SMRZ

SMRZ

They were in the swine barn at the Iowa State Fair. Gramps had steered them away from the industrial fans to a stall containing a pig breed he recognized.

"Hey sweetheart, come here."

She pushed at her plastic straw, trying to pin the lemon rinds against the inside of the sweaty empty cup in her hand, knowing what was coming.

You see this pig here? We didn’t like to get this breed at the meat packing plant. You see how they have those wiry white hairs? Them hairs wouldn’t burn off, so they were extra work. And, either way, we had six hogs coming down the line every minute. They were already gassed, so I just had to poke them.

He gestured to his own neck, about to detail the process.

Was it six or was it eight? Or nine? She couldn’t remember now. He told them every chance he got. He would go straight for their knife drawer when he visited and talk about the perils of a dull knife, citing the severed hands and fingers he saw on the kill floor, semi-focused on the metallic sharpening rhythm.

__

"Her family thought it was a bizarre question."

"Hey, do you remember how grandpa always told us how many pigs he killed per minute at the processing plant?"

"... no"

"Come on. He told us every time we talked to him. At least once every time we talked to him."

"Of course I remember, but I don’t remember the exact number. He always brought it up at the most inappropriate time. You know. It was compulsive. He always had to bring it up."

And we would try to change the subject. How could we have dismissed what he was telling us? That for thirty years each working minute was kept by this bloody current of swine.

And so he would drone on like the bees he kept so proudly. It wasn’t all about the meat packing plant; however, the topics couldn’t be prompted. If you were lucky, he reflected on topics of a more magical nature: What his mother would say to him in Slovakian and what it meant in English (or how she would say it in English: "you be eat, you be fat, you be look good"). She taught him how to forage in the forest with your mouth as your guide, how to plant the garden on Good Friday, being determined by the lunar calendar, and shared stories of the Romany curse that killed his grandmother and her cat before trapping his father into indentured servitude.

__

The day after the funeral his son has already started hauling the deceased’s belongings to the Goodwill down the street. The oldsmobile with a maroon exterior and no seatbelts that she always wanted went to NPR before she thinks to ask.

Short on time, she grabs a few items before returning to Chicago in a commercial plane that seats 4 passengers and must be subsidized by the agricultural industry considering that she is the only passenger: torn work jeans, plaid shirts, a little black notebook with his ever-capitalized scripty handwriting The photos she scanned at Walgreens hadn’t properly loaded on the disc, so she snaps photos of them with her iphone.

She searches their house on Zillow years later thinking about his tomato plants and the patterns his bees would fly to map out the best flower spots to one another: Zestimate $42,000. It’s a lot of money, but not for a house. So that’s what he left (along with exponentially split stocks in the pork industry) after all those minutes measured by six (nine?) swines’ lives.

Then, she remembers the notebook. After checking a few boxes in the back of her closet, she finds it, with the letters SMRZ on the inside cover and his name below. There is a pocket attached to the inside of the back cover that she hadn’t seen before. Inside, there are photos of her grandfather surrounded by mountains of the morel mushrooms he taught her to hunt in the woods and newspaper clippings featuring the same photos and describing hundred pound hauls of the elusive mushroom. She bought half an ounce of them at a specialty food store last week for twenty four dollars.

Upon further inspection, the notebook provides faded, hand-drawn maps of his guarded foraging locations, along with formulas and instructions for cultivation, drawings of dying elm trees, and multiple references to the root cellar.

Due for a visit to her grandmother, she makes the drive the next day. Six hours, a left at the gypsum pits, a right at the mill, and she arrives just after crossing the train tracks. Descending the steps into their basement, the light switch triggers the radio, and classic country music begins to play. A makeshift network of cords still hang their shower curtains and clean laundry in his workshop. Tools still display on the opposite pegboard wall. After considerable effort, the shelves at the bottom of the stairs are cleared of their empty jars, and the door to the root cellar is coaxed open.

Tunnels filled with spongy combs appear.

"Hey, Grandma, have you seen these morels that gramps was cultivating? They are worth a ton of money!"

"Oh, those took off? Do whatever you want with them. You know that I can’t stand mushrooms."