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the man and the mule yanked and pulled each other across the fields, to a chorus of giddyaps and winnies and whoas, until they had created wobbly rows of corrugated soil—crumbly, nearly black, alive with bugs and worms. It smelled strongly of humus, a smell that reached down to the core of me.
    We planted a couple rows of purple hull peas, a couple rows of corn, a half row of tomatoes, and a half row of green beans. Then we planted a couple hills of cucumber and onion on part of the back row. On the rest of the back row my mother let me plant whatever I liked. I chose watermelon, but I didn’t have the patience to let them ripen. When they got to be football-sized I picked them, although the flesh was invariably still white.
    Gardening taught me things I didn’t even know I was learning—lessons about patience and caretaking, but most important about disturbance as a condition of growth, that solid ground had to be plowed up for new seeds to take root.
    When harvest time came, we stayed in the fields all day, picking as much corn and as many peas or beans or greens as we could, trying not to leave a thing.
    At night we sat in a circle, around a mound of vegetables atop an old sheet on the floor in the middle of the room, each person with a large pan, and shucked corn, or snapped green beans, or shelled peas until our fingers turned dark from the pods. We would watch television, tell family stories, and laugh until we nearly peed our pants.
    Everything had to be canned or frozen for the lean winter months. We poured cucumbers, sweet and pickled, and jams and preserves into Mason jars, which we sealed in large shallow pans of slow-boiling water. Blanched peas and tomatoes, cob-scraped corn, and garden vegetable soups we ladled into plastic bags to be frozen.
    Shelling peas and canning pickles: these were the times that drew us together, the only times when I didn’t feel alone in that house. But harvest season lasted only a season. Soon it was done, and I shifted back into the shadows.
    Another occasion that drew us together and made me feel I served a function in our family was Hog Killing Day.
    We used a small space behind the house, beyond the clothesline and under the pecan tree, to raise a couple of hogs, while the large field, where Papa Joe had raised hogs, grew verdant with tall weeds.
    We fattened the hogs until it was time to kill them. It was always after the first frost, after the flies were gone and wouldn’t get at the meat. On that day, the hog killers came before daybreak. They were a small group of old men who still knew how to kill a hog right. They knew where the joints were, how to get through the cartilage, how to get butchers’ cuts from whole slabs.
    We gathered around the pen as one of the men raised a rifle. He wanted a direct shot to the head, but that didn’t always happen. When the bullet hit elsewhere, the hog unleashed a hell-raising squeal.
    When the hog went down the throat was cut, to let it bleed out. Then it was dipped in a barrel of boiling water to remove the hair, after which its hind legs were hooked to a crossbar and its body was pulled up the pecan tree.
    The carcass was split neck to nuts, and the innards were scooped out. They weren’t bloody, but shiny like jewelry—rose quartz and pale amethyst and pearly white. The head was sawed off and set aside for hog head cheese, and the hide was peeled away for cracklings.
    That was my job: cooking the cracklings. The sheets of skin were cut into small chunks, tossed into a cast-iron caldron that was half as deep as I was tall, and heated on all sides by a log fire. I stirred them around with the stick-end of a used-up broom until the fat melted and the pieces crackled in the oil they made. The cracklings were scooped out, salted, and eaten right away, so hot that they burned the tongue, so tasty that we didn’t care.
    But Hog Killing Day lasted just a day. When the killing and the carving and the cooking of the cracklings were