There were kurrah skins all over the
fairgrounds. They’d gotten into a patch of volunteer potatoes and tore up
the meadow something fierce. William and Zack Briarson were kicking
chunks of sod back into the holes that had been dug, but if it rained there’d
be nothing to stop anyone from calling it a mudpit.
I picked up the skins
as I came across them, stuffing them into my old paper route bag. It was
shiny from ink and sweat and grease and still smelled like the Hartwick
Courant.
The skins were funny things – some
were intact from the waist up, so you could almost picture how big the kurrah
was before it shed. They had little strands on the inside like you
sometimes see on an orange peel, but the outsides were smooth, almost glossy in
the right light, but so thin that you could read your fingerprints right
through them. They smelled like a cross between cabbage and cinnamon, if
that makes any sense. I’d picked up at least two dozen before Zack called
me over.
“What do you make of this?” he said,
pointing at a big sheet of skin with his toe. It was at least two feet
across, bigger than any I’d seen.
“Wow. That one must be at
least four feet long,” I said. We said “long” rather than “tall,”
probably not for a very good reason. It seemed easier to think of them as
less than bipeds when it came time to clear out a nest. Some of the old
timers couldn’t figure out what difference it made, but those were the same old
timers who would cook and eat them in lean times. There were some
certifiably country folk who lived out east of Millpond and Gerth
Roads.
I’d be charitable in saying that the
people who ate kurrah had probably never seen one wash the little shift of
fabric that they sometimes wore around their necks, or seen one cry over their
young when they got hit crossing 28 South. But I bet they’d seen it all
and didn’t care. “Meat is meat,” they’d say.
There’s only so much empathy you can
expect out of some folks.
--Steve Kilian
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment