HUNTSVILLE —     Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from my memoir, which I hope will be on shelves within a year or so. It aired on NPR several years ago as “Something Like Blood.”



    Just at dusk you can see on the horizon a line of cloud flat as a sheet of lead, and the color of lead, and you know, since you have heard them talking, low and earnest, that the weather is on their minds, and more. They are up much later than usual, in and out the back door.

    You can hear the radio, never on this late, and voices come from outside. There is the sound of knives in pans. But you are only a boy, and what you have on your mind is sleep.

    During the night, the windows rattle as thunder rumbles through. The room lights up time after time as lightning zips across the sky. Rain lashes against the window, and the house creaks in the gusting wind.

    When you wake, the sky is a brilliant blue through the little triangle where the curtains split at the top, and the lower window is sheeted on the inside with condensation and streaked where little rivulets have started down.

    A needle-keen wind buffets the house, moans around the corners. It is now a bitter November morning, and something catches the edge of your eye, still smoky with sleep, and you sit up in bed and squint into the window fast filling with sun.

    A coldchoked wasp, enticed from the curtains by the promise of the warming light, advances a tentative foot, then withdraws it, clinging stubbornly to the glass like a piece of bark.

    There are outside sounds, muffled, someone swears, the scent of woodsmoke finds your nostrils, you sit up in the cold bed. Then you remember, you know what day it is.

     Breakfast is a blur, the men already at the barn, the women tending the fireringed pots. Cold ham and, biscuits, iceskimmed milk; no time for eggs, no woman to cook them. It is not an ordinary morning. It is the first cold snap of the season, and they knew it was coming, the old men, even without the radio. They knew it in the blood.

     At the corner of the back porch you stand dressed for the cold, dressed for work, but you know that it is not your day, not a day for boys. It is enough that they will let you watch. The steaming creek, with its trees and steep banks, lies off to the south, where it will lie tomorrow or the day after, when the hog will be so many bundles of meat and this day will be memory.

     The sky is the blue of your mother's eyes as you step off the porch onto hard ground; frostheaves munch underfoot, a smack of cold wind whips your cap off, tumbling it back under the porch. You let it go.             Tomorrow will be soon enough to search for an old cap, and the fire at the pots will warm your ears.

    It is only sounds and colors and smells, though you do not know that now, do not know what will last, any more than you know what can and will be lost, as toys will come and go, wheelless and buried in the dust beneath the house, any more than you can know what your world will turn into.

    You do not know why you watch and wait, what draws you to the fire and blood. You know only that what you want, of all the options of the day, is to be there.

    The horses stamp and nicker where they are tied, and yet another wagon is inching up the road, its steel-rimmed wheels skirring and grinding in the gravel. It turns up the drive toward the house. A man and woman weave on the front seat as the wagon finds the proper ruts, children's heads bob and dip above the edge of the bed behind them. You turn back to the scene before you.

     You have not been allowed to witness the man with the rifle or see the white hog lunge sideways into his trough, skittering ice across what two days ago was the fetid slime of a wallow.

    But you stand on the back porch and watch and listen to the collective grunts of the men now dragging, now rolling the bloodribboned carcass to a steaming barrel dug into the ground, ready to scald away the hair and soften him for scraping. As they push the pink body in, hot water gushes out, flattening the ice-stiff grass in a bold circle before the barrel.

    “Are they sure he’s dead?” you ask no one in particular. No one answers, so you assume that he is:  He has not, after all, squealed, as you know pigs do when they are in pain.

    Before you can walk to the nearest fire and warm your hands and ears, he has been hoisted from the barrel, a great pale blister of flesh, and strung by his heels from a pulley tied to the apex of a scaffold of three white poles skinned of bark just for that ritual.

    A gaunt Negro man, moving with the precision you'd have expected only of a surgeon, slices down the belly, piles the steaming entrailsthe reds and browns and purplesinto waiting tubs, then sets to cutting the hog into its parts, some you’ll recognize later, some you won’t. You wince at the pungent smell from the tubs, the odor of scalded pig flesh, and the bite of spices in the air.

    The ground beneath the scaffold is a spongy red, the way you have imagined battlefields, though you know little of wars and the reasons for them — here there is only one cause at work, the most fundamental of all. A deep heel print brims with blood.

     Two women, whose faces you know but names you do not, go from tub to tub, sorting, selecting, discarding. The men help the Negro carver. Your mother pokes the fires and stirs the liquid in the pots.

    Two long tables, made of saw horses with scrubbed pine boards laid across them, fill with meatwhite, red, and brown chunks of stillwarm pork. There is a whoop as a whiplike length of sinew whizzes up and catches in the stark branches of a nearby chinaberry tree.

     “What was that?” you try to ask, but no one has time for a boy on a day like this. You do not know why they will not even look at you, these strange people you have known all your life.         You know only that what is happening is a ritual that you have to earn the right, the age, to be involved in. And you know that it has something to do with blood, maybe the pig’s, maybe theirs, but with blood.

    You walk once more past the chattering women and bubbling pots, where squares of fat roll and brown, then crawl up under the house to find your cap. From the doorsteps you watch a few minutes, but the creek calls, the trees and steep banks, and this is no place for a boy.

    So you walk down there, followed by one of the dogs, who by now is too full of fat and gristle to be interested in what’s happening back at the house.         You go, as you always have, to what you understand.



Paul Ruffin, 2009 Texas State Poet Laureate, is Texas State University System Regents’ Professor and Distinguished Professor of English at SHSU. He may be reached through his web site at pauldruffin.com.