Cy nods.
“All this stuff here,” he says, pointing to the desk and chair, “is new.” Darla says dryly, “That’s a relative term here.”
Cy reaches into a cabinet and extracts a wicked-looking knife with a blade about five inches long. He hands me the brown-handled knife, and I press the tip against my thumb. As sharp as it is, it wouldn’t take much work to reach bone.
“These babies come from Germany,” Cy says.
“Koch butcher knives. Five inches of the finest cutting steel in the world. If you put this under a microscope, you’d see it has a bunch of teeth. This is what the murderer used. Only fifteen people in this plant had knives like this, and all of their stories were rock solid.
Class, he claims he was home by his self If he came around here, he’d have his self a little accident, I expect.”
Cy motions us to follow and pushes through a door in front of me into a hall and then through another door to the left.
“This is the kill floor,” he says over the squealing of pigs, men’s voices, and machine noise. In front of us about twenty feet away a black guy dressed in knee boots touches what looks like a cattle prod behind the ear of a huge hog and immediately the animal collapses on the concrete floor of an oversized shower stall.
Beside him another hog watches impassively.
“Does that kill him?” I ask Cy.
“Naa, that’s just a little stunner. It’s only got two hundred and forty volts. Knocks him woozy for about a minute,” the manager yells into my ear.
“Now watch what happens.”
From his side the black guy pulls out a knife and bends over the hog, and quickly there is blood spewing onto the floor. The hog beside him sniffs the twitching carcass but otherwise makes no move to flee. I thought pigs were supposed to be smart. This one acts as if his buddy were merely suffering from a major mosquito bite. If I were him, I’d be looking for the back door.
“If Archie doesn’t get him killed,” Cy yells, above the din, “they’ll get back up.”
As dumb as these animals are, they probably think they’ve just been out in the sun too long.
Archie reaches down and hooks the dead animal’s back legs and pushes a button on a machine beside him. I watch as the pig is hoisted up and moved over to a vat of water and then dipped.
“That water is one hundred and fifty degrees,” Cy says.
“It helps remove the hair.”
After more than a minute, the dead animal reappears and is placed on a machine that rolls the body back and forth in a vigorous beating motion. Cy, who has moved ahead of me, motions me over.
“The hair comes right off,” he says, pointing to the carcass.
Indeed, the pig is practically nude within a few moments as wisps of hog hair fall away through the metal rods on which it is bouncing.
Finally, it is pink all over, looking like a cartoon pig-Porky or Petunia, minus their clothes-and again it is hoisted up and sent along its way. Cy directs us to a new station only a few feet from us, and I watch as a skinny white guy who looks to be in his early thirties moves in on the animal and scrapes at the remaining hair. Every few moments he stops to sharpen his knife.
“He’d wear himself out, and it’d take forever, if he doesn’t keep the blade razor-sharp,” Cy responds when I ask him about this incessant and deliberate process.
“What is happening if you could see it is the teeth of the knife get lined up again. Still, these guys go through a knife about every month.
We give ‘em the first one, and they have to buy ‘em after that. Before we did that, they’d go through one every couple of days.”
Damn. A plant where the workers have to pay for their own tools! At the next station the toenails and more hair on the feet area are removed, and then the actual cutting begins.
“Watch Tony rip,” Cy says, with obvious pride in his voice.
“I taught him myself ten years ago, I’ve never seen anybody work with less wasted motion.” Tony is a middle-aged black man with sloping shoulders and arms as long as Scottie Pippen’s, also an Arkansas product. First, he splits the hog, still hanging from the grappling hook, lengthwise.
As Tony works, Cy explains that at Southern Pride (unlike many other plants), they do not save the lungs, ears, or intestines, because Willie demonstrated to his own satisfaction long ago it wasn’t economical. Tony tosses these items into a bag that makes me nauseated to look at. Then, as the head comes off, I find myself listening more than watching.
“Some people come direct to the plant and buy hogs’ heads for five and a half bucks, and we sell ‘em to stores. They cook up what we call souse out of it. We make it up ourselves, and you can buy it over the counter. Spreads good on crackers. I’ll give y’all some before you leave.”
For the first time Dick, standing beside me, grins. It is a promise neither of us would be brokenhearted to see go unfulfilled. Almost directly in front of me is a guy squinting hard at various pig parts.
He looks as if he dropped a contact lens into them.
“Who’s that guy?” I ask, noting that the sheriff has grown even more tightlipped than usual though he is watching everything like a hawk. I realize that “some people” means blacks.
“Harrison-one of the federal inspectors,” Cy says.
“He’s still kind of an asshole, but it was him that noticed that Doss’s knife was out of place the next morning. If it wasn’t for him, it might not have been checked.” Dick asks, “What’s he doing?” Dressed like everybody else in a white coat and cap, Harrison looks as if he is about to lose his cookies, too.
Cy points at the pig hanging above us and then to a metal table to our left where four men are busy cutting meat.
“Before the hog makes it to the table, the inspector checks each one’s parts for abscesses, tumors, signs of disease in general.
They’ve already checked them in the lot before they go into the plant.”
Dick suggests that we visit with Harrison, and we walk over to him. Cy introduces us, and it is clear that despite who we are, he is eager to talk.
“Since they gotta buy their knives in this plant, each man puts his mark on his so nobody will run off with it,” he says in answer to my question about how Class Bledsoe was fingered so quickly.
“Every afternoon when this plant closes down, I know exactly where every piece of equipment, including knives, is, because I’ve inspected them to make sure it’s all clean. The next morning the sheriff here had me walk with him over every inch of this place. I noticed that Doss-he was the best meat cutter Willie had working-had moved his knife just a little from the night before. Want me to show y’all where it was?”
“I’d appreciate it,” I say, looking down at Clarence Harrison, who can’t be more than 5‘4”.
Beaming as if he had solved the murder of John F. Kennedy, he looks in the face exactly like James Carville, the President’s celebrated political guru. We follow him across the floor, and he stops in front of the east wall and points to a small wooden table.
“Class nearly always kept his knife overnight in a sheath on the center of this table just like so,” he says, pressing the knuckles of his left hand against the wood.
“When I came through the next morning,” he says, flipping his hand over, “it was upside down and a little over to the side. As soon as I remarked on this. Sheriff, you remember you had a man take pictures of all the knives, where they were and everything.”
Bonner merely nods. Despite his redneck look, Harrison, it seems clear, respects the sheriff, now that criminal charges have finally been brought.
It dawns on me that Harrison expects to be considered the hero in this case and testify as the star witness. I doubt seriously he will be willing to harbor any doubts that anyone other than Class was the killer. If that is true, it will be unfortunate.
He is in an ideal position to observe the social dynamics within the plant. I’ll get back to him later, but I am not hopeful I will get anything.