Every Little Scrap and Wonder. Carla Funk

rose above the idling of engines—my uncles, my dad. When I stood on my bed and pulled back the curtains, my window lit up with headlights through the autumn fog. The shadow-shapes of men lurched from pigpen to truck as they lugged and loaded each dead hog.

      Schwein schlachter happened every fall. Though our clan was not as Mennonite as most, we held on to certain customs and beliefs with a death grip—most of them having to do with God and food—and pig butchering was one of them. When morning frost began to cover the ground with a foreshadowing of snow, and the season teetered toward winter, my dad and his five brothers marked a Saturday on their calendars, then announced it to their women, who spread the word to the rest of the extended family. Come for Schweine-schlachten, they said, and bring your knives.

      SMOKE PLUMED A grey cloud above the roof of Great-Grandpa Martens’s shed. Though the sun hadn’t yet risen, cars and pickups already clogged the long gravel driveway. Aunts in kerchiefs and flannel jackets trundled boxes stuffed with thermoses of coffee and tea, pies, cookies, and squares. The cousins, my brother, and I, bleary-eyed but hyper with excitement, buzzed around the yard with rocks and sticks in our grip, little primitives waiting for blood. Through the trees, from their cabin at the back of the property, the old bachelor uncles came, jowly and carrying their knives.

      In a lean-to connected to the shed, the men stood in a circle, passing around a whetstone. Each one spit on it, then drew his blade down and down again, scraping and sharpening until it gleamed. They stood beneath that lean-to for as long as they wanted, rubbing their thumbs slowly across the sharpened blades, talking in Low German—sounds familiar to me, but words I didn’t understand. They smoked, talking trucks and bush camp, and drank their coffee, and when they were done, they snuffed their cigarettes and swigged their dregs, and the work began in earnest.

      When they hefted the first pig into the scalding trough, and from a huge vat over the fire drew buckets of water to pour over the flesh, the smell that rose was like a mingling of smoked ham, rusted tin can, and outhouse sewage. As the steam cleared, the men hunkered in with their knives and began to scrape their blades across the skin to get rid of the hair and bristles. As soon as one pig was cleaned, they hoisted it up onto the long wooden table, and the next station of workers began their job of breaking down the carcass.

      I loved to watch the pig being unzipped. Into the belly, right below the sternum, an uncle stuck the knife tip and dragged a slit clean down the torso. As innards oozed and bubbled up from the open seam of flesh, more hands set to work sorting the parts. In the doctrine of the butchering shed, everything that could be saved should be saved. What spilled from inside was a source of mystery and wonder. Here was death up close, and the mystery of what lay hidden inside a creature was gloriously on display, giving clues to the future I couldn’t yet frame. When one of the knifed-open big-bellied sows spilled four tiny piglets, the uncles hollered for us to come and see.

      “They look asleep, not dead,” Aunt Agnes said when Uncle Corny pulled the piglets from the split-open sow, splayed on the table in the butchering shed. Everyone seemed a little sad and surprised.

      With the other kids, I crowded around the table. Each piglet, small enough to curl in a Styrofoam cup, was perfectly formed, its hooves soft as new fingernails, the end of its snout like a button on a baby’s sweater. In my hand, the piglet felt like a rubber toy, something the dog would drag to its bed and gnaw.

      “It’s a shame to just throw them away,” my mother said, and so she slipped them in an old ice-cream bucket and set them in a cooler at the side of the shed. “We’ll figure something out.” Later, back at home, she’d pickle them in formaldehyde, two to a jar, their pink bodies snow-globed and floating in flecks of lifting light.

      In the butchering shed, I peered over the table edge as the kidneys, liver, heart, spleen, stomach, and entrails were pulled from the pig, each warm, dripping organ named and held up for inspection—healthy, someone would pronounce, or looks a little sick—then either set aside in a bowl for use or tossed into a five-gallon oil bucket at the end of the table.

      That bucket, full of the glibber and gristle and guts, was bound for the town dump, but until the uncles hauled it away, we kids were free to poke around in it. Like bargain-hunters at the discount bin, we jostled for spots at the rim, stabbing our sticks in as we fished for some glossy clot or slippery bit, then hoisted it close to each other’s faces, saying, Smell it, smell it!

      Of all the cast-off parts, I loved the bladder best. My mother washed it off in clean water, tied off the ureter with a double knot, and tossed it to me. The bladder, warm and wobbly, was the size of a football, but harder to hold on to. I tossed it to my brother, who set it on the ground and jumped on it. The bladder squirted out from beneath his feet but did not burst.

      “Catch,” he hollered, and threw the bladder back. I tried to grab it as it sailed toward me, but it slapped into my hands, slipped my grip, and blobbed to the dirt.