Chapter 4

Hoping I'd given the girls the proper mind set I left them with Anne and Annie as I sought out Julie, Sandy, Ben Jr. and Tom. I wanted them to teach the new girls how to act around the cows, feed them, move them, clean them and milk them. It's something that kids on a subsistence farm pick up through their skin so I figured they'd do a good job.

If I heard of any racist shit going on I'd come down on them like a ton of bricks.

I found Michael and Ben and sat down with them for a little heart-to-heart. What I had told the girls had come off the top of my head, but in my guts knew to be the thing to do. I explained this to the guys. It brought on some sad looks because of what it meant but they basically agreed. We put our heads together and laid out plans to dig a road out to the river and gravel in a small jetty—just a few feet long. From there we wanted to leave a 20 foot strip of publicly accessible riverbank as was prescribed by law, then use the Cat to dig out a fence line. We'd start a second compost heap with what came out of the path. We'd connect it with the East and West hedges, leaving room for a tractor to water it come spring. We'd clear it out now since we had time now that the harvest was in and the roots of what we wanted to dig out were still in soft soil, not frozen as they would be in the spring. We'd fertilize the fence row before planting to stimulate first-year growth. While looking up the plants to use for the hedge I was going to look up apple and pear root stock to buy for next year's orchard planting. We'd want to add plenty of organic matter and fertilizer to that as well.

Cows typically eat half a bale of hay a day. From October to May gives eight months of fodder to bunker. That's 240 days times 14 head, twice that one we double our herd for beef/milk cows. That's about 1700 bales per herd. We'd have to put in another barn. Milking cows give more butterfat if they get about pound of mixed ground grain per day. Typically cows freshen once per year and go dry for a month or two. That's almost two and a half tons of grain per herd, figure five tons. We'd figure all this into our dairy expenses on our worksheets.

Our contractor friend Dave had something like FRS radios that worked on another band. He could get us a dozen for about a hundred a piece, with chargers. I gave him the go-ahead. He'd put in two heavy remote-control gates for us within two weeks, along with a call-button and powered opener/closer wired to the kitchen. Someone was always in the kitchen. We'd make sure to make it a certainty. We bought more shotguns and buckshot. I had all the shotguns equipped with slings for easy carry. I talked to Dave and quietly asked that a high-speed closer be added. I wanted four thousand pound gates that moved on air curtains. If someone cut the power or tried to move the gates manually I wanted hernias and wrecked cars. I got "No Problem!" by way of reply. God, I love a compliant contractor.

I spent a couple hours online looking up nasty hedge plants. I settled on white-stemmed bramble for nearest the water backed up by Osage Orange planted four feet apart and a row of well-spaced plantings of Surinam Cherry to pretty-up our side of the fence. I read that Osage Orange can grow 3-6 feet per year, as can the white stemmed bramble. If we topped them for two years after the first the hedge should fill out to be nearly impenetrable. I still planned on planting Rosa Rugosa all along the fence to weave it into something truly vicious. Eventually I wanted to put in a fence of hardware cloth (wire mesh) all along the inside of the road until it hit the back 'main street' and plant the roses along them too. Nobody would climb THAT damned fence.

Comparing different fruit tree root stocks we agreed on some that were a bit pricey but had increased disease and insect resistance. We settled on a Geneva II apple root stock which was a 33-45 percent dwarf variety, at 25 bucks a tree with a 7/16 inch trunk, 40 trees plus delivery. The same nursery had pear stock with a good reputation. It was labeled OhxF87, cost 31 bucks per tree with copyright, 7/16 inch trunk, ten trees plus delivery. Both types of tree wanted sandy, loamy soil so we'd give them sandy loamy soil with enough digested cow shit to make them happy. We'd condition the orchard, plow in the sand, humus and fertilizer, use the rotary tiller on it, use the drag to make nice furrows and plant it in clover. Once the clover had sprouted (and we could drive on it) we'd use the small tractor and fencepost drill attachment to dig holes for the root balls. A hose attached to our water buffalo would let us give them a generous drenching twice a week for the month, then once a week for the rest of the year. Too much watering gave fruit trees something called collar rot.

It was near the first of October.

We had to herd the cows to the milk house and back the first week. After that they'd gotten the idea and showed up by themselves. They got their grain while being milked so they were pretty happy about the whole thing, I figure. We'd put in milking stanchions and demand watering bowls. There were two sides of eight stanchions to the milk house. We could buy two more cows before we had to milk in shifts.

