The 'Cousins'

Part Sixty-Two: Walt Kempster Burns His Bridges.

His footsteps echoed around the empty vastness of the hallway as he slowly placed one foot in front of the other to climb the stairs and visit every room once again. This would be for the last time; not only for nostalgia, but also to collect his few belongings. 

Every room held a happy memory that played through his mind as he entered. The two storied, wooden frame and board building had stood for more than a hundred years. It was a roomy, draughty house and twice a year when he was a child, he and his mother would be on their hands and knees in each room to deal with the draughts. 

Every autumn they hammered newspapers into the cracks between the wall skirting and the floorboards to protect them from the icy draughts that blew through these gaps. Then in spring they would pull them out, so the breeze could blow through to reduce the heat of summer. These had been hard, but happy times. 

Walt pulled back the net curtain of his childhood bedroom and caught sight of the old red-brick pigsty, with its rusted corrugated iron roof in the far corner of the back yard. The sight evoked more pleasant memories of his childhood. 

Each spring his father brought home a piglet for his mother to feed through the summer. It was Walt’s job to keep the sty clean and he would spend a lot of time with each pig, becoming friends with each one. His parents forbade him giving them names. ‘The pigs are not pets Walt, they’re for slaughter so don’t give ‘em names, you should be kind to ‘em but don’t make pets of ‘em.’ 

Walt chuckled as he recalled his father’s face, set rigid and stern as he handed out this advice. Walt did give each one a name and would use it when he talked to each animal as it nuzzled its snout against his legs, searching for treats and throatily grunting its appreciation when Walt rubbed behind the hog’s ears. 

He was careful not to mention the grunter's name when his parents were around. The porker would grow larger week on week, feeding on garden waste and feed spillage from the warehouse until the icy blast of the north winds heralded winter and that the pig’s time had come.

Walt would run to his room when his father loaded the pig into Jim Caffery’s trailer for the trip to the abattoir. He would lie on his bed and cry tears enough to dampen his pillow.  

Walt chuckled at these recollections; for he had no problems at all when a half pig came back three day’s later. The first time he had asked his father irately. ‘We sent a whole pig, how come we only got half a pig back?’  His father explained he had sold the other half of the pig to the butcher, out of which he had paid the slaughter man.

Walt happily joined in with his parents as they busied themselves in the kitchen butchering the animal into joints for preserving and cuts for giving to friends. They had no freezer in the early days and his mother salted down much of the meat she kept for their own use. He took his turn on the handle of the mincer, grinding meat and rusk into a filling that his mother would stuff into the pig’s entrails, after extensively cleaning and washing, to make sausages. One of his favourite sandwich fillings was the cheese she made out of the pig’s head. Walt no longer recognised the meat as being April, or May or June, or whatever name he had given the pig. 

The first meal after the pig came back was always a feast of liver and onions. Walt had no guilt feelings preventing him eating his fill of the offal, mashing his potatoes into its rich, succulent sauce. 

But his face hardened as he looked out of the window onto the neglected yard and overgrown vegetable garden his parents had tended so assiduously. He saw it all in a different light today, and the taste of bitter gall rose into his mouth. These were happy childhood memories for him, but for his parents had been an absolute necessity of life. The pig would be almost their sole supply of meat for the winter. They ate a lot of vegetables, mostly grown in the two long plots in front of the pig-sty; nourished by garden compost and the manure from the pig. It was all part of an essential annual cycle.