"Hey, look, we're smokin'," I said to my buddies. We were huddled together in the predawn semi-darkness. As we breathed out the water vapor in our breaths condensed forming clouds of water droplets appearing as smoke. The morning air was cold.. It was like this every year at hog killin' time when it first got cold. I asked Daddy why we always waited until it got cold. He said the weather had to be cold or else the hog meat would spoil if the weather was warm.
"I'll be glad when I'm old enough to make real smoke from a cigarette!" Jimbo, my very best friend said. We were blood brothers.
"My grandpa says cigarettes make him cough a lot. I don't want to cough like he does, " BT said.
BT was our newest friend. He had just moved close by. "I ain't seen a hog killin' before," said the smaller boy with the kinky black hair. He was a bit smaller than we were but strong for his size. I recognized the cowboy shirt he had on. I had worn it until I outgrew it. Momma said I should add it to the clothing drive at the church. I didn' t want to give it up. But I did.
“I can’t wait til breakfast. We always have brains and eggs!” I said.
“Yum, yum!” added Jimbo.
BT said nothing.
Jimbo said, yawning, " The men do most of the work. We just keep the fires going around the wash pots for boiling water and cooking lard. We do other stuff they ask us to do too. If we're lucky they'll make us a ball out of the hog's bladder and we can kick it around."
"They make a ball outta the hog's innards?" BT said.
"They shore do!" Jimbo said.
Uncle Joe always made us a ball of the hog's bladder when they were cutting up the hog. Momma said Uncle Joe was lazy but he was a lot of fun to be around. He showed me a lot about fishing. He went fishing a lot.
“Y’all boys keep them fires burning,” Uncle Jack said as he hurried by. He was my mother’s brother and younger than the other men.
“Yessir,” we said together.
We three kept the fires a burning. BT had come with his daddy in this old beat up pulpwood truck. His daddy cut pulpwood for our cousin George and he let Big John, BT's daddy, use the truck off the job. His daddy deserved the name ' cause he sure was big. They called my daddy Big Jack but he was not near as big as Big John. BT, his daddy and momma lived about two miles away. Momma said that BT had a baby brother too. Daddy said they lived in a shotgun shack. I don't know what that is. But I never had seen Big John with no shotgun.
Daddy and Uncle Luther, my grandpa’s brother, had buried a fifty-five gallon drum half way in the ground at an angle. Boiling water would be put in the drum to soak the hog in. Hot water softened the bristles of hog hair making them easier to pull out. When they finished pulling hair off the hog he would be clean as a pin. The accident happened when Daddy and Uncle Jack were putting hot water in the drum.
They were carrying the boiling water in foot tubs. BT had brought this little dog with him. It wasn't much more than a pup but it got in Daddy's path and tripped him up. He lost his footing and spilled that foot tub of boiling water on his left leg. We heard him holler and ran to see what happened. He was laying on the ground, his face clenched in pain. His face was pale. There was blood dripping from the corner of his mouth. He had bit his lip. Everybody was gathering around, they had heard him hollar.
"We've gotta get him to a doctor. Put him in my car!” yelled Uncle Jack. The tall thin man drove a race car for Stubby's Garage in the Saturday night stock car races at the fairgrounds. He always took off with tires a-spinning and stopped sliding.
"Ole Doc Brown ain't in his office on Saddays," chimed in Uncle Joe.
Big John said, "I can go git Cindy."
"Why?" asked Uncle Jack.
The grizzled little man, my great uncle Luther, stretched up to his full five feet and two inches and said calmly, "Cindy can talk out the fire"
Uncle Jack's face was turning red. He said a bad word. And then he said, "You know colored people always lie!"
“John, go get Cindy!” said Uncle Luther.
In a long minute Uncle Luther came face to face with Uncle Jack. He looked up into the younger man's face and said, " Jack, Big John don't lie!"
"BT, go get yo' mammy," Big John yelled.
And BT was gone. Although it was two miles to his house by the dirt road, it was only bout a half mile through the woods. BT was probably the fastest boy I had ever seen. I saw him catch a young rabbit on the run once.
The next time we saw him he was carrying a little baby and following his momma out of the woods behind our house. His momma was a kinda small woman with her head tied up in a bright red and yellow kerchief. I recognized the dress she had on, it used to be my momma's. Momma had given to the clothing drive for the poor at the Cedar Rock Baptist Church. Momma said she had worn it for twenty years and she was happy to let somebody else have it.
Cindy took charge right away and said,” Y’all move Mister Jack to some place where I minister to him in private!”
Momma complained but complied with Cindy's wishes. They moved Daddy into a small building nearby and Cindy closed the door.
However, young boys, being curious, found a way to see what was going on inside the building. We found a crack in the outside wall aboud an inch wide. We took turns looking inside. Daddy was laying on an old table and Cindy was bending over his leg. Her hand was palm down over the burn and moving away from her face it looked like she was blowing on the burned leg. She was saying something, but it sounded like mumbling to me. BT said, “Them’s words from the Bible.”
All of a sudden Daddy stopped moaning. Then he sat up and got off the table. We ran around to the door in time to see him and Cindy come out.
We gathered around with the grown ups and looked at Daddy's leg. It looked bad but he said it didn’t hurt. Momma gave him a big hug and took him in the house to bandage his leg. Cindy gave us boys a hard look. I think she knew we had been watching.
The rest of us went about getting ready to kill the hog. BT, Jimbo and I had to get the water boiling again. By the time Daddy came out of the house it was boiling. He went over to Uncle Joe's truck and got the .22 rifle from the gun rack behind the seat and walked toward the hog pen.
The rest of the day was rather uneventful. Cindy had gone home with her baby. The evening sun was sinking low as Jimbo and I were cooking down the lard. BT was looking for his pup to take him home. Big John was waiting for him in the truck and he was taking home a lot more meat than the usual pig's feet. I left Jimbo with the fire to help BT. We found the little pup behind the barn. The pup snapped at BT and tried to bite him when he tried to pick him up. I saw what was the problem straight away. One of the pups front legs was broken.I guess when Daddy tripped over him his leg got broken. It was twisted in an awkward way. When BT saw this he held his hand palm down over the pups leg and mumbled some words. I watched as the dog's leg moved back to the normal position without BT even touching it. The little dog stood up on four good legs and wagged his tail. BT abruptly turned around and said to me, "You didn't see that!"
Until now, I've never admitted that I did.
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In southern Appalachia and other parts of the rural South there are people with healing skills. Some stop pain from burns, some can stop bleeding and heal other injuries. Some believe such claims to be true and others explain them away as hypnotism or local hoaxes. Although the story above is fiction, I remember that there was a man in our community who reportedly had such powers.