The second hard freeze hit. It was in the upper thirties the day we took a collective deep breath and started butchering the pigs. We used the backhoe to dig a trench just inside the front fence plantings, about three feet deep. That's where we dumped the offal. It would be under the frost line and should decompose nicely by spring to provide some excellent fertilizer. That's over a mile long trench. That's a lot of pig guts.

Wendy called in a vet to supervise. We needed to make sure that all the stock was healthy before we ate or sold any of it. He brought a kit with slides, stain and a microscope to test the organ meat and brain tissue from each pig after it was killed. Once he gave his okay ( less than a half hour later) we broke the animal down. We put him up for most of a month and fed him well. I'm sure he trimmed his bill down quite a bit come the end. We'd always be able to call on him if we needed a vet after that.

We butchered six porkers a day working in teams. We kept the big sows for last. Wendy collected kidney fat, called leaf lard, and simmered it constantly in every stock pot we had. When it looked clear she'd filter it through a china cap lined with several layers of cheesecloth then pour the lard into the stoneware crocks she'd been collecting. When they were three-quarters full or so she put them in the packing house to cool. We isolated tenderloins, shoulder for picnic roasts and blade roasts, belly for bacon and spare ribs, hams, the loin for chops and loin roasts, hearts, livers and kidneys. The rest went into the grinder. We sacrificed the heads except for the cheek meat, the tails and the feet. Other than the bones and offal the rest was fair game. We had to salt all of it, then smoke it other than the sausage and tenderloins. The smoked sausage and kielbasa got a smoke house treatment of course. Our smoke house was running 24x7 for over a month. We wrapped and labeled everything. We kept the tenderloins and organ meat unsmoked because they were a more forgiving meat to cook with that way. We filled all but a few freezers with pig. We had tubs of meat sitting all over the shelves of the packing house at sub-freezing temperatures, sitting unwrapped on screens so the air could dry them a bit and condense the meat. We bought eight more freezers. Every single house had an entire kitchen wall of chest freezers full of meat. After I thought about all that I talked to our contractor. He put in a huge propane generator hooked to two one-thousand pound LP gas tanks and a circuit cut-over box in exchange for three butchered, smoked and wrapped pigs. We had to fill the propane tanks, though.

I made a deal with Jim Deaderick to trade four butchered pigs for two butchered yearling steer. The weight would come out about right and both families would have a more varied diet.

We held four of the young pigs back for pig roasts at Thanksgiving and Christmas. When we butchered the sows we found the meat to be tough. Except for the hams, bacon and tenderloins we cut it all into sausage meat. That's when I found out what the stoneware crocks of lard were for. The Italian sausage, sage sausage and hot sausage had to be preserved differently. Wendy had every stove in the compound filled with pans of water at a simmer, filled with crocks of lard. Once the lard came up to temperature and became liquid she went from crock to crock coiling sausage into the crocks until they were full, then labeled each one with a grease pencil. They stayed at a simmer for 6 hours to partially cook the meat and sterilize it. Then they were cooled and set aside in the root cellars. The anaerobic environment (no oxygen) kept them fresh. Wendy knew her charcuterie. (sausage making)

Lord, did we sell sausage, ribs, chops, roasts and hams. A hell of a lot of people would eat ham that Thanksgiving and Christmas. We didn't hold back hardly any hams. We planned on doling it out for months and months. Fat chance.

Just after the big pig kill we got a caller. A guy in a dark suit drove up in a dark sedan with GS14 plates. He said he was with the Department of Agriculture and asked to see our permits and licenses. Well, hell mister government man, we don't have any. His eyes got kind of bright and started talking about fines and seizures when I pulled my derringer out of my coat pocket, pushed it under his chin and pulled the trigger, spattering what little brains he had all over the grass. What, you didn't think I started this shit unarmed, did you? A .45 caliber Texas Defender shooting .410 shotgun slugs is as up front and personal as I can get.

"Pity. What a waste of flesh. His momma would be so disappointed. The idiot came to a gun fight with an attitude. Let me go change into clean clothes, new sneakers, a cap and rubber gloves. Ben, would you empty his pockets for me and find his keys, the slot him in with the pig guts? Josh, I'll drive his car over to the next county and find an abandoned farm to leave it. Would you follow me and pick me up? Please stay on the blacktop and don't follow me down the driveway. We don't want to leave tire prints."

