Winchester .44

Thanksgiving week was for butchering in Nicholas County,

as late November air was likely to remain cool.

Winter was the only refrigeration on Horse Ridge.

Daddy told us that when he was a boy, this was the week of the hog,

fattened on a diet of late season chestnuts that smothered the ground

under the grove near the woodlot.

Daddy’s father and uncles mourned the passing of the great trees.

Chestnuts would disappear to memory, like the hog’s fate.

One of the elders brought out their father’s Winchester,

a sturdy rifle that Perry Coe used to hunt since settling

in this high timber country in 1880.

They led the beast under a lower bough

of the sugar maple near the pen,

put a .44 round into his brain,

and hoisted the 400 pound carcass high

with hemp rope twined through block-and-tackle pulleys.

Once the boar was gutted, life blood drained,

a pair of uncles stood side by side to peel off cuts of pork with boning knives.

Organs were the first to be cooked, not salted nor pickled.

The smokehouse was cleared, cord wood of oak burned for days,

apple or hickory added to flavor the hams and slab meat.

Chunks of loin were cut for the mincemeat pie, sausage ground

for the Thanksgiving feast, this clan’s Samhain.

I remember holding the old Winchester before it was stolen,

a memory withering

like the chestnut tree, like

the fate of the hog.