The reminder that somebody is actually named "Fatback McSwain" brightens any moment.
So, my dad marries a southern belle from the Triangle. Rose up from very humble beginnings to become a Doctor, professor at West Point and a Colonel in the Army. Her mother was aging so we'd travel down to the homestead outside of Durham regularly. It's a quaint place, former farm, with lots of hints of a hardscrabble family life. When she passes, my father and I go down to close up the place. The pantry full of sweetbreads should have given me a clue as to how the week was going to go...
I'm given the task of cleaning out one of the outer buildings. I swing open the door and peer in. 7 foot piles of newspapers stare back at me. So I get to work, reading and moving, reading and moving. I notice that the piles seem to be arranged around the periphery of the walls with an open area in the middle. I jokingly think to myself, "this is where they must have held the cock fights...".
As I work my way into the middle, I notice a big metal hook hanging from a rafter with something attached. About the size of a small person. And a smell. Just an awful smell. I grab my flashlight and point it at the object. It's big, and meaty, and greasy, and heavy with a stalactite of drippings hanging from it, frozen in the Spring chill and a stalagmite of the same raising 6" up from the dirt floor below. I trot back to the house to tell my dad about my "find". He says, "it must be the last fatback from when Paw Carden died 10 years ago".
10 years of North Carolina summers. 10 years of flies and rot. 10 years of drip, drip, dripping. Disgusting.
