When she first started at the Whole Hog, she was a waitress, navigating the tables while balancing a tray filled with bucket-size glasses of sweet tea. She hated every second of it, but she needed the money, the tossed-off tips, almost always a mere 10 percent of the check. She didn’t pretend that she was a good waitress; she was too shy to check her tables often enough, believing that she was always a nuisance when she stopped by to ask if anyone needed more tea, more food, or the check. She did not like being witnessed while in possession of someone else’s food. The owner had given her the job as a favor to her father; the rest of the waitstaff was comprised of Mr. Bonner’s daughters and nieces. And she was truly grateful for the work and steeled herself to smile more, to be charming, to flirt with the farmers and factory workers who wanted young girls to serve them giant plates of pulled pork so they could call them sweetie and honey and baby doll.
On her breaks, however, while the other girls went off to smoke or to talk on their cell phones, Izzy would hide in the kitchen and watch Mr. Tannehill, the seventy-year-old man who worked the smoker, prepare the pigs. She watched him rub down the lifeless carcasses of the pigs with a simple mixture of salt and pepper, watched him somehow hoist these beasts onto the smoker, and watched him mop the skin with a prehistoric-looking implement before finally tearing the pig apart into something so delicious that it was not food but a miracle. The men and boys hired to assist Mr. Tannehill were shiftless and transitory, doing the bare minimum to earn a paycheck, and so Izzy, inching closer and closer to the action over a period of months, found herself, on occasion, the recipient of Mr. Tannehill’s clipped, specific instructions. He seemed pleased with the serious way she obeyed his orders, the fact that he only had to tell her something once and then she never forgot it. Sometimes, as the actual pit boys sat on a stool and read a magazine, Izzy would go over her allotted break and one of the other waitresses would yell for her to get back to work. One time, she heard Mr. Tannehill mumble under his breath when she had been summoned, “Damn it all.” It thrilled her, to be of use and to be good at it. Some days she would come to work before school started or stay an hour or two after her shift had ended and simply sit by the smoker with Mr. Tannehill, neither of them speaking, tending to the fire, maintaining the exact heat that gave the pork its singular flavor.
Once a year had passed and three successive pit boys had either quit or been fired, Izzy asked Mr. Tannehill if she could take the job. He talked to Mr. Bonner, who needed convincing, but soon it was just Mr. Tannehill and Izzy in the back room, left alone to handle the pigs, alchemists in a dungeon, two lonely people who understood meat better than other people.
Izzy felt a gagging sensation stall in her throat, and she hunched over the hog and tried to reclaim her bearings. Mr. Tannehill finally spoke up, his eyes barely visible beneath the brim of his baseball cap, “You feeling poorly?”
She shook her head and then, knowing it was no use to lie, thought up a lesser lie. “Hungover,” she said. She watched Mr. Tannehill wince at the admission, and she remembered, too late, the story of the man’s past, his own restaurant in North Carolina, written up in magazines by enthusiasts of barbecue, and the ruin his drinking had brought down on the establishment. Still, no other choice seemingly available to her, she soldiered on. “I drank too much last night, I guess.”
“Not a good habit,” he said, “but sometimes a necessary one.” He stood beside her and then lightly shoved her out of the way, his ancient hands, no need for gloves, tearing the meat apart. “Drink some water,” he told her, and she did, running the tap and slurping from her cupped hands. She felt the water stabilize her nausea, but she hung back from the hog and its inescapable scent. Recently, she had to start washing her hair twice, scrubbing furiously, to get the smoke and fat out of her hair so that she could sleep in some state of calm.
“I’m better,” she said, and she then took her place beside him, quickly working the meat from the carcass, their hands never once reaching for the same spot. Once they had finished, Mr. Tannehill cleaned the innards, saving them for the dishes that certain old-timers requested from off the menu. Izzy took a cleaver in each hand and started to chop the meat into a uniform size and consistency. She found a rhythm as the cleavers hit the wood, the knives an extension of her desires, never once betraying her. She wiped her blades clean on her apron and then sat on an overturned empty bucket of vinegar, wondering how she was going to make it through seven and a half more months of this.