breakfast

The day the pony dumped me in a puddle of blood behind the slaughterhouse was the day I learned where breakfast comes from. Morning meals on my uncle's Dodge City farm were extravagant feasts of deep yellow free range eggs, fresh baked biscuits, yeasty cinnamon rolls rich with butter, raisins and sugar, and always, heaping platters of smoked meats and plates of fried, crispy head cheese.

Though I didn't know it at the time, it was head cheese my grandmother was making when I rounded the corner of the slaughterhouse dripping blood. She vaulted to her feet, dropping the hog's head from between her knees and lunged for me. "What happened, what happened to you?," and then, finding me uninjured, "What did you do?"

She shook me ~ hard ~ but I couldn't tear my eyes away from the bloody pig's head that rolled to the ground when she rushed to my aid and I was mute in my shock. It was a grotesque thing, upside down, one hairy ear stuck out to the side. The creature's tongue poked from between enormous teeth and it glared at me with its sole remaining eyeball.

I screeched once and collapsed. I came to surrounded by my kin, half with knives, and all of them grinning. Immediately wary, I sat up and looked for the hog's head. There was grandma, perched on the bench, digging and scraping with her arm buried deep in a bodyless head. She was singing softly in German, the melody of Sunday mornings interspersed with the teeth-on-edge sound of knife on bone.

She caught my eye and smiled. "This is for that head cheese you gobble up at breakfast, and I've got the brains soaking for scrambled eggs tomorrow." Then she winked and my kin dispersed and I was left sitting outside the slaughterhouse, the smell of scalded pig skin stinging my nose, my fingernails filthy with swine blood.

I hesitated the next morning when the platter bearing head cheese passed me, and I have never yet tasted scrambled eggs and brains. But by the end of breakfast, the repugnant realities of hog butchering dimmed and I tore off a piece of head cheese, swirled it through the yellow yolk of my egg and ate.