On the day after Thanksgiving, there is an alternative to sitting on your duff in a stupor, recuperating from the previous day’s gluttony, or rushing into orchestrated retail madness.

 

Here in Woodward, there’s work to do. It’s the day when families, friends and neighbors keep alive a two hundred year-old tradition: hog-butcherin’.

 

The real day starts when Tim Fetzer sizes up the first hog in the corner of his dad’s barn. He raises his pistol and fires. Mike Huey comes up next with a knife to finish the job.

 

These are “country matters,” as the British call them: those realities city dwellers consider brutal. Rural folks see them matter-of-factly. It’s what you do if you want to eat.

 

With the snout pierced by the business end of a hook, four men drag the body out to the tractor. They slide it onto the forks, cart it across the highway, and roll it off into Bud Orndorf’s side yard. 

 

One brave soul – still wary of stray kicks – grabs the hind legs and fastens the feet to a set of chains. The tractor then raises the stretched carcass into the air as Ron Fetzer records the hog’s weight. Four hundred to five hundred pounds is average.

 

About twenty people stand amid a haze of smoke from the kettle fires. Long wooden butchering tables are only a few steps away. Everything here has a purpose. Everything is in its place.

 

A chosen few clean out the innards and dump them into a boiling pot of water. They’re later diced up for “pawnhaas”, or scrapple. A small team hoists each dressed pig up inside a stout wooden tripod to cool off in the frigid, pre-dawn air. After more cutting, sawing, picking and poking, hides and heads are tossed. Nothing else goes to waste. Two more hogs will look the same way within an hour.

 

Each half-hog finally drops onto a waiting shoulder that spins, carries, and heaves it up on a table. The most experienced butchers divide the choicest cuts into ribs, chops, hams and shoulders. But the biggest prize of all comes from just under the backbone: a glistening, ruby-colored, trout-sized slab known as the “fish.”

 

Mike and his wife, Jen, choreograph the entire day’s operation by keeping track of who gets what meat and how they want it. Questions and answers fly through the air in Woodward’s distinctive, nearly extinct, dialect: a broad, rolling thunder of elongated vowels that’s usually dismissed as “sounding Dutch.”

 

Everyone else stakes out positions. Greasy hands deftly wield razor-sharp knives to make quick work of what’s left. Novices can’t go wrong, as long as they use the correct edge of the knife. It’s all color-coded. White globs of fat go into one bucket; these are rendered into lard. Anything red goes into the sausage bucket.

 

Inside the shed, burning logs in the fireplace provide more heat than light. Cindy and Brianna Stover grind up buckets full of sausage. For those who prefer their sausage loose, Leah Speicher, a young Amish neighbor, hand-kneads salt and pepper into the pile. Brian Stover has his wife and daughter squeeze the remaining sausage meat through an ancient cast-iron press while he feeds it into long, stringy casings.

Every station along this food chain has its share of inter-generational bantering, joshing and flirting. One husband jokes about his absent wife forgetting to park her broom. Someone teases a nearby teenager that his premature bald spot is starting to look like his daddy’s. No sense displaying false ego here. He’s already learned how to parry the jab. “That’s ok. I’ll just borrow one of my aunt’s wigs so I can look like you.”

 

There’s no time for kids to be idle or to sulk after a reprimand. Someone always directs them to do something else. Work, as with time, heals all things.

 

Some swear that home canned meat tastes best; others simply freeze it. Before refrigeration, their fathers and grandfathers pickled hams in salt water until the upper third of an egg floated above the solution. These would then cure in a ramshackle outbuilding named for the wisps of smoke wafting from every corner, crack and crevice. Most Penns Valley attics still have large spikes protruding out of the rafters. Newcomers aren’t aware that hams of yesteryear once hung there.

 

Within two generations, convenience has not only removed us from the ageless art of husbandry. The fellowship of shared work, wrapping us within the necessary rhythms and cycles of life and death, is also in danger of disappearing.

 

They won’t lose that special legacy here in Woodward, though, as long as all those kids keep grabbing knives and pitching in. With people like Mike, Bud, Ron, Tom and Joe passing along their skills, knowledge and guidance, this community tradition should go on forever.

 

Bruce Teeple is a free-lance writer, speaker and local historian and is writing a book about Prince Farrington. He lives in Aaronsburg, Centre County and can be reached at mongopawn44@hotmail.com