But he was absolutely, positively sure he’d never eaten chitlins before he got here. Maybe if he’d grown up with friends from South Central L.A… . Since he hadn’t, pig guts had flown under his radar till now.
He and Lindsey ate them for the same reason slaves in the antebellum South and their sharecropper descendants had: they couldn’t afford to waste anything. When she made chicken soup, she threw in the feet these days along with the rest. They thickened the stock a little, and you could get bits of meat and skin off them if you worked at it.
But chicken feet were a difference of degree. Chitlins were a difference of kind. Somebody in Guilford had a cookbook that told you what to do with them, even if it called them chitterlings. That was necessary at first because, unlike in the deep South, they weren’t a part of local pre-eruption cuisine. These days, you didn’t throw out anything you could possibly use.
Since Rob spent more time at home than Lindsey did, he got to deal with them. You turned the guts inside out. You scraped them. You soaked them in cold, salted water for a day. You washed them half a dozen times. Considering what had been going through them, that struck Rob as an excellent plan. Then you cut them into two-inch lengths, stewed them with onions and whatever other herbs you could grab, and ate them. The first time Rob and Lindsey tried them, they were surprised at how tasty they were.
You could also deep-fry them. You could if you had cooking fat to spare, anyhow. Even though Rob and Lindsey had got some lard along with the chitlins, they didn’t. Fat was hard to come by, and you used it with care. Lard, schmaltz, duck fat, goose grease… They were luxuries, delicacies. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d eaten butter. Olive oil? Olive oil was right out.
Chitlins and parsnips. Pig’s feet and potatoes. Duck and barley stew. Sauerkraut. Homebrew beer. Moonshine. Baked potatoes with salt and a little schmaltz for flavoring. Rye bread that was all rye, not the domesticated stuff groceries called rye bread. Moose meat. Wild turkey—a much skinnier, stringier bird than its domestic cousins. Berries. Mushrooms.
All of it added up to just about enough to live. Even Jim Farrell had had to have his trademark suits taken in. “I resent being skinny,” he said on a sleigh-borne swing through Guilford. “But I suppose I would resent being dead even more.”
“Seems a pretty good bet,” Rob said. They were sitting in the parlor of the Trebor Mansion Inn, enjoying the warmth of the fire blazing in the fireplace. With malice aforethought, he added, “You probably wouldn’t be so noisy about it, though.”
Farrell aimed a baleful glare not at Rob but at Dick Barber. “See the trouble you got us all into when you tossed a bone to these stray polliwogs or whatever they were?”
“Well, if I hadn’t they would have caused trouble somewhere else,” Barber answered. “It might as well be here in Guilford, where they can entertain us while they do it.”
A Maine Coon kitten started to climb Rob’s leg. He knew how kittens climbed legs: the same way they climbed trees, with their claws all the way out. Maybe trees didn’t mind. His leg did. He gently removed the kitten before it made too many flesh wounds and set it on the couch beside him. It let out an indignant, squeaky mew.
“Take it easy, you dumb thing,” Rob told it. “I was just trying to keep you from shredding me. And now you’re up here.”
“He talks to cats,” Dick Barber said to Farrell. “I’ve seen it before.”
“When he gets them to answer, that’s when we have to worry,” Farrell replied.
“Well, I’ll talk to you, too,” Rob said to the retired history prof. Farrell touched the brim of his fedora—as regal a gesture as Maine north and west of the Interstate was likely to put up with. Rob went on, “Are we going to make it through another winter? Not one whole heck of a lot got up here this summer.”
“Which is an understatement. I was keeping track, so I have unfortunate reason to know.” Farrell sighed, muttered to himself, and then went on, “Most of us should make it. Guilford should do all right. But the closer you get to Canada, the less came up from the south.”
“Not so many people up there. More moose to shoot. More pines to cut down,” Barber observed.
“I like to think there’s more to life than cracking moose bones for marrow in front of the fire pit,” Farrell said. “Neanderthal Man could have done that. Neanderthal Man did do that, as a matter of fact. How have we advanced over the past fifty thousand years?”
“If we’ve got a satellite phone with a charged battery, we can take a picture of ourselves cracking moose bones for marrow and post it on our Facebook page,” Rob answered.
“Well, yes, certainly,” Farrell said. “But how have we advanced?”
“We’ve lost some more people this year,” Dick Barber said. “They decide they want their cell phones and their Facebook pages, and they leave for places that still have them. Or they just get sick of shoveling snow and chopping firewood.”
“The really interesting question is whether it’s that much better anywhere else in the United States.” Farrell waved objections aside before they got raised, like a man swatting at gnats that hadn’t landed on him yet. “Oh, I’m not talking about places like Florida and Southern California. Those were barely part of the country even before the eruption.”
“Thanks a bunch,” Rob muttered.
“Any time,” Farrell said. “But from things I hear, you will endure shortages and outages and dreadful weather if you move to Ohio or Tennessee or any of those other heathen places. And the people already infesting California or Florida want no more company for their fortunate selves. Hawaii, now, Hawaii is doing everything but sowing mines in the Pacific to discourage new arrivals. If only it could come within light-years of feeding itself, it might try to regain its aboriginal independence.”
Rob looked at him in admiration. “I don’t think I ever heard anybody use ‘aboriginal’ in a sentence before.”
“Your servant,” Jim Farrell said modestly. “Ambrose Bierce defined aborigines as ‘Persons of little worth found cumbering the soil of a newly discovered country. They—’”
“‘—soon cease to cumber; they fertilize,’” Rob finished for him. “Sorry, Professor. But I found The Devil’s Dictionary when I was, like, fifteen. My dad had it. It’s warped me ever since.”
“Your father is a man of parts,” Farrell said. “Did I hear that not all his parts are working the way they ought to? A robber with an assault rifle?”
“That’s right.” Rob nodded. “Last letter I got, he still didn’t know if he’d be able to go back to the force.”
“Chances are he’s made up his mind by now, then,” Dick Barber said. “Our connections to the regular U.S. Post Awful aren’t what you’d call great.”
“I know. We’re lucky to have any at all, when we’re pretty much off the grid and off the map as far as they’re concerned,” Rob said.
“It’s partly because the postmasters in Newport and Bangor remember we’re here even if Heap Big Chief Postmaster in Washington doesn’t want to. And it’s partly because Jim”—Barber pointed at Professor Farrell—“threatened to talk to Canada Post if the USA stopped sending things up this way.”
“I did not threaten. I merely stated an intention,” Farrell said. “Hard to believe as it may seem, someone at the Postal Service is still possessed of a vestigial sense of shame—and we are still possessed of a vestigial link to the rest of the land of the corporate and the home of the resigned.”
Rob grinned. “Even if that doesn’t scan real well, I may steal it.”
“You can’t steal what’s freely given,” Jim Farrell replied.
He was fun to listen to, more fun than anyone else in Guilford—probably more fun than anyone else in his little not-quite-duchy. When power outages made entertainment at the flip of a switch only a nostalgic memory, that counted for a hell of a lot. Farrell’s sentences had grammar. They had wit. They had just enough purple passages to make listeners smile… and to camouflage his underlying hard common sense.