Thin Blue Smoke: A Novel About Music, Food, and Love by Doug Worgul

Author:Doug Worgul
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction - General
Publisher: Conundrum Press
Published: 2014-12-04T16:00:00+00:00

27

Chumming

Behind the butcher shop, back where Delbert and Hartholz played checkers and sipped whiskey in the evening while the sausage and briskets smoked in the pit, there was an old wooden barrel that smelled like moonshine and pickles. It was a 30-gallon oak-stave barrel Hartholz used for making sauerkraut, until customer demand for the sauerkraut necessitated a move up to a 50-gallon barrel, at which point Delbert appropriated the smaller barrel for the purpose of fermenting grain for use in chumming for catfish.

Delbert learned chumming from his father, Delbert Douglass Merisier II, and when Delbert and Hartholz became friends and started going fishing together, Delbert taught chumming to Hartholz, though Hartholz left the actual making of the chum to Delbert, which was fine with Delbert inasmuch as he had strong opinions regarding chum-making technique.

The recipe for the chum itself could not have been simpler. First Delbert dumped three pails of seed corn, two packages of dry yeast, and three bottles of beer into the barrel. This was then covered in water and stirred with a wooden paddle that Hartholz also once used in making sauerkraut. Delbert then tamped the lid down on top of the barrel and left it alone in the Texas heat for a few days, after which two more bottles of beer were added and the corn covered again with water. When the soured grain had been allowed to ferment for about another week, it was ready.

The other half of the chumming equation was the stink bait. Because Delbert’s stink bait stunk so omnipresently, it could not be made nor kept on the butcher shop’s premises, lest customers conclude that Hartholz was selling spoiled meat.

Spoiled meat was, in fact, the primary ingredient in Delbert’s stink bait recipe, which he concocted in a fifty-gallon drum that Rose brought home from Raylon Rice and Milling. Delbert buried the drum in his backyard, in a hole only as deep as the drum was tall, so that its top was roughly level with the ground. Into the drum Delbert deposited scraps of meat he brought home from the butcher shop, to which he added a quart or two of milk, a pint or so of vinegar, and a handful of apple peels. Delbert then put the lid on the drum, weighted it down with rocks, and let the meat mix rot until needed.

After LaVerne came to live with Rose, she insisted Delbert erect a chicken wire fence around his stink bait pit, to prevent the boy from investigating and falling into the fetid hole.

Early on Saturday mornings when it was still dark, Delbert would shovel some of the rancid meat out of the pit and into a big pail, then cover it all with a shovelful of clean dirt to mitigate the stench. This and several buckets of the fermented corn mash were then loaded in the back of Hartholz’s 1937 Ford pickup, along with Delbert’s old skiff, oars, cane poles, a tackle box, and a gunnysack in which Delbert

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