Half of my butchering-day projects were in those pots, but I didn’t say a word. I toddled across the kitchen to my new rocker and sat down heavily. I felt as bulbous and full of juice as a ripe melon. Never in my career as a cook had I been squeamish. I had dealt with my fair share of dead soft-shell crabs and rotten wild mushrooms, had ingested scraps of raw lamb to find out whether or not it was too old to serve. (It was.) I had been caught in a walk-in refrigerator with a tub of steaming tripe whose pastoral pestilence overtook all the good air. I was not afraid of barnyard.
Previously, all my intimate meat moments had taken place in a Manhattan basement kitchen, divorced from the source. This was different. Having seen the pig’s blinking eyes in the morning, and still looking at its empty stare seven hours later, I was as close now to real ingredients as I’d ever get. And at such close range the view was a little grisly. But the urgencies were also more natural. My ingredients in Two Inlets would not necessarily arrive in my kitchen in boxes, according to my timeline. The beans I planted in my garden would ripen when they felt like it, and when two bushels of apples, or a pig’s head, arrived in my kitchen, it would be my duty to cook them, no matter how busy I was on that given day. Or how pregnant. For better or worse, I was hooked to the seasons.
I fell deeper into the rocker. I knew that I’d finally earned the use of my personal talon—the paring knife that had been like an extension of my mom’s hand. And I’d finally gained the family motion, that smooth, vehicular way of moving around a pot. But I had to admit, simmering a pig’s head in my awkward physical condition was a day’s labor enough for this old girl.
Aaron came trudging through the door, even sweatier than before, his face blown wide with relief.
“We got it going,” he said, panting and leaning on the doorframe.
“Really?” I scooped myself up and followed him down the hill to the pump.
I was so excited to taste our rock-chilled water again that I joked, “The joy I feel at this moment is going to eclipse this kid’s birth!” and then immediately felt a sharp pang of guilt in my side, because of course that wasn’t true.
—
Our son’s birth was perilous to say the least.
When I woke up in intensive care, a kind priest with a deep Irish brogue was sitting next to me, his thick white hair glinting in the sunny room. A succession of young nurses with different-colored ponytails had been taking care of me for the past day or however long it had been, gently rolling me this way and that way, changing my bedding, and as they moved my concrete legs I imagined that this was what it felt like to be a baby undergoing a diaper change. I couldn’t open my eyes and I didn’t know how long I’d been out, but Aaron was feeding our boy, holding him, I knew that. He had probably already given him his name: Hank.
My mother was sitting on the other side of my bed, her wide eyelids at half-mast, her hands clasped. Even in my haze I knew that she was the one who summoned the priest and that his presence at my bedside could mean only one thing: last rites. I was going to die.
“Relax!” My mom shushed me and petted my hand. “You’re going to be okay. I found Father in the hallway. He’s just going to say the Prayer of the Mothers.” As he canted the words, the Catholic rhythm of my childhood came back like a familiar pop song.
Turns out that the easygoing midwives had it all wrong and my side pains indicated that I had a rare pregnancy-related blood disorder, with a touch of liver failure on the side—on my left side, to be specific—called HELLP for short. Their neglect was strangely fortuitous, because the lack of a diagnosis allowed me to ripen Hank up all the way. I was shaken and yellow for a few days, but our baby was perfect, and Aaron was indeed holding him. And that was all that mattered.
—
A week later, when we came home from the hospital, Vern had finished the addition and taken down the partition that divided the old house from the new. The electricity we’d hooked up the previous year now flowed throughout the entire house, powering lights left and right. And water was running, in my kitchen, out of the faucet, like a miracle. Nonchalantly, as if it had always done so.
Hank, my new appendage, was wide-eyed, with a flirtatious smile and a near-constant sigh. Sometimes his sighs sounded like contentment and other times just as if he felt the need to put some sound on the passing moment, to make us aware that he was taking up new space in the world. I woke up every day with the sinking feeling that I had only dreamed his sweet skin, that he didn’t really exist after all. I was so relieved when his cries turned out to be real.
After going through our morning routine, I laid the fragile, sleeping Hank in the bassinet for his nap and went to the fridge to find the block of headcheese. The hunger I’d lost in the events of the previous week had returned with a vengeance. The chunks of pork in golden gelatin looked like fossils floating in amber, caught in time. When I tried to carve a thin refined slice, the cake crumbled like a bunch of stacked stones. So I cut a thick slice—a proper Grandma-size hunk—set it on hot toast made from plain supermarket-white, and tasted it. Sadly, it was nowhere near as good as the Italian testa. My aspic was the right strength, but I’d thrown in too much fat. The meat tasted vaguely swinish, and yet curiously still bland. I should not have short-shifted the brining. That two-day salt cure was not optional. I opened my pine cabinet, found the white wine vinegar, plugged the top with my thumb, and sprinkled droplets over the headcheese.
Just like my mother’s butter, the salty golden pork juice seeped all the way to the bread’s bottom edge. It wasn’t perfect. But it was close. Not by degrees, but literally—like a local who’d never left, it was born, raised, and ceremoniously consumed within ten miles of home.
—
That fall, sticking to the plan, we moved back to Brooklyn with Hank. Aaron got to work on finishing the sculptures for his second solo show at his Chelsea gallery.
Brooklyn, with Hank at my side, felt almost unrecognizable. I took Hank with me everywhere, to the large suburban supermarket in Red Hook, to the nearby playground where he clung to the monkey bars like jailbait and shook his diapered booty, to the coffee shop where I checked my empty email in-box. There was not a minute of taking care of him that I begrudged him the brief derailment of my working career. Well before he could speak, his expression conveyed perfect comic timing, and his eyes glimmered with unspoken punch lines to my doofy jokes; he was that delightful of a companion.