The guys looked at each other. It was a nervous silence.

"You done this before?"

"Kinda."

Silence. "It shows"

"Relax, guys. It gets easier after you do it a few times." A longer silence.

"That's what we're afraid of."

I kept his briefcase, glove box papers and wallet. After reading a bit on the internet I found that the Dept. Of Agriculture had relaxed on food licensing and a simple walk-through by a certified sanitation specialist and a sign-off would have gotten us off the hook, but no! Mr. Barney Fife wanted a little stipend. He had twelve 5000 dollar checks in his papers. He'd had quite a little racket going on!

I figured that we'd better call for an inspection once we got rid of all the meat littering the packing house. That week we had it all wrapped and labeled. We shipped it all the next week. Let the grocers worry about warehousing it. We sluiced everything down with the pressure washer and some bleach. We were ready for inspection.

Wendy and I inspected the milking shed and the milk house. Our milk maids (loosely taken) had learned their lessons well. There was a bit of crud in the corners that a putty knife and a rinse took care of. Only a drill sergeant or a sanitation inspector would have found it.

Tony had our cheese operation in full swing. He had several shelves filled with wax coated cheeses, aging in their temperature-controlled environment. The curdling tanks and bain maries were pristine. Everything looked great and smelled clean. He had us try some high-fat fresh cottage cheese while we were there. I wondered why he was smiling until I tasted it. Sweet, nutty and fresh. Lovely. "Tony, you're going to make us a fortune. You're certainly on the right track. We don't want any low-fat anything. If you can whip up some cream cheese I'll ask Wendy here to crank out some bagels and we'll have a New York breakfast come Sunday. You on?

"Yep."

"Good. You're welcome to bring your family. We really haven't seen much of them. We're all one community here, isolated as we are. I know you have a wife and daughter, that's about it. We like to have Sunday dinners together. I hope you know that you and yours are invited.

Tony grinned. "Good. I hoped that I wasn't just an employee hitting the time clock. It's good that there isn't a bar close, though. That's how I got in trouble before. Not enough time spent at home with the wife." He frowned to himself. "I hope we can pull it together here. I love my wife and daughter but my wife and I don't really like each other right now."

I thought long and hard about it. We needed to keep everyone pulling on the same rope and in the same direction. "Tony, I've got an idea. Why don't you ask your wife to work with you during the day. Wendy here cooks for five daily. I doubt if three more would give her fits. I'll ask Julie and Sandy to watch out for your daughter during the day. It'll give her someone to talk to as well. We can each take her a day once in a while to give the girls some time off. It wouldn't hurt her to see what her daddy does for a living either, I'll bet."

Wendy smiled and agreed. Tony looked relieved. He probably needed some alone time to talk to his wife without little ears listening in and working together would hopefully bring them closer. The first few conversations were going to be real corkers if I read things aright.

I thought about our meals together. We really didn't have a place to sit down and eat as a group. "Wendy, how about we build a dinner room and bath off the big kitchen. We could heat and cool it, have parties, put in satellite TV and maybe get some online classroom stuff for the kids. We've got three that should be in school. It doesn't have to be fancy but I would like to build it solid, like our houses. We could put a covered concrete patio beside or behind it to grill outside or do our pigs. Sound like a plan?" She looked at me like 'why the hell didn't you think of this before, doofus?' Sigh. Sigh. "All right, all right. Consider it ordered. You could have asked, you know."

I got our contractor on the project. I figured on a multi-use room 60 feet by 40 feet with a collapsible wall 20 feet from one end would let us set up a classroom and not bother them while doing anything else in the rest of the building. I got tables and chairs ordered as well as a couple of fridges and a small commercial ice maker.

Thanksgiving wasn't far off. I started thinking about what I'd had before for the big meal and what I liked. We had nothing like cranberry relish or any way to grow it. It takes a cold bog. I checked with the internet. The Cranberry Grower's Association was still in business. I contracted for two thousand pounds of bagged cranberries to be delivered by the middle of November by a temperature-controlled semi.

We'd have our stash and sell a lot to the grocers to make a hell of a lot of people happy with a taste that would remind them of better times. Along the same lines I contacted the Florida Citrus Grower's Association. I got 300 pounds of lemons, 2000 pounds of oranges and 200 pounds of grapefruit ordered for delivery a week before Christmas. I started to leave Wendy a note as to what I'd ordered. She could reserve as much as she wanted while retailing the rest. I thought about Wendy King and Cindy Pike baking for the holidays. I started a belated inventory of my gamma lid buckets.

