives or saws, on the other hand, produces cutlets and fillets—pork and beef, instead of pig and cow. There’s a big difference, both visually and conceptually, between roasting a freshly killed raccoon over the coals and simmering a kettle of nearly unidentifiable segments.

So though the hunters skin, gut, and behead each raccoon before sale, Scott and Frank and the rest insist that they leave on at least one paw. “We gotta check, just to make sure they’re not comin’ in with kitty cats or something,” Scott says. Once the animal’s identity is confirmed, they cut up the raccoons in such a way that (if you can put aside the sight of the brining tank) the meat looks pretty good. But it sure smells bad.

I retreat outside, stepping across a bloody little rivulet and into what I think will be blessedly clear air, but I at once make the mistake of wandering over to Frank, who—a brief cross-draft masks this fact at first—is immediately downwind from the cooking kettles. Three of the four pots were made by welding sheet steel over sections of three-foot pipe. The fourth, the story goes, was once a Confederate cookpot (or maybe a washbasin), found buried under someone’s grandmother’s front porch and identified by an elderly black woman named Bessie Lee. They used to use all iron pots and wooden paddles. But the health department got interested, forcing the move to stainless-steel implements. (The other point of contention was the homemade pies once served for dessert at the supper. The department has declared that Gillett can serve up six hundred pounds of raccoon at a sitting, but the citizenry is forever safe from the ravages that homemade peach cobbler and huckleberry pie might visit upon them.)