I had cinnamon by the pound. Vanilla. Powdered ginger. Brown and white sugar. Salt. Baking powder. Lemon, orange and rum extract. Candied lemon and mixed fruit peel. I still had a freezer set at 10 below zero Fahrenheit full of pecans, walnuts, instant coffee, bulk spices and chocolate. I had six cases of evaporated milk and five five-gallon buckets full of powdered milk. I discovered five one-gallon buckets of buttermilk powder. I had four five-gallon buckets full of cornstarch. I had four flats of mason jars left full of ghee (clarified canned butter). There was enough corn oil to fill two bathtubs, easy. I'd say 120 gallons at five gallons a bucket. I found cases of peach, strawberry, grape, raspberry and cherry preserves. I had four flats of pineapple rings and four of chunk pineapple. I found that I had stashed twelve cases of Jiff peanut butter in institutional sized jars. It was probably the only peanut butter left in four states. I started carrying all this out of my closets into the spare bedroom and ran out of space. My wives were watching with huge eyes. "Ladies, would you go get Wendy and Cindy? I think we've got the makings of a baking competition at hand."

Wendy came through the door with Cindy right behind her. They were gently touching the containers, taking in the labels. Wendy looked at me with steel in her eye, strode right up to me and belted me across the cheek, hard. "OW! What the hell was that for?"

"For holding out on me, you beautiful bastard." She held my ears with both hand and kissed me with more tongue than I'd ever had before. Sigh. Sometimes it's hard to be the villain. I handed her the freezer inventory along with the citrus and cranberry shipment receipts. "You still gonna make me my bagels?" I thought she was going to cry. She probably did, later. I think I made her week.

We passed our Dept. of Agriculture licensing without a hitch. Our papers the vet left us from the pig butchering set the general tone. Each building passed with no hits. All they worried about were the wild rabbits and deer. They wanted us to slice open the livers and inspect them under a bright light before passing on them. If there were specks or worms we should bury the offal and flesh then sanitize the butchering station with hot bleach water. No problem! We got our tickets. I framed and posted them.

Thanksgiving was upon us. We received our shipment of cranberries. Wendy went quietly nuts. We had over twenty pounds of cranberry compote put aside in mason jars in no time. The rest got sold at a very good price. Yes, we made up our cost, but not by much. It was a feel-good thing.

Just before the holiday we had another fishing party. Damn, that water was getting cold. We still filled the smoke houses again. We held back the smoked fish until after Thanksgiving. It didn't seem right, somehow. There were no swedes or norweigans around to appreciate smoked fish at that time of year.

We invited the entire Deaderick clan and slow-cooked two pigs over a smoky fire. We had stuffing, mashed potatoes, onion pie, candied butternut squash, sweet potato pie, fresh rolls and bread, pound cake and cookies. I missed rhubarb compote and rhubarb pie. We'd fix that next year. The Deadericks brought apple pie, bread pudding, black pudding and pickled beef tongue. Sliced cold it was wonderful! We invited them over for a re-do at Christmas. Tony brought out his finest cheddar cheese for dessert. It was a marvelous time.

Christmas was much like Thanksgiving but with a harder crust underfoot.

The special dish of the meal was custard made inside a squash, with brown sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg. Each person got their own squash with a custard filling. Brilliant.

I stopped by the transy girls' house around noon one day. They were there eating sandwiches and playing cards, looking bored. It was only the first week of November and they were getting into the winter doldrums already.

"I figured that once you got it down you'd only work two and a half to three hours twice a day. If you need something to keep you from going quietly crazy you might want to hang out around Wendy and pick up some professional cooking techniques or crawl around on the internet. The new building going up next to the communal kitchen is going to have our internet connection fed to it and cable TV before Thanksgiving. The Foxfire books are both printed out and in electronic form on my computers. There are valuable skills described in those books that directly apply to how we need to act to survive. I've got some Sci Fi and most of Shakespeare saved as files, as well as some mythology and Aesop's fables. I've got cookbooks crawling out of my ass and I'll bet Wendy does too. Learn baking. Learn butchering. I'm going to put together a wood working shop this winter because I'm interested in it. Anyone else?"